"Half-erect," that was Ryan Ross Hernandez's answer when we asked him what would he be tweeting at that very moment. "Wait, no. Full-erect. Change that answer. Fully erect." The wonderful thing about how he delivers his answers is that he never changes his tone. He has a deep, smokey voice that he only seems to channel away when he is singing.

Of course, if your follow-up is asking what his favorite hobby is other than music, you can already expect a witty remark to be said. Without a blink of an eye or wasting another mere second, Hernandez responds "Getting girls pregnant. At my place, poolside, from two to four. Followed by a lite lunch-in." At least this time, a sly smirk formed at the corner of his lips to settle some sense of it being a joke.

Hernandez's chosen venue for this evening's interview is his own personal LA home. Of your idea of home is a white-picket fence, with a well-kept lawn, three bedrooms, and maybe a pool in the back, then Ryan Ross Hernandez's place isn't for you. The man enjoys the Finer Things in Life. His LA home is a gorgeous villa in the exclusive neighborhood of Hollywood Hills. The white-picket fence is replaced by a heavily gated front lawn, inside an already gated community. It is so difficult to get inside that the singer/songwriter suggested he pick me up himself at the hotel I was staying in. I arrive in my hotel lobby to find that the multiplatinum singer has draped his rangy six-three frame (to use the obligatory description) on a leather couch, the better to savor his glass of Laphroaig 25-year-old single-malt Scotch.

His lazy-Thursday strategy is to drive nowhere in particular, avoid any unwanted attention from the paparazzi's, maybe pick up some dinner. The plan is to not have much of a plan, which seems to suit Hernandez just fine. The 32-year-old has given himself a long weekend off from recording his forth studio album. By request of Hernandez, he wanted everything done at his home. The photo shoot, the interview. He said he'd accumulate everyone but wasn't going to some fancy Hollywood studio for a shoot or having an interview over drinks at a exclusive LA restaurant.

The musicians home is as classy as you'd expect. The decor is much taken from the sixties, or better said a scene from Mad Men. At first sight, there is nothing that tells you this is the home of multi-platinum selling, IMA-winning musician. "I don't want to be reminded of my career when I'm at home. I see it as being a surgeon. You don't go to a surgeon's house and see a human heart and a scalpel on the coffee table." Hernandez is filled with analogies. He does say that he has a two hundred and twenty guitar collection in his home, but he declined to show it off. He was more than glad to show us another other of his many collections. He is an avid collector. He showed us his collection of watches that's worth in total skyrockets over thirty million dollars. He has over two hundred pairs of sneakers, no pair costing less than a hundred and fifty dollars. And what is most impressive, he has turned one of his bedrooms into a near wine brewery. While he doesn't make the wine himself, he has an extraordinary wine collection. One of his rider request at all of his concerts is that an exclusive bottle of wine predating 1980 be equipped in his dressing made in that specific country. He doesn't drink it that night, instead it is an addition to his collection. Hernandez is an oenophile, but his taste buds aren't just limited to wine. He considers himself to be an expert in almost all alcoholic drinks. His favorite drink, for years now, has been a glass of single-malt Scotch with a single ice.

When I showed up earlier in the day, Hernandez was happily lounging poolside and fully dressed in a vest over in a long-sleeved white collared shirt and slick black pants. He was waiting on his personal assistant and manager to arrive, while talking on the phone with his girlfriend. His girlfriend being fellow pop singer, GirlSpice's Nadia Berry. He told us that he doesn't text anymore, forcing his contacts to call him or wait extended period of times to get a reply to an e-mail. Sinatra was playing in the living room. A surprise to many might be how he has no servants, no cooks, no bodyguards. In this massive Hollywood Hills villa with a perfect look over the city, only one man lives there. He offered me a drink, going on to giving me every single detail by memory of the bottle of 1967-Italian red wine bottle he had opened earlier, and talked about a film script he had been reading over the last week that was sent to him by a production company he choose to remain nameless.

He declined to respond when I asked him if he would ever act again, but by the sounds of things, the man is extremely picky. If you think about how far he has gotten, he has every damn right to be. "L.A. represents opportunity," he says. "And, as has been proven over and over in the current media landscape, it doesn't take much for them to put you on TV. If that's all you want, you can be on The Bachelor or The Real Housewives or The Real World or whatever show just wants oversized personalities, ridiculous behavior, and zero dignity."

But don't you need a burning desire to break through? To be crazy enough to think you can show up and be anointed for fame?

