Ryan Ross Hernandez sat down for an exclusive interview in an intimate gathering at the Clive Davis Theater in Los Angeles, where Hernandez spoke in front of two hundred attendees, composed of music critics and industry insiders, about his new album, the passions and influences that inspired the recording, and his career thus far.
Break in the Clouds: THE INTERVIEW, PART ONE
Thank you for joining us tonight, for not only sharing some observations on the new album, but also allowing us to hear some of it.
Ryan: It's my pleasure. There aren't many ways for me to get this album out to people since I can't perform, so I'm glad to be here.
For anyone who has followed your career and listened to the records you make, there has been a progression of really interesting things that you've done. I've had the privilege to be given a copy of Break in the Clouds, which I've been listening to the last three or four days. I'm curious to know where the overall feeling, the overall sound on this record comes from.
Ryan: I think that Break in the Clouds is probably a bit of a reboot. I don't think I had that step in mind. When you get out of high school, you kind of have this mastermind plan, we all have one. When I was in high school, I thought about the records I wanted to make, but you don't really have a dream or vision for record four or five. The vision becomes hazy after a while. I think that with my last four records I've gone into each with a vision of what I wanted each of them to be, and for the most part I'm happy with the outcome of each. I didn't have a next step for this record.
And I guess it ties in with not knowing the next step for a lot of things in my life. So it was interesting to reboot all of the music that I love or music that I've come to love since I made my last record. I just didn't like to think of myself as an artist already established, out at sea, just doing his thing. Somewhere in the middle of the Let a Man Be Lost tour, two years ago, I just had this flash moment while listening to some Bob Dylan tunes. Before that moment, I never caught the hook of Bob Dylan. But that's the thing with great music and great musicians, their waiting for you, you may not love them at one point, but one day given what happens in your life, they'll come in from waiting in the wings.
I felt like a kid again when I started to listen to Bob Dylan and really get invested in his music. I felt like I was fifteen years old again and listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn or Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton for the first time. This was while being on a tour I probably didn't love being on. I just needed to go home.
Was that during the Let a Man Be Lost tour?
Ryan: Yeah, I just needed to go home. A lot of times during that tour I needed to go home. If you track the time frame of all that happened in my life during the tour, it just made sense for me to go home. I had to reset. I remember being in a hotel room listening to music and I kept thinking to myself, 'why does the vital part of my career have to be over, if it's not the beginning part?' You know what I mean? Why do I have to make a sixth record? Why can't I walk down the street with a guitar? I wanted the beginning of my career back because I hated all this middle stuff. And I feel like I did get the beginning back. I had to wait until the end of the tour, and I went to Electric Lady Studios in New York City. This is where I have to show how thankful I am to Studio60 Records, because they rented out Electric Lady Studios for a year, we locked it out. That was from October 2010 to about this past August. And I was in there everyday, and most of the time I was alone. I wasn't really thinking about melodies or recording guitar parts, I mostly just wanted the studio to write songs. I wanted to feel confined, as if I needed to disappear into songwriting.
That's an interesting time pattern, because a lot of people would think you spent most of last year writing and recording your last album, Running Changes, but that wasn't the case, right?
Ryan: Interestingly enough, I began to write songs for Break in the Clouds, before writing anything for Running Changes. For about six months after the tour ended, I was focused on Break in the Clouds, or at least writing for the record that would become known as Break in the Clouds, but I felt like something was missing. I felt like between Let a Man Be Lost and Break in the Clouds, a record was missing. That's where Running Changes came in. I know I've talked that record down in the past, but I think Running Changes served its purpose. It's still not my best album, but I'm content with it being in my catalog.
What was the difference between writing songs for Running Changes, and writing songs for Break in the Clouds?
