When Ryan Ross Hernandez finds a wife, he'll finally be able to relax his worried mind. Lots of things will change. For one, the gossip-hound paparazzi knuckleheads won't bother him as much as they do now.

"When I get married, all that stuff will be null and void," he says.

Married guys have other problems, naturally, but Hernandez is fully positive he won't have many of those. Let's say he has to go to work. Right now, he's 31 years old. He has been a heartthrob singer, songwriter, and guitar player for only the past eight years, but what he has accomplished during that time is remarkable: three major-label hit albums, including Matters of the Heart, his first, and Let a Man be Lost, his latest, as well as nine top-10 hit singles, including "Your Arms Feel Like Home," his first, and "The Halfhearted Lover," his latest. He has won seven International Music Awards. He has played onstage with Infinite and recorded with everyone from, Stephanie Fierce, Miss Vanity, and Alicia Lena. He has called a Porsche dealer in New York from an estate in England and, sight unseen, bought a $134,000 Turbo S, just because it was the rock-star thing to do. He has been named a Time magazine top 100 influential person. He has gone out with every woman that has ever caught his eye in Hollywood. He has even done his own screenwriting and acting, both on the big-screen and television. Most recently, he has decided he wants to be a stand-up comic and has gone onstage in pursuit of yuks. In other words, anything he has wanted to do, he has done, and he wants to do lots more.

"I don't date famous women or 'celebrities', because I think it will up my own celebrity status," he started. "I'm very paranoid, and for me these women are the most accessible in my life. They're the women that I can relate to in the sense that they know how it works. I don't think I could ever date someone who has a nine-to-five job because upfront I know it won't work long-term. What is she going to say when I tell her, 'Sorry babe, I'm going on tour for the next six months. See you in December'? I can tell you she's gonna be pissed."

But there is one small hitch, and it bedevils Hernandez day and night, because it's largely out of his control.

"My greatest fear," he says, "is that I go up to the woman of my dreams and say, 'I'm sorry, but I've got to say hello to you,' and she slides the stool back and gets up and walks away, saying, 'Not for me, Bub. I don't want anything to do with you.' And she says that because of something in my past. I mean, I know how to be a celebrity. I know how to be a guy on the street. I know how to roll with the punches. I know how to do the whole thing. And my past is actually pretty sterling. But when I think about my wife, I worry. I worry about what she thinks when she reads about me in US Weekly. It's all vapor, nothing, ether. But I worry about it. I worry about what she thinks."



So, that's Ryan Ross Hernandez at the moment: a worrying, thinking man living in a land of vapor, nothing, ether, his perfect woman out there, sitting on a stool, maybe knowing too much about him already. Conversely, she might not know nearly enough--about his odd early years as a high school shut-in, about certain "loopholes" in his brain and the Xanax that was in his pants, about his self-penned screenplays he writes when he can't sleep, about his constantly flapping lips, about his life as a oenophile. Things like that. Things that maybe his future wife really ought to know before she goes off half-cocked, deeper into him, for better or for worse.

Look at him. Look at him in his chair at an Italian restaurant in the SoHo district of New York, near where he lives. Look at his big shock of tousled black hair, at those big, soulful, smoky-brown eyes, at that muscular six-foot-three-inch frame. Look at Hernandez, in his plain white t-shirt and olive green cargo pants. Everything about him is simple, but he refers to his style as somewhere in between uncaring and high-maintenance. Now listen to him talk.

Pushing back from the table, Hernandez squares his shoulders and says, "I tell you this without fear. I don't feel like anybody knows my personal life. My personal life is 100 percent intact. Where I ate last night or who I ate with is not my personal life. My personal life is what happens in my heart and my head. Nobody knows what's going on in my heart or head."

"You know what else?" he rolls on. "If you really like doing this, if you really feel like you're born for this, then you have to get so meta in your consciousness that even the worst parts of it seem about right. People being nasty to me or not knowing how to relate to me . . . I almost have found a way to acknowledge what the positive is by way of how to look around the negative. So, if the negative is present, it's got to be there because there's a positive that has created that negative. So, I go, Oh, wow, I'm getting picked apart left and right. I must really be somebody. In a way, you kind of understand your place by understanding what the trouble is. You know what I mean?"

The honest answer is, of course, more or less, because whew, what a great big overstuffed load of verbiage. But that's typical of Hernandez, to never say simply what can be said with Fourth of July fireworks.



