Anyway

 

Anyway, the third album by Nick Ryder will be released on all streaming platforms on Thursday 1st August 2024.

Anyway is a collection of twelve brand new original songs which were recorded between January and June 2024.

The Album features Steve Dutton on drums and has guest appearances from Georgia Batterley and Will Yates.

It was mixed by Brad Mott.

Most of the songs were written with a live band in mind. Nick says "I wanted to try and create some anthems that people would feel like they'd heard before. I tried to put a lot of energy into the arrangements so that when we do play them live, hopefully it will get people on their feet".

Nick continues "When Steve Dutton agreed to play live drums on all the songs, that in itself gave the production added energy which certainly helped when I was tracking all the other instruments."

The album track listing is as follows:

The First Hello

Summer is Gone

Not the One

Another Day

The Great Escape

The Perfect Storm

Weatherman

Hey You

Stuck Inside a Cloud

I don't Know

This Is Not a Test

My Love

Please watch out for more articles and information in the coming weeks and if you want to keep up to date, please subscribe to this blog.

Photography by Kevin S Petch

Anyway

 

Releasing three albums within the space of six months of each other was quite an intense and exhausting task. I put in so many hours of hard work and effort to get them over the line that I said to myself that once the Save Me Now album was released in January 2024, I would take a break. It felt the right thing to do as surely my creative energy had dried up?

Wrong.

During the recording of Edge of the Universe, The Georgia Project and Save Me Now, I had written and recorded about twenty or thirty other half finished demo songs. Many of them were a couple of years old and I had forgotten about them. One day I decided to have a tidy up of my hard drive, so ended up loading up the projects and was pleasantly surprised to find some real gems which, with a bit of time and effort, had potential to be half decent.

The approach was very much a case of let’s do a bit at a time and not force or rush into a new project. At the same time, I continued to write new material. This is something I cannot stop. My head seems to be filled with music all the time. This is both a curse and a blessing.

I soon realised in early February that without having to put much effort in, I would have another two albums worth of songs. 

So I asked myself the question ‘should I do this so soon?’. The answer was of course a resounding ‘YES’.

Anyway, my third album will be available very, very soon........

The Madness of the Broken and the Fools

 

The lockdown brought out the best in some people, and the very worst in others. I think it damaged friendships as some people, out of frustration, expressed their misguided views on the situation.

 

Misinformation was everywhere and conspiracies were rife. Some fell headfirst into some very dangerous rabbit holes.

 

Failed journalists were popping up everywhere offering the ‘truth’, and promised even more revelations if you only supported their channel financially. 

 

I had a chord progression which was a bit ‘James Bondy’ that I liked but was really struggling for words. And then it suddenly hit me. I had all the material I needed on Facebook. I made metal notes of people’s crazy posts, their attitudes, circumstances, and demeanour. From here, the song pretty much wrote itself.

 

However, that was not the end of it. I had to come up with an arrangement to compliment the rest of the song, and that’s where the fun really started.

 

It was important to me to build a soundscape, a journey as it were and to somehow convey the madness of paranoia which the world was seeing on a daily basis. This was a big production and one which I threw everything at. I even think there may be a kitchen sink in there somewhere.

 

Because of the nature of the song and its arrangement, I do know this was not easy for Matt to mix and I have lost count of how many different mixes there are. He’s added things, taken them away, resampled snare drums, mixed in sound effects. You name it, he’s done it but I can tell you that this finished version was well worth the wait.

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She Said

 

Sometimes a song writes itself and this is very much the case here. I remember picking up an acoustic guitar and strumming the chord sequence and actually making up the first verse in one take. That was it. It was like the first verse already existed.

It felt very ‘Britpop’, so when it came to the arrangement, the drums followed a familiar pattern which was matched by the rhythm guitars and bass. The piano filled in the gaps and as Matt always says ‘you can never have too many backing vocals’ so I layered them up a plenty!!

It was clear to me that with the right direction, this could be a crowd pleaser if I ever got to play it live, so that was very much in my mind as I finished the song both lyrically and in the arrangement.

I played it to my good friend Steve, and he said that if this had been released in the mid 90’s, then we’d have been playing it on the main stage at Glastonbury!

I remember writing this with a smile on my face and doing my best to make it as ‘feel good’ as possible.

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Time to Walk Away

Writing songs on a piano is so different to writing songs on a guitar and vice versa. However, whilst this song ended up being recorded on piano, it actually started life on the guitar. 

I’d been playing around with a chord progression which included several diminished chords as they add tension and drama to the sound. The first line seemed quite haunting - ‘that photo in the hall, it seems so long ago’. It sets the scene for what is a heart-breaking subject matter for a song. Once upon a time, things seemed perfect, but whilst it is going to hurt you badly, now is time for me to go…… and by ‘go’.... Well, take from that what you will.

I wanted the arrangement to sound intimate and heartfelt. To this end, I asked Matt to mix it in such a way that the listener felt like they were sitting on the same piano stool as the singer.

I also had to make sure my vocal performance delivered, given that for the most part it was just vocal and piano.

Strings were introduced to add some drama and tension, but then taken away just before the end to resolve the piece. 

To date, there have been three cover versions of this song, which is lovely knowing that others think it good enough to want to record themselves.

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