Ryan: Well when I wrote songs for Break in the Clouds, it was in complete silence. I was not a famous person writing this next record. I was letting the world forget about me. And I needed that, I needed to do it. I let everything sort of drift by me. It's a very scary thing to do. I'll never be able to explain how it feels like to say, 'even though all this feels terrible, I have to say goodbye to it, but I'll miss it.' Almost like this weird Stockholm syndrome. I told myself I was going to go home and basically become irrelevant. I'm going to basically flat-line, then restart my life.
Was it as much a reboot emotionally, as it was musically?
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. Here's the thing, I had lived every dream I had by thirty-one, thirty-two years old. So I began faking new dreams on the spot. That's a dangerous to start doing. But at least I knew when I had hit the wall. I knew what I was doing for a very longtime. I knew how I was acting in front of cameras, during interviews, wasn't natural. There was something wrong with that picture. And then when I didn't know what I was doing, I never admitted it. And up until that point, over-thinking it was a very smart idea. It got me out of holes, got me out of situations, got me to confuse people. Until I hit the wall. Until I had this violent crash into adulthood. And for a while I didn't have anything to do, so I thought why not refocus myself and just go back to what I love doing? Why don't I just go back to spending entire days at home in sweatpants, writing songs? I put a lot of rules on myself while making this record; no drum machines, no easy way out, no loops, no humming, no gibberish, nothing that you can fool yourself into thinking sounds good before you've written a note.
These days any musician can walk into a studio, not have a band, just have a team of producers and engineers there, and in a matter of hours, boom! There's another number one hit.
We were speaking earlier and you told me that you didn't use a computer to write any of these songs. Did you go back to pen and paper?
Ryan: No, no, I actually bought a typewriter. Their really cheap but really hard to find, their like a hundred bucks. I started typing three or four pages a night, I always wanted to go into the studio with something already on paper. I didn't want to guess on the spot what I was doing in the sound booth. One night I remember I sat in front of my typewriter and I typed, "I'm too young to write epilogues on my own death, it's twisted, but it's how I feel right now." I don't think I would have written that line in front of a computer. A computer can distract you too much and that's what I didn't want. I didn't want to be distracted by anything. You can be really honest in front of a typewriter because you don't see what you're typing. That's why I feel like with this record I was really confessional with myself, I wrote some lyrics that I never thought I would write.
How did it feel from going to be one of the biggest artists in the world, to as you put it, becoming irrelevant while you wrote this new record?
Ryan: I had a beautiful time writing this record. It was a beautiful experience when I was just left alone and forgotten about. There was no paparazzi's waiting outside my house anymore or outside the studio. It ended up being a very powerful thing and something that I will probably do for a very long time.
With your last couple of records, you've had an almost set band playing with, most of which your fans were use to seeing play on stage with you. How was the transition from playing with a band you knew really well, to making a record with other musicians you aren't accustom to playing with yet?
Ryan: Well I have to say that the band playing with me on this record, plays a huge part in achieving the goal I had for it. I've always a natural sound, and especially on this record, I didn't want to be in everybody's face, I wanted to kind of take a seat and see what the bassist, the drummer, the keys, what all these musicians can do with a song. I wasn't chasing a sound, I was chasing a feeling. Before I even stepped into a studio, I knew in my head how this record was going to sound. I'm such a people pleaser, that I want everybody in the studio to be enjoying the music. I even want the engineer to enjoy the music. So I want everyone who works on my records to enjoy themselves. I don't want session musicians to be whispering when they get out of the studio, "Hernandez is a fucking prick."
When you said earlier that you went into a rebooting while making this record, I would have thought that would have meant going back to the blues, which is one of the great places to reboot for power players like yourself.
Ryan: Yeah, but I think I'd done it. I had done it. Sometimes I feel bad I haven't listened to a Stevie Ray Vaughn record in a while, but then I realize, 'nah he'd be alright.' I just think that's the greatest thing about music. I mean I love being alive in this time because there's already more music out there that there will ever be made. You don't necessarily have to take what is playing on the radio or TV, you can go back and listen to great music that was made forty or fifty years ago. An album like All Things Must Pass by George Harrison, has been around since before my birth, yet I didn't get to it until 2008 or so. That's really exciting, so I started thinking about what else was out there that I hadn't gotten to yet. I've never been shy about saying, 'I heard this record and I want to explore what I might be able to do with that sound.' There is no doubt that I would love to write a song because of Neil Young's Heart of Gold, but not in its shadow. I'd love to write music because of a song I really enjoy. Maybe selfishly I want to have that same feeling in something that I play. That's okay. It's okay to hear a song and go, 'I want one of those.'