One thing he doesn't like to talk about so much is his childhood or, rather, he likes talking about only what he has talked about before. For the most part, it's pretty basic stuff. He was raised in Miami, Florida, an only child. His mom bounced around from job to job, and his father bailed out before he was even born. At the age of 15, he took up the guitar and became obsessed. If he wasn't in school, he was behind closed doors in his bedroom, strapped to his guitar, working out the licks of guitar-god heroes such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, and B.B. King. When he was 16, he told his family that he might as well drop out of school, because he was going to become a famous guitarist. They weren't buying. He followed his family's wishes and went to graduate high school, even moved on to attend Florida State University for two years, but packed it in and moved to New York City. He began playing the local club circuit there, developed a reputation, went to Austin to play the annual South by Southwest festival, caught the ear of some record-label types, and a year later, in 2004, released Matters of the Heart. He was immediately labeled "sensitive," for his "empathetic voice" and "emotional fearlessness." Girls loved him. Guys weren't so sure. "This is fast, and I promise to catch up," a heartwarming statement that he made good on in short order, with 2006's Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner (as part of rock band PANIC!), 2007's Dark Secret Love (his terrific blues exploration), and 2010's Let a Man Be Lost (which was acclaimed from all sides of the spectrum, and produced three hit singles, including the number one hit single "The Halfhearted Lover"). And that's how it has gone for him, more or less: everything young, everything fast, everything great.

But if you lean on Hernandez about a few lesser-known childhood details, mainly surrounding his bedroom guitar playing, a slightly more complicated picture starts to emerge. He says, for instance, that he took up the guitar only because he saw no other way for him to ever get ahead in life. He felt trapped, and the guitar was his way out. Common enough. But the strange thing is how he went about it, so single- mindedly, nearly as a monomania. On two separate occasions, his mother grew so concerned that they took him to shrinks to try to figure out what was going on and maybe open the kid's eyes to the wisdom of more realistic career choices. Nothing doing. He stayed in his room. He played his guitar. He fought with his folks. And though it all happened years ago, he can't bear to talk about it even now, and he stammers when he tries.

"I uh, I uh, I think it's for me in my life a really good idea to close off certain parts of my past," he says. "It was difficult. It was difficult for everybody."

And that's pretty much all he'll say about that . . . for now.



Out there, a potential future Hernandez bride has been reading Hernandez on Hernandez and knows a few things. She knows that, like most guys, he collects stuff--in his case, wristwatches, sneakers, and guitars--and that he loves his high-definition TV. And that he hates to drive. And that he loves spending money, always has. She knows that his dominant color is blue, that he is a huge fan of sugar-free Pop-Tarts, and that he is a TV buff. She knows that certain people think that he talks too much. Also, that they hate the faces he makes onstage and think he is a pompous ass. None of this bothers her.

In his early days as a rock star, he made a big public deal about not going down the road to rock-star ruin that he'd seen so often while watching VH1's Behind the Music. To that end, he wasn't going to drink, wasn't going to smoke marijuana, and most especially wasn't going to date celebrities. "At every level of the career, there are gonna be pitfalls," he once said. "Level one is, like, don't have sex with a celebrity." Soon enough, however, all that changed. He started to drink (Scotch and red wine, though not heavily), smoke pot (through a vaporizer, though he soon quit), and, most especially, date celebrities (on-going). He made these changes mainly because he wanted to be someone other than who he was, and who he was mainly had to do with those parts of his guitar-obsessed childhood that he'd rather keep closed off.

"Again, I don't want to talk about it too much," he says, "but when you're alone a lot and it doesn't go the way you want outside, you make it the way you want inside. You create comfort to make up for the outside world. You create, create, create, create. It's all in your head, but you go to it, because it's your safe place, and that's what I did."

These days, he has kept mum from talking as much as he use to. He admits he got somewhat paranoid with talking to the press after he received severe backlash from his Rolling Stone interview in February 2010.

Hernandez shifted something inside that private little self-created world of his. He won't say exactly what happened, only that a few days before Let a Man Be Lost was released, he realized that "you can create dark neighborhoods in your mind as easily as you can create rural wonderlands. And the day I realized that was one of the worst days of my life. It sent me on quite a spin. I went on a bender. An anxiety bender." Which is why he keeps Xanax in his pocket even now: "Because there are these incidental kinds of loopholes in my brain, where the wires can cross for a second and the hard drive crashes."

