When it comes to music and making your mark, the path of becoming an independent recording artist, like life itself, will always have its ups and downs.
Paris-based singer-songwriter, Steven Ryan, has been involved in music one way or another for a majority of his nearly 33 years, and with his newly released extended album “Life, Love and Everything After,” the musician has taken inspiration from the highs and lows of life’s biggest moments.
Ryan’s love of expressing himself through music first began as a young child; Whether it was simply pressing buttons on an organ or trying his hand at singing, the musician has always been fascinated with music.
“There’s an old photo of me around the age of three and I’m sitting at an organ in one of my relatives’ living rooms and I vividly remember just pressing the buttons to make different sounds. It was definitely not music, but back then, it seemed like the craziest thing to me that I could press a button, and a sound would come out that, to me, sounded like something more,” he said. “When I was five years old, we moved to St. George and up the street from us lived another kid named Quentin Carter who played the drums. His dad was in bands his whole life and so me and my older sibling who played bass would go over and because I wanted to be involved, but had never picked up a real instrument before, his dad encouraged me to sing.”
Around the age of ten or 11, Ryan got his first electric guitar from a pawn shop but could only play a few riffs here and there; It wasn’t until grade nine when his uncle gave him an acoustic guitar that he started to take learning the instrument more seriously.
“For me, it really felt like the whole world fell away when I was singing and so the acoustic guitar eventually became something that I could do by myself to go hand-in-hand with that.”
Though Ryan never formally took guitar lessons, he took it upon himself to learn how to play and write his own songs.
“Really, I was learning by watching people’s hands on YouTube videos. I would sit there watching and think, ‘okay where’s this person putting their hands? What does it sound like if I put my hands there instead?’” he said. “Learning a full song that way was much harder than doing what I thought sounded right. So, funnily enough, I think I probably started writing music before I fully was able to play any other song.”
He said that even as he started playing cover gigs around town, he would only learn half of a song and then fill in the rest with whatever he thought followed next.
“For whatever reason, it just didn’t interest me to learn things that already existed,” he said. “I was never one to learn a song verbatim or play an exact guitar solo because it was more interesting to me to make it up as I went.”
The singer-songwriter said that to this day, he still prefers to not listen to any other music when he’s writing.
“I like to be in kind of a blank space and not let anything influence me, you know? I want to just try to create something new for myself and for my listeners.”
After finishing high school in 2009, Ryan opted out of going into post-secondary education and instead focused on releasing his own album in 2010 called “Dear Lover.” He even launched the debut album with a performance at the Sanderson Centre.
Nearing the end of 2014, Ryan finally scored a management deal but found himself stuck in a three contract and never ended up releasing any new music. When the contract finally ended, he signed another deal with a different company, and while he maintains a good relationship with them to this day, he still found himself with a hard drive of unreleased music.
“You know, after kind of building a career that I could play in a thousand seat venue in my own community of Brantford and the Brant County area, I ended up going six years without releasing any original music,” he said. “I then found myself at a more advanced stage then I would have hoped to to kind of restart my career because at that point, it really became my choice whether I could release music anymore or not.”
At the age of 30-years-old Ryan took it upon himself to go forward and independently record and release his album titled Light of Day on his own.
“I decided that I was just going to do this myself and so I recorded the 2021 album in my studio at home because it was just kind of now or never,” he said. “So, here I am, a few years after that, and things are finally starting to get closer to a place that they were about ten years ago, but everything happens for a reason. I wasn’t the writer, or artist I am today a decade ago so I think, hopefully, it has all happened for the right reasons and maybe this is the time that things are supposed to happen for me.”
Looking to continue creating music and produce another album, Ryan got his band back together, and even brought on his childhood neighbour Carter to play drums. In September of 2023 he released “Life, Love and Everything After,” later bringing it on a coast-to-coast Canadian tour.
“Everything on that 2021 album was either played by me or programmed by me and so for this new one I was finally able to explore more by having some of the other guys in the band come and play on the record,” he said.
Now that he’s released the album’s extended edition, the artist said that listeners can expect an honest journey about what it means to be alive.
“The songs about life are either about the struggles of life or mental health and things like that. There’s a section of songs about both romantic and paternal love, and then lastly, there’s songs about loss or that idea of ‘everything after,’” he said. “Because in my mind, the three big things in life are exactly like the title says; it’s life, love and loss, and it all came from different things that I’ve experienced in my own life.”
While he originally released the album with 15 songs, he decided to release an extended version in March of 2024 with five more songs for several reasons.
“It was mostly because not only do I feel like you can’t explain life, love and loss in 15 or even 20 songs, and really, those are things that we’ll be writing about or making art about till humans don’t exist on earth anymore,” he said. “But also, through those six years where I wasn’t able to release music, I just got to the point where I felt like there’s no point in leaving songs on my hard drive when they could be out there and people could listen to them.”
He said that when it came down to curating this album, he wanted something that anyone and everyone could relate to.
“Personally, I’ve just always felt that I want my music to be as accessible as possible because if there’s a message that can help people, no matter who they are, how they identify or what education they have, I want them to be able to experience whatever it is this message is that I’m trying to get across,” said Ryan. “There’s a song on the album called “With You” that I wrote specifically, because there aren’t a lot of love songs that have no gendered language, or they reference specific things that might not make sense with somebody’s love story. For me, everybody deserves a love story and so I wanted to write a song that didn’t have gendered language and didn’t have specific references that anyone could listen to and say, ‘oh, this feels like my love and it represents how I feel.”
Ryan noted that while his album could be listened to in any order, he encourages people to listen to “Life, Love and Everything After,” from front to back at least once.
“If you have time to listen to music for over an hour straight, it’s one of those albums that I believe listening to from beginning to end is a different experience because there are, as we call them, “Easter eggs” throughout, and there’s references to other songs and whatnot,” he said. “So, if you have the time, I encourage people to take that roller coaster journey but if you don’t, that’s completely fine, too. In this day and age, whether you listen to all of it or you just pop a few songs onto your driving playlist, there is something on the album for everybody. I just hope that whether it’s either one person listening or 50,000 people listening, that they can get something meaningful from it.
