Ryan Webster is an American singer-songwriter that grew up just outside of Rochester, NY. Spending most of his twenties bouncing between east and west coast, he currently resides just outside of Nashville, TN. Like his living situations, NY, CA, TN, TX and a converted school bus for a stint, Ryan has experimented with musical style. Taking Folk and Americana song craft, and diverging into, psychedelia, soul, alt-rock, and everything in between. Modeling his songwriting characteristics after idiosyncratic artists like Neil Young, Damien Jurado, Richard Swift, and Bonnie Prince Billy. Letting the music decide where the song needs to go.
‘Stranger’, Ryan’s latest project is a full length album coming in 2021, featuring a series of singles releasing in Fall 2020. As a follow up to his debut album, ‘The Point of Pointlessness’, Ryan chose to attack these songs in a more personal manner. Stranger, a DIY project. He played everything (except the drums), and recorded it all himself in a shed, on 15 acres in rural Tennessee. “Artistically, I wanted to expand on my last album, I’ve learned more about life, love, and myself, so I have more to say. Stranger is a snapshot of the last few years of challenges and victories, with some diversions into fiction and fantasy. I wanted this record to be more personal and accessible. I didn’t just write it for myself, I wrote it for all of us, right here in this little moment in time. It’s a coming to terms with my little place in this life.” ‘Stranger’, the title track , tackles being subject to stereotypes, and rages against the establishment, to Alaska, which is a requiem of the younger person, it’s the closing curtain of Act 1 of our lives, then landing finally to ‘Oh Great Sprit’, the final track on the album which is an anthemic homage to peace in the midst of the struggle.
Ryan, now a father of 6, shares how he turned personal tragedy (having his only daughter go missing while on a family vacation, and the chain of events that transpired from that) to using the fear, anger, and PTSD into making something beautiful. “My daughter is safe and sound, but the whole situation was a turning point for me – after I got home, I disappeared into my studio and the songs sort of fell into place.”
The first deluxe single from the album features ‘Always Blue’, a song Ryan wrote about “falling in love with my wife again…finding love again, despite our own shortcomings and imperfections.” The b-side single is ‘Just Pretend’ an anthemic dystopian pop love song, is about “a virtual love affair…socially distanced if you will.”
‘Always Blue’ releases digitally worldwide on October 23, 2020 via CatBeach Music.