"I don't know," Hernandez says. "When you try to learn how to do something new, you approach it with respect. Or at least I do. But if you just want to be famous . . . that's not that much different than porn. 'I'm a movie star!' Well, no, you're not. You're a porn star, and that's completely different. And you know, hey, mazel tov—porn probably built half the houses out here, but you're selling your dignity in a way that I feel I'm not. And once you sell it, it's gone. You ain't getting it back."

Hernandez is good company, long-winded and charming, each balancing out the other, with an appealing touch of a grown man who understands he is in thirties. He drives a Land Rover Defender (which sale is prohibited in the United States for safety reasons), carries a folding Kershaw knife, and displays a sense of coolness that goes unmatched by any other modern day celebrity.

"I've never done anything because I thought it would look cool. It's always been a pursuit based on a curiosity—never a war-room strategy for my career. And, in fact, given the case history of singer-songwriters, anything other than leaning the side of your head against the bout of your acoustic guitar at the photo shoot is a wild card to people."

Hernandez knows he engenders hostility in certain quarters, a sense that he could stand to be taken down a peg. "This is not to be comparing myself to DiCaprio or Clooney, but I remember the hatred for those guys when every girl I liked wanted to have sex with them." He pauses. "It's not extraordinary envy, like Robert Pattinson or Justin Bieber fan-worship shit, but I do feel animosity from men. They feel like they want to challenge me. 'I just fucked up Ryan Ross Hernandez!' It's a story you can tell, and I guess you're cool for it."

What's startling about Hernandez isn't that he's just the chisel-chinned messenger sent from the past to save us from casual Fridays and Twitter. It's also the way Hernandez imbues everything he does with a sense of complicated, conflicted adult-ness. As is often noted, the very fact that he's made this philandering, imperious, brittle, not-at-all-well-adjusted guy into a hit with the ladies is nothing short than mind-boggling. What does it say about masculinity today that we've exalted such an openly divided character—the fraud who values authenticity, the finer things in life and listening to Frank Sinatra on vinyl at night, the great charmer who can't make anyone happy for long, including and especially himself?

Not being an overnight success meant years of studying music and playing shit bars and lounges—but it also meant having time to think about how to approach a career as a singer-songwriter. He didn't get a record deal until he was 22-years-old, compared to a massive number of artists aged between fifteen and twenty one with record deals today "Anything can be the next big break," Hernandez says, "and you really don't know what's going to hit. You can try to be that guy who's the predictor. Or you can just say, 'If you're happy with it, so am I.' It's much more difficult to predict shit."

I ask him if he feels lucky that his overnight success took as long as it did. "Absolutely, I don't know how the Twilight kids or Michelle Green or whoever handle it. You fuck up, make one bad decision, and people in Thailand twitter about it." Hernandez's mostly left alone, he says: "I'm thirty-one on the brick of thirty-two, I'm not young anymore but I'm not old. I wish I knew how to duck the paparazzi's but I can't. It's literally someone waiting for you to trip and fall at the time. I'm sorry, I went to the grocery store in sweatpants—who the fuck doesn't do that? You're really going to run that story? What the fuck?! Everyone has fucked up at one point in their life too."

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 dope, 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 bang a celebrity." Soon enough, however, all that changed. He started to drink, 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."

Honesty is one of the most important qualities he looks for when he associates himself with someone, which is why when he's asked about a new album he is working on, or his place in the business, or whether how many women he has hooked up with, he tends to offer you a forthright reply. Call it big mouth, but he refers to it as honesty. A reason why his fans love him so much. He tells it how it is and if you can't handle it, he honestly doesn't give a shit.

"I will say what I feel, almost too much so," Ryan Ross Hernandez says himself. "I wear my heart on my sleeve, and it can sometimes blow back. But it's the same thing that also lets me access the truth of my emotions."

"I appreciate that if you come home after making staplers all day, you might want to sit down and incite somebody on the Internet. They're exercising a voice. I get that. I'm lucky because I get a really big voice." Hernandez sometimes utilizes that voice on what he calls "my quest to annoy." Let him explain: "Hopefully, I'll get you on something—hit you with one song, and you'll go [jaded-hipster affect], 'Act-ually, I've gotta say, that song's my jam! But I still think he's a douchebag as a guy. . ."

As he mentioned many, many times over the course of our talk; Hernandez is 32-years-old. A new chapter in his life in which he is looking for stability in his romantic life. You call him a man-whore, he'll tell you he is a serial monogamist. He only sleeps with the sexiest women around, which to him means a combination of "sex appeal, intelligence, sense of humor, and success." He says he needs someone who challenges him. "I need a woman who can put up with my shit, yet gives me that glare that makes me understand that I'm one stupid remark away from not getting any tonight."

