“Is it poetry?” I said.
“Sort of.”
“What do you like to do in your free time?” I kept going and dared to broach the subject. “When you’re not doing music or school stuff? What do you like?”
She glanced at me and then looked back down at our pipettes. She said, “I don’t reallyhavefree time.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “There’s gotta be something.”
She smiled. “I always thoughtMario Kartwould be fun.”
I was blown away. “You’ve never playedMario Kart?” When she shook her head, I said, “You’d love it. You can come over and play sometime if you want. I just gotGrand Theft Autofor Christmas, too, and it’s next level.”
“That sounds cool,” she said. “I’d do that.”
It never happened, of course. She got busy again, and I brought it up once or twice, but nothing ever came of it.
That’s okay. She was still a nice person.
Skip
One thing I do wish I’d pushed harder for in those days was to have Ryan spend more time with people her own age. We got into a routine: She got out of school at 2:45 p.m., and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she’d come to the studio to work until six. I don’t know what she did most Tuesdays, Thursdays, or weekends, but judging by the pace she was cranking out songs, it was probably just more of the same.
I did tell Barb, hey, make sure she takes time off to live her life a little, yeah? I didn’t know when Eastside held their prom, but it seemed like something she should go to—and I think she did. I want to say I remember her writing something about it for “Eastside Blues.” Not the happiest song, so I’m not really sure what transpired, but still.
My ask wasn’t completely altruistic. You’ve got to build up real-life experiences in order to write songs about them, and I didn’t want her to be drafting lyrics as a total shut-in.
I think, though, that Ryan was reluctant to really get close to any of those other kids. She was already set apart, kind of going through school with one foot in the classroom and the other in the studio. If I was less generous, I’d say it almost gave her a kind of martyr complex.
“These kids aren’t going where I’m going,” Ryan told me once. “They don’t understand what I’m trying to do. That’s okay; they can live their normal life, and I’ll live mine.”
I had to hide my smile. It was such an angsty thing for this bright-eyed kid to say. “You don’t think you can live a normal life?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I don’t want to.”
Ryan didn’t know just what the future held or how long she’d be at Eastside—which proved to be a fair concern, since Barb started talking about homeschooling near the end of that first year. Ryan’s schedule just needed to be more flexible than it was, especially once we started booking shows.
But it was worth it. I could tell. Ryan worked with one of the best songwriters that Andre and I had been able to poach from our old labels, Jas Jeon—or Jasmine, I should say for the official record, but I’ve only ever called her Jas or JJ—and they just refined, refined, refined together.
Jasmine Jeon,songwriter, Madcap Records
Ryan was such as sweetheart. I shouldn’t say “was,” but, well ... it’s been a long time since any of us have seen her.
I loved working with her. I’ve written for Nickel Creek, Miranda Lambert, Darius Rucker, but honestly—Ryan was my favorite. I’ve never been able to work so closely or have as long of a tenure with any other artist.
We got a pretty good thing going, where she always had the reins and I was there to step in when she needed help. Her understanding of songwriting back then was simple but solid. We did a little bit of homework together; I had Ryan bring me in the lyrics of five songs she really admired.Not just liked for their sound, but for their words and message—the kind she wanted to emulate—and we studied them together, really picked them apart and questioned why they were structured the way they were.
She had a great knack for slant rhymes. I cowrote six of the ten tracks on her debut album, but my favorite line in all of them was hers:And I believe you loved me, yes / But you don’t know what love is yet.That’s from “Eastside Blues.” But she knew when to come in with those satisfying perfect rhymes, too, like with “Shoes on the Dash”—He’s got gospel on the radio / I’ve got my sneakers on the dash / We’re runnin’ on a gasoline dream / And a shoebox full of cash.Just a lot of fun, unpredictable, fresh lines.
Ryan drew from a deep well of ideas. She’d come in with ten different hooks already in her head, and we’d riff on the banjo while she just talked through what happened in her day.
I understood and agreed with Skip’s desire for Ryan to keep up a regular life, a social life, outside the studio, but my reasoning behind that was—she’s a kid. I didn’t share his concern about plumbing real-life experience for songwriting material. A better writer than I once said that, honestly, making it through childhood is all the lived experience you need to be able to accurately convey emotion, conflict, yearning. I mean, have you seen these teenagers? We’re not going for realism here in the music industry. Save that for documentaries. We’re going fordrama, for lyrics that make youfeelsomething, and teenagers have it in spades.
Ryan was no different.
Skip
She had a great eclectic mix in that eponymous album, a really interesting fusion between her Massachusetts roots and the Texas flavor she was starting to pick up.
