A Conversation with Matthew Ryan (continued)

MR: I got to tell you, Frank, it's so good to hear your accent, man.

PM: [laughs]

MR: I'm serious. I don't have one anymore. I sound like I'm Canadian or something.

[laughter]

PM: And I don't even know I have it until a Philly cat hears it.

[laughter]

MR: You got it, man.

PM: And I've been hanging down in South Beach this whole holiday with my two brothers, so it probably gets reinforced.

MR: Yeah, it does, whenever I go home, yeah, yeah, it's true.

PM: So there's one great outside song on the record, "Providence." Tell us about the writers, Grant McLennan and Steven Kilbey.

MR: Oh man... When I was first waking up to music in the '80s--and I think the '80s gets a bad rap because of what MTV or VH1 makes the '80s look like.

PM: Yeah.

MR: But back then you had bands like The Go-Betweens and The Church, and Jesus and Mary Chain.

PM: There were some incredible bands in the '80s.

MR: There was a lot of really, really good stuff! But oddly enough, Grant McLennan was in The Go-Betweens, and Steven Kilbey was in The Church. And they got together and did a side project called Jack Frost. And back up when I was going to the University of Delaware, there was a record store called Rainbow Records. It was like this stereotypical Hi Fidelity record store. People that really loved music. And I'd heard about it, and I went in there and got it and just fell in love with that song back then. And then when a friend was dying of cancer, I started thinking about "Providence," and those opening lines, and I wanted to write a song for her that spoke to it honestly. And I don't even know where Grant McLennan and Steven Kilbey were coming from, but I know what it meant to me.

PM: Right.

MR: I was like, well, I'm not going to write a better song than that concerning the situation.

PM: Wow.

MR: So that's why I chose to record it.

PM: What are those guys doing now, do we know?

MR: Well, unfortunately, Grant McLennan died last year. Sadly, quietly.

PM: What did he die of?

MR: I don't know. I know it wasn't self-inflicted, I know that. I think he had some sort of illness. [McLennan died unexpectedly in his sleep, apparently of heart failure; he was 48.]

PM: Damn.

MR: And he was really a great writer. He has a record called Horsebreaker Star that has a handful of absolute gems on it. And when I say a "handful," that's no small compliment. You either write a great song or you can't, but if you get four or five of them on one record, that's something.

PM: Yeah, absolutely.

MR: Let alone eleven or twelve. And in some weird way, that stuff with Grant McLennan, in particular, combined with the year that I'd already had last year, really kind of spoke to my ambition as an artist. I don't mean to project any sort of maudlin stuff on McLennan at all. I don't know how he felt about this stuff and where he was headed, but it has motivated me to want to stretch and go further. I really have that ambition to try and offer something that has that sort of greater cultural impact.

PM: Wow.

MR: You know what I mean?

PM: I do, of course, yeah.

MR: Because you can kind of get comfortable, like I said, in your "David Koresh" world, and maybe I've acquired a career, but I don't know at the end of the day if that's why anybody does it. I think you do it to try and really offer something. I don't know, it's really motivated me. It really saddened me to hear that he had died.

And Steven Kilbey is still doing The Church. And I don't know this for a fact, but I feel like it might mean a lot to Steven if somebody recorded one of his songs. I hope he hears it.

Whenever I've heard somebody sing one of my songs, and it happens once every blue moon, it means the world to me, man. All of a sudden you have an objectivity on your songs that you never would have had. I always get choked up. [laughs]

PM: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

MR: It's like, "Oh! I really do exist."

PM: So do you make much time for reading in your life?

MR: I love the idea of reading, but I don't really have the attention span for it. So that's why I tend to read poetry collections. I find that I get so disappointed in a bad phrase that I can't go on.

PM: Wow.

MR: It's a good thing when you get that distilled thing, you never run into the clumsiness. You only get like the most--

PM: The essence.

MR: --distilled or elegant--the essence, yeah.

PM: You say some unusual things. I like it.    continue

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