When Ryan didn’t say anything, I asked, “Are you feeling better?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“You have people in your corner,” I said. “It’s not always gonna feel that way, but you have to remember that. You’re not alone in this.”
Ryan took a sip of her coffee and then looked at me. I could tell she was trying to frame what she wanted to say, and to be careful about her wording: “But very few people know what it’s like, right? You don’t get mobbed. Mari doesn’t. I was hurrying to my hotel in Seattle, and this dark car pulled up out of nowhere; two men got out and started running at me. I didn’t know it was the media until they pulled out the microphone.
“I don’t want to feel sorry for myself for being famous,” she went on. “It’s not that. But ... sometimes it does feel like I’m alone.”
I nodded, and we were both quiet for a long time. She was right. I didn’t know how that felt. Neither did Skip.
Finally, I asked, “What do you want to do next, Ryan? It’s up to you now.”
She thought for a moment and then finally gave me just a hint of a smile. “I got some good advice from someone one time,” she said. “I think I’ll turn to my fellow musicians and see what they think.”
Skip
While all the celebrity news junkies and crackpots got off on Ryan’sLA Minuteoutburst, the more serious publications laid off. Ryan was included in a few articles about music leaks and data security in the industry, a piece about the media pressure on young female artists in the age of the internet. But those were good. They made her a sympathetic character whose boundaries were overstepped during a very bad day in her career.
And even better was the fact that other artists knew what she was going through. They’d had music leaked or been threatened by the same risk.
So when Ryan came to me and asked, “How fast can we get some guest artists on this album?”
I said, “Tell me more.”
“People have already heard those three tracks,” she said. I could tell she’d come back from whatever ledge she’d been on, because her momentum was starting up again. “I’m not in denial about it—I know they’re everywhere. The lady at the check-in desk had it playing on her laptop, for crying out loud. And they’ve heard the singles, so ... that’s more than half the album.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I worked hard on those songs. I’m not going to let them go to waste.” She looked me straight in the eyes. “But we can make them fresh and new.”
Music Now Magazine, May 2012
“Count Your Days,” music thieves, because Ryan Holding isn’t going to let you stand in the way of success.
After a recent three-track leak ahead of the forthcoming release ofDiatribe, Holding’s third studio album, Holding and her label Madcap Records have decided to rebuild anticipation of the drop with a little help from friends in the industry.
The label announced Tuesday that a last-minute list of guest artists will sing on the album, adding new voices to the leaked tracks as well as the record’s three singles, which will be rereleased.
The stars lending a helping hand include such former tour mates as Dust and Roses and Montana Line, butthe lineup also boasts new and unexpected collaborations: rap artist Tame J, pop sensation Victor!a, indie rock band Brace for Impact, and—perhaps most surprising of all—model Kylie Cameron, who recently released a number of self-produced songs on her social channels.
Kylie
The whole music-leak thing was where things started to crumble between me and the girls. I mean, they were allsojudgmental of Ryan when she yelled atLA Minute. They were all like,Why is she so angry? Look how red her face is. Nothing is tackier than screaming in public like some cokehead.
Savannah was especially bad. I don’t think she ever forgave Ryan for her fling with Nick Hoffmann—which, fair. That was kind of shitty of Ryan.
But it wasn’t an excuse to bad-mouth her as terribly as any of them did. I was like, you guys, we know what it feels like to be painted in a harsh light by the press. For Chrissake, Savannah’d just had an exposé written up about her supposedly cheating on Nick—who she was dating at the time—with the male model on the Versace fall campaign. Just because they’d gotten dinner together after a shoot. God forbid a woman eats with her coworker when she’s hungry.
Plus, I did feel ... really shitty about what Ryan was going through. We’ve all trusted guys we shouldn’t have. We’ve all worked really hard on a project just for something to go wrong. And I thought the girls would be more understanding.
They weren’t. They laughed at her any chance they got—not to her face, but that made it worse—and they would play the leaked tracks at parties just before she arrived, and then giggle behind their hands all night whenever she would look at them and say, “What?”
I should have called them out on it earlier. But I did finally tell Savannah, “What’s your goddamn problem?”
