Matthew Ryan – Autumn of discontent
On “Heartache Weather”, Ryan tears through a litany of balms for a soul he can’t stop scouring:
There’s no rope
There’s no nail
There’s no psalm
To make us strong enough
There’s no con
There’s no skin
There’s no beauty
To help you through enough
It’s one thing to savage the easy answers of a self-help culture, those talk-show and new-age retreat injunctions to take off your training wheels, let things unfold, release your fears, shake your soul — for even that criticism has become a cliche. It’s another thing to interrogate everything you want to believe is true — poetry, love, beauty, faith — down to the last hope of healing. To put the torch to all of it. Everything but the heartache itself, its all-consuming weather.
Such are the songs on East Autumn Grin. For these black, existential raids, these gorgeous and vile recognitions of a land where even faith and fate are “running out of steam,” Ryan and Nashville aces Will Kimbrough and Doug Lancio distort, delay, and choke their instruments, as if looking for the sound guitars might make if they could follow the singer down to the last fiery, nauseous circle, and come back to tell everything in howls, whispers, descants, babble, and dreamtalk.
“Please remember/Things are gonna get worse/Before they get better,” Ryan repeats in “Heartache Weather”. What his songs ask is clear enough, really: Can you make it through the worse?
“There comes a moment when you come to terms with whatever the circumstance was,” Ryan says. “That’s what the songs are about. The one thing that amazes me about people is the endurance. Even people you don’t think have endurance, are quite amazing.
“I’ve seen the same panhandler since the day I moved here. He hits me up every time he sees me. Depends on my mood. Sometimes I give it to him, sometimes I don’t. But he’s gonna try.
“Relationships are the same way. There’s so much projection that goes on at first in love, then over time, these things are systematically denounced or affirmed. That’s what you have to come to terms with, whether or not it is enough. They all start from the same romantic idea, that maybe it is enough.”
Maybe. The last listed song on the album is “Worry”, a quiet, lush Chet Baker meditation of piano, strings, and a strangely soothing drone of feedback. “It ain’t worth the living, if it ain’t worth the lie,” Ryan whispers. Thirty seconds later, a ghost drifts in:
A promise that is wounded
Is a promise nonetheless
I only wanted you forever
In that August summer dress
“I think it sums the record up,” Ryan says. “That desire for the first feeling. After that it’s all scrapes, dents, and arguments over who’s gonna take out the trash. More or less. It’s those goofy little things, petty things, that become radio towers for you to impale yourself on.” He laughs.
It’s also more than Ryan says in stolen words, an incomplete conversation. Wounds are promises worth keeping, memories of summer dresses are beautiful, and some things might last.
ND contributing editor Roy Kasten would like to thank Mary Wolcott and Seth Hurwitz for their help on this article. Kasten still lives in St. Louis.