Nick Ryder Songwriter: The Perfect Storm

I love playing the piano. I’m not that good but I like to think I know a few chords, so I can kind of make something resembling a nice tune.

This song was written one day when I was sitting noodling at the piano. I’d got a melody and the first line “Now the leaves are falling gently from the trees”, so I worked out what the chords were. It didn’t take long before the next line came “they flutter in the breeze as they face their final journey”.

The piano is such a great instrument for adding texture to chords. The “final Journey” line had an Em chord under it, but instead of playing E on the bass note, I played a C# instead which turned it into a diminished chord and added tension to that part of the song. It’s much easier to do tricks like this on the piano than on the guitar. This is why writing on different instruments can produce entirely different types of songs.

A few weeks earlier, I had heard the phrase ‘The Perfect Storm’, and I made a mental note that it would be a good title and theme for a song, and as I was composing this, I remembered this so decided that this would inform the theme. It’s so much easier to complete a song when you have a theme to focus on.

I think it is important to make the chorus of a song the best part. It has to be the most memorable section of a song and should lift up beyond the verse sections, especially in a piano ballad like this song.

Therefore, I picked the highest note I could comfortably sing and went up a semitone just to push myself. My plan was that even though it was out of my comfort zone, when it came to recording the vocal I would prepare by doing an hour's worth of singing warm ups and exercises.

As often happens, I hit a brick wall with the song. I had a verse and chorus but I could not progress it any further. I’m a firm believer that song writing should not be rushed or forced, because in doing so, you only ever end up with something inferior to what it has potential to be, So I left it on the shelf until such a time that I could do the song justice.

When I did eventually come back to it, my mind was fresh and full of ideas, and so the middle 8 section came quickly. I brought the dynamics down so that it could lead into a big final double chorus. I am particularly fond of the ambiguous line “the clock in the hall remembers it all”.

There are two versions of this song. The first was recorded by a girl singer from Argentina called Julia. I gave it to her because at the time, I was not confident enough to sing it myself. Julia’s version is sublime and I can listen to it over and over. It sounds so good to me that it doesn’t feel like I have written it.

And to be honest, I decided to include my version on this album simply because I thought the song was worth it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope it has been interesting.