That's for visiting my page.
My name is Nick and I like to think of myself as a songwriter.
I get asked a lot about the songwriting process so I thought I would share some of my songs and go into detail about where the inspiration came from, how the melody was formed, how to arrange and produce and many other aspects.
I'd love people to get in touch if you have any questions too.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Religion is such a strange thing to me. My brain cannot accept an extraordinary claim without extraordinary proof to back it up.
I remember a street preacher shouting that the only way to get to heaven and eternal paradise is to believe in god and that for all those who don’t believe, they would go to hell. My mother had recently died and she was the nicest person on the planet, and an atheist. So I asked him if she was going to hell, and he truly believed that she was.
If god did exist (which he clearly doesn’t), then why would he be so utterly cruel and discriminatory?
I do not swear much in real life, so it was a difficult decision to leave the F bomb in the first verse, but on reflection it was the only word I could use to express the sentiment. I do not apologise to anyone if it has offended you.
I’d got the first line in my head for several weeks. ‘Dear God I want to ask you why you let my loved ones die”. The minor chords were obvious to me and I knew what they were before I even picked up the guitar.
Now that I had the theme for the song, I started writing lyrics down whenever they popped into my head. This happened at random times but mostly when I was out walking the dog. I think it is important not to try and force songwriting. For example, I never sit down and think ‘I’m going to write a song today’. It just happens when it happens. Creativity cannot be forced in my opinion.
I’ve so many notes with lines of lyrics for this song, and most of them didn’t make it into the final version because they were either not good enough, or they didn’t convey the message. As it turns out, there are only two verses in this song, but I think that's enough. It could have been so much longer but that would risk boring the listener.
Musically it is not that adventurous. Whilst it has a couple of ‘jazz’ chords, for the most part it is standard minor chords. I wanted to have a section which lifted, and this was where I sing ‘Dear God you’re not that great’. The chords rise and then fall creating a sense of drama and dread. Similarly, the arrangement amplifies this with the strings, backing vocals and percussion. Dynamics are important in songwriting. The listener has to be taken on a journey.
The arrangement for this came together really quickly because I could hear it in my head before I’d recorded the first note. Whilst I wrote it on guitar, I knew that it had to start with a piano. Instruments were added as the song progressed and I think there’s even a kitchen sink in the bigger sections.
I do not feel like I am that good on lead guitar as it is not my main instrument, so I really had to work hard at writing parts which sounded good and complimented the song. In the end, to me it sounds a little Pink Floyd and I was pleased with the end results.
As the song was developing, I was aware that it was becoming quite dark, so I attempted to throw in some dark humour. I’m particularly fond of the lines;
“I want to thank you for the pain, Dear God please don’t do that again”
And
“Dear God this is not a joke, the logic disappears in giant clouds of smoke”
It's funny that when I released a demo mix of this on YouTube, several people contacted me to say how much they liked this song as it resonated with how they felt about religion. In fact, I’d say that this song has attracted the most interest in that sense out of all the songs I have released so far. Even some of my devout religious friends took the time to comment, although not everyone was impressed by the F Bomb.
This song was anchored on and around the bass line. It's a simple minor blues pattern and I was thinking about some of the dirty politicians which gave me a loose theme and starting point for the narrative of the song.
I love the first line which goes “get out of this dirty town” and then “it goes a bit like this”, as if to say, I’m just starting the song, and it's kind of like this but it might not be. I think that was just a throwaway line at the start that I was going to change, but in the end I liked it so much it ended up in the finished song.
I mentioned politicians earlier and whilst I do not reference anyone specifically, at the time this was written, Donald Trump was president and Boris was our Prime Minister.I think most songwriters are guilty of using metaphors and that’s certainly true of me on this song. I think it's good to let the listener try to work out the meaning behind a metaphor and to this end, I won’t go into too much detail about each line.
It hung around for a while as I wanted to get a bridge section nailed down, and that took a couple of months before I had something I was happy with. I was half planning for this album to be a kind of concept album, and the title I had in mind was ‘The Great and Secret Show’, and this is why there’s a line in the middle section which refers to ‘the great and secret show’, but ultimately this wasn’t the direction I ended up going in. There’s also the line ‘could this be a movie now’, which was a reference to the song The Man With the Camera.
The quiet and slightly psychedelic section in the middle was stolen from a song I wrote in the 90’s which never really went anywhere but sounded a bit ‘Beatley’. It adds dynamic to the song as a whole and because it is almost ethereal, the solo section has a big impact when that comes back in.
For the solo section, I was torn between a dirty synth sound or a guitar solo. So I recorded both hoping that Matt would choose one or the other. As it was, he made the genius decision to use both in a question and answer scenario.
For the ending, I was really struggling but Matt suggested what we ended up with, and for a really cool end, I reversed the main guitar intro section to make the production feel like it had gone full circle.
As with a lot of songs, this took a while to develop as the lyrics did not come easily. Lines need to flow well, and getting the right balance is not always easy. I probably have about four other songs worth of lyrics with the lines that I cut / changed in this song before it became the final version.
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