Ryan Kinder will release his debut record ‘Room to Dream’ on the 30th July. Here we talk to Kinder about the project and the evolution of his sound.
Hi, how are you? How is everything in Tennessee at the moment?
I played on Saturday for the first time in probably about a year. Live music is coming back!
Well you’ve been far more productive in the past year than most people – training for the Iron Man and getting two projects together for release. Have you found that you’ve been inspired over the past year? I know for some people they’ve either been completely inspired or that’s completely vanished?
It ebbs and flows. At the start of the pandemic, it was all Netflix.
I feel like if you didn’t have that phase you didn’t do quarantine right.
Yeah. I mean, that’s the right way to do quarantine, nobody had figured out zoom writing yet and then that was a huge learning curve – getting used to writing when you don’t have the personal connection when you’re not in the room with them and finding the vibe for the song.
It’s a different energy when you’re not in the room, even just not being able to have those moments to pause and reflect.
Absolutely. It helped to write with people I knew and then add a new person, so there was a bit more of a comfort level.
On ‘Room to Dream’ were those songs that you had in the back catalogue or ones you’d written on Zoom? How did the project come together?
I had finished Room To Dream before the pandemic – we were about to release it and then my business manager, who’s a brilliant man, said ‘you need to hold onto it.’ So, I didn’t release it. The Ontology project though was bred out of the pandemic. Everybody’s got a home studio now and I’ve been wanting to do a collaboration record for a long time. I thought it was a novel idea until everybody started doing one, but I changed the focus and instead of it being artists that I love coming and singing on my project, I tailored it to the person I was collaborating with. The song with Sykamore is more pop country than the ones with Brandy Clark and Jerry Douglas was more folk-Americana.
There’s so much range on the project – it really shows the breadth of the Nashville sound. Then, in terms of Room to Dream, it must be kind of strange that you’ve had this project for so long and you can finally talk about it. Now they’re finally being released into the world, what does that mean to you to finally have the project out?
Yeah, some of the songs I’ve had for way longer than two years. Every time you go into a project, you try and write for that project and sometimes you dip back into the catalogue. This project meant a lot to my producer – Luke Sheets – and I. We had been working on this for so long, and it feels good to finally get it out, especially after this pandemic.
Was there anything you kind of wanted people to take away from it? Obviously it’s a full-length record and there’s more space. it’s the full length records, there’s much more space to be able to kind of tell your story and tell sort of express yourself, I guess.
Yeah, the title was called ‘Room to Dream’ for a reason. After all the lives I’ve lived in Nashville, I’ve realized that there is no genre, and there shouldn’t be. It was the opportunity for me to do what I love – all on one album. There’s parts of it that are pop country, there’s parts of it that are rock and roll, and there’s parts that are folk-Americana – that was the idea behind the title ‘Room to Dream’ – I have the opportunity to just do what makes me happy.
That’s something I really loved about the project – you have ‘Hell Is’ which has a bit more experimental production, or ‘Jane’ gets a little more into a stripped-back John Mayer-esque sound. I love that you had that breadth, but then it seemed incredibly cohesive – I guess that’s credit to you and your producer.
Well, I’m very glad to hear you say that, because that was that was one of the problems we went into it with – thinking how do we find that one string that ties it all together? I think we found it. It’s quite hard to predict when been sitting on songs for a longer amount of time – you evolve as an artist and you evolve your sound and your ideas, so you have to pull it back a little bit. You pick yourself apart until it’s out.
I did actually want to talk to you about ‘Jane’ just in terms of the evolution of the track and kind of where sonically and melodically the inspiration came from? That one stood out to me a little bit when I was listening through.
Josh Osborne and Ross Copperman and I wrote that – I think about four years ago – songs have that poignant timeline in your mind. Jane was Osborne’s idea – he came in with an idea for a song called ‘Jane’ then Ross and I were like, ‘Alright, let’s see where this one goes.’ We were trying to figure it out and he goes ‘well everybody always talks about plain Jane, let’s play off that!’ I think I started going ‘Hey, nothing plain about Jane’ and we went with that.
Yeah, I think sonically it really struck me. I know you’re from Knoxville originally, but were born in Alabama and then moved back to Nashville. What do you think that journey gave to your music? Did you always know you were going to return to Nashville?
Honestly, I hadn’t thought about Nashville until I met Keith Stegall – who was my very first producer, he brought me to Nashville. I was 15 years old and a friend of a friend introduced me to Keith when I was in college – I started driving back and forth from Tuscaloosa to Nashville to write with him. He said when the time is right, I feel like you should move to Nashville and the tornado in Tuscaloosa hit in 2011 and almost killed me and my friends – that was a kind of ‘come to Jesus’ moment. Life’s too short. It definitely one of those things. It was a higher being – whatever you believe in fate, fortuitous, unfortunate circumstance – and it pushed me to Nashville. I could have gone to New York or LA but Nashville was where I began to build a community that I loved.
In terms of the rest of the year, I know you’ve got obviously these two records coming out and finally live dates again – it must be crazy to finally see or be able to see the response from fans to the songs as they’re coming out.
Yeah, that was a crazy thing before this all happened – and with Room to Dream – I’ve been playing some of the songs live and I knew which ones resonated but some of them I’d never played live because they were newer, so you can’t really gauge people’s interest as we’d probably got half of it done [before all this]. We have absolutely no idea how the songs are going to resonate with people.
It’s kind of scary, but fun as well because obviously usually you play songs and you know your diehard fans will probably have heard the songs about 15 times – they’ve got recordings on their phones – whereas this time, it’s a blank slate. I’m excited for this project to be out and for you finally to be able to tour the UK again! Thanks for your time today.
No, thank you. I really appreciate it.