You mentioned Neil Young's Heart of Gold, I can hear elements of Heart of Gold, and that entire Harvest record. Were you listening to that record and other stuff by Neil Young?
Ryan: Absolutely! That stuff smoothed in and kind of just put its arms around me. And it wasn't just Neil Young, it was also Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell, and George Harrison, and Crosby, Stills, Nash. It was not only those sounds, but the feelings I got when I listened to the records by those artists that made me want to make this record, need to make this record.
You also learned how to play harmonica on this record, right?
Ryan: Yeah, I had to learn how to play harmonica. I think I learned it selfishly just because I really wanted to learn how to play Heart of Gold. But ugh... I had never played it before. I'm the kind of guy who's always going to need new colors to paint. Which really makes it difficult on a commercial side or label side, because you're really not sure what another one of my records is going to sound like, so it's almost like you're starting over again as an artist. It's not like you can just put the next record out by me, and people go, 'Oh! That's Ryan Ross Hernandez.' I like being the author of many kinds of different books, but the tone of my writing is kind of the fingerprint.
That's risky though, commercially, I mean you do that and you have a big seller, which you've had a number of.
Ryan: That's the alternative. You have a choice; you can either decide to move on gracefully before anyone asks you or say that the only way I'm going to identify myself is if I'm always the same. I'm not saying that one choice is the better than the other, because it's human choice and also scary as fuck. I will tell you that not being able to tour and not doing a bunch of promotional stuff, there are daily jitters, daily conversations about it. People are really outsourced, and I'm not saying they shouldn't be, I am too. It just comes down to whether people like it, people need it. It's scary. I think everyone who worked on this record, my management, Studio60 Records, were all worried and we have a right to be. When I'm touring, when I'm playing these songs for people around the world, you can ease your mind because we did a lot for this record even if it doesn't do well. That's not the case for Break in the Clouds. All I can do, I want to be here for a long time. Whatever my age and linings and experiences telling me that I should leave. That means right now not being in the top 10 or 20 of radio songs, but hoping that I transition to a more authentic place, to always be in an authentic place.
Fighting Shadows, the first single from this record, which I love. By this time I usually get really disgusted with the first single but it's a beautiful song and I wrote it probably a year ago, but I still love it. How can you listen to the radio, which I'm not hating on, but I think I should get out of the way and let other people have their songs on the radio, maybe for a while, or maybe forever. But how can you listen to the radio for an hour, and think that Fighting Shadows stands a fighting chance? It doesn't. It's not suppose to go there. I did that. I think you need to grow old gracefully and I think that my fans will follow, because their growing old too. I'm not exactly sitting here and trying to win over the crowd that listen to GirlSpice or Isabel or even the crowd that listen to Ellie-Grace Summers or Katie Coyle. I'm not making music for the mainstream pop audience or the teen audience either, which I'm guessing the lines blur but still. Whether this record gains me fans or makes me lose some, this is where I am in my life, I'm not going to progress backwards, there's no such thing.
One thing about a lot of these producers or songwriters that write these mega hits and their fifty-one years old, but their writing for an eighteen year old to sing.
Ryan: Yeah, and I think you can do it at thirty, you can get away with it, thirty-five, forty. I can probably get away with it if I decided to write a pop record at my age, right now at thirty-four. But then you find yourself not having done the required work you needed to do years ago, and now you don't know where to go from here. I've always, almost always, been pure at hear with my music. I'm excited to just go down the line. You're suppose to go down the line.