"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."

Hernandez's quest for a person who understands him completely has led him into entanglements with at least a half-dozen celebrities including actresses, supermodels, and fellow singers. This carousel of high-profile girlfriends is perhaps the reason his reputation as a musician has been eclipsed by a public image that is often summarized by the quaint pejorative "cad." During his time in the paparazzi glare, Hernandez became known for giving media crews comedic sound bits, only to be called a "douchebag," soon after.

Now his current paramour is Nadia Berry. The on-again, off-again label has already been thrown around to describe their relationship. The couple dated for about five months in 2010, and have once again rekindled their romance this past June, nearly a year later than when they first dated. They are already tabloid staples separately but together they've become arguably the biggest couple in music . . . for the second time. Contrary to his usual big mouth, he isn't open about saying too much when it comes to his relationship with her, or Nadia Berry period.

"She's a wonderful woman, and I'm extremely glad to be with her." Hernandez says. "No matter what color her hair is," he added with a laugh. He of course is referring to just one of the many ridiculous rumors that were attached as a reason behind their break-up last November. One tabloid went as far as saying that Hernandez had broken up with Berry due to her dying her hair blonde again. "I've heard a lot of rumors involving me, but that one reached new heights in stupidity."

The stories that make him even sicker at the moment, are the ones that they write about him cheating on Berry. "I'm not an idiot. If you have a woman like her in your life, and you cheat on her. You are the biggest idiot to every exist. We've had conversations about our past, including past relationships. I know how much she's been hurt in the past and I will absolutely not stand for being another guy who doesn't treat her right and with respect. I have the up-most respect for her and for women in general, to ever hurt someone," Hernandez says, getting a bit antsy and deciding to quickly end talking about Nadia Berry. You also may have noticed that he has never actually said her name, he says this is part of his respect for her and their relationship. "I can't tell you if we're still going to be together a week, a month, or a year from now. All I know right now is that the time I'm spending with her, I value greatly. If people could see behind the privacy wall we've built around our relationship, they would understand that she's not just another notch in my belt. Nor I am another guy who's bound to hurt her and treat her like crap. Then again, they aren't the ones experiencing this. We are."

"You just never know who's going to come into your life," he says. "To my mind, the only thing sicker than saying, 'Wow, you're a famous person and it would do a lot for my career to go out with you,' is to say, 'Wow, you're a famous person and I like you and all, but I can't do that to my career.' I don't think either of those is a good option."

Like any student of The Game, having neutralized the attack, Hernandez goes on the offensive, aiming a killer blow at those media people who would cast him as Super Cad.

"What do you think is stronger: a dozen press articles that say I'm this guy, or a record with 10 songs on it that you enjoy? Which has greater staying power?" Hernandez doesn't pause for an answer. "At the end of the day, all I owe the world in exchange for my dumb face being in their lives are the 10 songs every couple years that are hopefully of greater magnitude than somebody's press story about me."

Edited by user 28 October 2011 09:55:54(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I think your final line in this interview sums things up perfectly. In my opinion, there is no 'famous musician' with as much self-awareness as Ryan Ross Hernandez. It makes me feel slightly weird being called a celebrity, since you're doing a way better job at being a public icon than I am. It's a very good thing that you'll be producing my next album, because you have so much to teach me, and I'm not just talking about music.

-Eric Quillington

OOC: This is honestly the level of quality that deserves to be in professional magazines. The detail to this is amazing.

Ryan Ross Hernandez: "I've always been self-aware, and that helps me with this celebrity lifestyle. I think that as long as you can explain things to yourself when the lights go out and you're in bed, you're doing a good job. I didn't just hit my head and turned into a celebrity overnight. I knew it was going to happen because of the changes I was making in my life. I had moved to Hollywood, I was going out more, I was dating people who already had the celebrity title to their name. Let's say that I know how to do LA right. Well I do have a habit of talking a lot, so maybe I'll be able to drop some worthy knowledge on you during those recording sessions."

OOC: Wow, thanks a lot. I don't think I can make it as a writer because I do not have the muse to write stuff like this very often.



Ryan Ross Hernandez: "Haha, thank you. I don't think she'll mind too much. She knows it's true too.

OOC: Thanks!

OOC: Just dropping in to say great job writing this. Really amazing!