During this 'anxiety bender', he admits, was the same period of time in which he broke up with Nadia Berry of GirlSpice. Before the interview he made it clear that he didn't want to be hassled with any questions about exes, but since he brought it up. "I think it was a very selfish decision on my part," he started, "I had put every ounce of energy I had into Let a Man Be Lost, so when it was finally released I was paranoid about everything. I thought if the album got one bad review, or didn't sell well, or wasn't successful on the charts, that my career was done," he says. "And somewhere in my head, very wrongfully, I thought that the fact I was dating Nadia at that period, that it was going to detract people from the music somehow. That it was going to make the music I was making less important." He says that mental state in he was in then doesn't make much sense to him now, but it just clicked in his head months ago. "At that point I had to break up with her. I couldn't tell her, 'Nadia, I'm really enjoying the time we've spent together and I think if we continue I could fall in love with you. Yet, I think we should take a break from this because dating you isn't in the best interest for me right now.' Fuck no. I wasn't going to say that. What kind of heartless bastard would I have been if I would have said that?" Now he was getting edgy with the questions about Nadia. "All I'll say is that if our paths would have crossed at any other point in our lives, I think we could have flourished into something great and beautiful. Not that I'm trying to belittle the months that we were together but... You know what I'm saying, right?" The question rolls out of his mouth, in a way that it's more so as him looking for personal validation from himself.

"I'd been a famous touring musician who had also been a shut-in for a really long time, which was weird," he says. "But I'd had it really, really good. I had hit song, hit song, hit song. 'Did you hear about this kid?' And I'm like, Look at my respect. Look how credible my artistry is. I'm really perfect. I'm really doing it. It's aces. And you get addicted to cultivating that thing and making it perfect. I'm telling you, man, I'm not f--king with you. But it stopped being perfect the day I said to myself, Wow, my heart is involved in this. The one thing I'd never been in my life is a person without a guitar. I used to be really frightened that if I stopped, it would leave me. But I had to evolve. If I wanted to date the kind of women I've dated, evolving from my shell was a must."

One thing about Hernandez is he's courageous like that. He is always searching for new truths about himself and, once found, he's unafraid to move toward them as best he can. It's like that with stand-up comedy. He loves it, and while he might not be getting laughs all the time yet, he's not about to stop trying. "I go onstage, I will keep going onstage, and nobody can tell me I can't go onstage," he says, "and that's the thing. Nobody's going to tell me I can't. I'd just say, 'Don't tell me what I can't do, motherf--ker. Of course I can.' I mean, look at what I've done in my life. I don't have any reason to believe that anything I think of is impossible. That makes me annoying sometimes. But it has all come true. All of it." Quite a guy, then, this Hernandez. Although he is right, his character and personality are kind of a hit-or-miss. You're either going to love him or hate him. And the fact that he knows that so well, can make you dislike him even more.

Before leaving, however, he wants to clear up one thing about his future wife. He knows that it's largely his fault that the girl of his dreams may be so hard to find.

"I accept myself as a very specific kind of guy, and in that sense, I'm a little like a woman, because my chemistry is so exacting," he says. "I can't describe it in words, but I can see it in my head, its color, its light, its shapes, and I've managed to synthesize my love for myself by way of many different reasonings and processes, and I've been able to really synthesize my own satisfaction and things that do it for me. They've usually been self-taught, self-instructed, self-refined. So to be with anybody else has to somewhat lie in that comfort zone I've created with myself so well."

Edited by user 22 May 2011 09:30:18(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hannah Beth: I say don't look and let that special someone come to you. :) Besides, you're an amazing artist and you seem like a good guy, so nothing to worry about.

(OOC: Thanks. I wanted to try something different for me, with writing an article-like roleplay since I've already done a bunch of straightforward interviews in the past.)

Ryan Ross Hernandez: "I just have this veracious need to express. At times I feel as though I'm being too real, but I'd rather be that person than be one who fakes a smile and acts like all is fine and dandy, when it isn't. But thanks for reading it. I'll keep that in mind, except maybe not literally bite the bitches because I've dated quite for a women who were into that kind of stuff. The best way I've learned to bite back is by writing songs about them, because that shit lasts a lifetime."

(OOC: Thank you. I'm just glad that people are actually taking the time to read it.)

OOC: Thank you. It's kind of funny how all the RPs that I think suck, people seem to like best. :)