Biography
"I wonder if I'm, born at the Right Time" asks Ry in the chorus of his first single Right Time. If the initial response to Groundwater is any indication, then Ry is born at the Right Time, and people want to hear what he has to say.
Dubbed "just plain excellent" by Amie Street.com, a popular online music store, hitting number 1 at CKMS 100.3 in Waterloo and nominated at the 2007 Canadian Folk Music Awards, Ry is rapidly making an impact on the Canadian Music scene.
Listening to the album, it is clear that Ry is profoundly moved by the times he is living in, and compelled to right about them. Be it the environment, aboriginal-alities or good old fashioned love, Ry attacks these topics with a sincerity, passion and honesty seldom heard in music today.
When preparing the record this album, Ry searched high and low for a producer. He eventually met JB Eckl, most well known for his work with Santana and Ozomatli. The two quickly became good friends, spending time drifting about the ocean on Ry's small boat discussing the project. In the end, the pair co-wrote the album, each adding their unique style and flavor to the project.
In the final line of Right Time Ry sings "Something tells me that I'm, born at the right time...how can you question destiny." If the initial response to Groundwater is any indication, then perhaps there is a bit of destiny involved in all of this. '
Trying to pin down influences is tricky, so I’ve decided to speak to this on two levels; there are the facts, minds, events and histories that have influenced me as an individual and helped shape my world view. There are also the multitudes of great musicians that have influenced my songwriting, playing and singing.
So first, a bit about what has influenced me as a person.
I have always played music…it was just something that was inside of me from birth. Growing up, I was very lucky to have an excellent music teacher at my elementary school. The school had an ORFF music program which is a school of teaching based around ORFF instruments – essentially small marimbas. To this day, I believe that ORFF is one of the best ways to teach kids how to enjoy music.
Mom also had me in organ lessons at an early age. Her side of the family were all musicians and my great-grandfather had a shot at becoming a professional singer at one point. That same great-grandfather was a wonderful singer right up into his eighties and always played the organ. I have memories of him singing while I played the organ when I was about in grade 3. He passed away shortly after that.
I really dug into music seriously in high school and it was during this time that I really wrote a lot of my first songs. Following high school, I went to University for the better part of six years, where, in the end, I graduated with honors holding degrees in Political Science and History. While I was there, school was very important to me. I love challenging myself and I really enjoyed learning, and still do to this day. Towards the end of my degree though, I began to become frustrated with the process. 
I was young and full of passion and studying ‘the world.’ Already by this point I had traveled to some 27 countries including India, Nepal, Turkey, France, you name it. I had also lived in Finland for a year. I was stuck in school churning out scores of essays and papers on the state of affairs, the nuclear arms race, aboriginal politics, social justice, the environment etc, and nobody got to read these. Instead, you would spend a ton of time thinking and working on a very serious topic only to have one person read it, perhaps quickly, and that was it.
I needed to find a voice for myself. Upon graduation, my now wife and I moved up to Haida Gwaii…a very remote set of islands that, at minimum takes a seven hour ferry ride across the fourth most dangerous body of water in the world to access. Haida Gwaii is the land of the Haida, of the eagle and the Raven, the ocean and the forest. It is an amazing place.
The islands themselves changed me in many ways, but there was one encounter that truly created a rupture in my thinking and understanding of the world. It is a long story, one which I will tell one of these days, but suffice it to say that the aboriginal soul inside of me was spoken to.
At that point as well, a number of other events in my life were converging. My aunt was doing research into our family background and had informed us that we were Métis. For many years, my family had many unanswered questions about our identity. We could not figure out why Granny and Dad were all so dark, why we had a number of conflicting and sometimes contradictory histories on that side of the family. Things just didn’t add up.
I had known I was Metis while still in University, but still did not really understand what this meant. In many ways, our whole family went through this process as we suddenly were forced to look at our family history in a completely different life. Not having many Metis people in my life to guide me through this process, I turned to the only sources that I knew could help me understand what it meant to be aboriginal. I turned to my friends, many of whom were Haida and Tsimshian. I asked them questions, listened as they told me, sat respectfully at potlatches and family gatherings and was humbled by their teachings.
I also asked Mother Nature what it meant to be aboriginal and spent much of my time observing and listening to the lessons that she can teach. We lived very close to nature on those islands and were actively engaged in providing ourselves with food from the wild. With this, an understanding of the complete cycle of life occurs, from birth, through growth, and finally to death. I was fortunate, thorugh all of this, to have the guidance of a number of people who taught me how to harvest from mother nature. Sure, I did learn a lot on my own through obeservation, but the teachings were fundamental.
Just coming out of school, I also turned to books and read anything I could find on aboriginal culture, sociology, art, history and life. I slowly began to understand the position that I now held in the world, and while there was much, much more for me to learn, finally began to feel more at ease with my aboriginal identity.
While going through all of this, I also happened to meet a number of the owners from Nettwerk Records. Speaking with one of them, I stated I was a musician, ‘probably pretty good’ and asked him what I should do. He naturally asked if I had a demo to which I had to reply no, as I didn’t. In actual fact, I had spent the previous two years trying to get the recording process figured out using Protools and other pieces of software without much luck.
So armed with the trusty mini-disc recorder that I had been using to capture my song ideas, my synth, a keyboard and a pair of Alesis reference monitors, I sequestered myself into a Boat Shed on Langara Island and began an intensive recording process. I was under a tight deadline though because at this point, I was working at a very remote fly-in fishing lodge called Langara Island. We used to work six days on, with one day off per week. We lived in the middle of nowhere, communicated by satellite phone, worked our butts off and loved every second of it.
Fortunately, my day off fell in the middle of the Nettwerk people’s trip and I had one day to record and edit my album…in a boat shed surrounded by paint, toxic chemicals and all sorts of other nasty stuff.
Well I finished it with a lot of help from my friend Dave Burnell. I burned the album onto a CD, gave it to my contact, helped him board the helicopter that he was leaving on, and that as it.
I never heard from him, despite feeling that I was sure to receive a phone call any day that would tell me he had a big fat recording contract waiting for me to sign in Vancouver when I was ready. Instead, what I took away from that experience was the fundamental understanding that music truly was what I wanted to follow and that I could and would be able to record and produce an album on my own…with a little practice.
From that point, I ordered my first Mac computer and some software and headed to the main Island of Haida Gwaii with my now wife to look for a place to live. We arrived on the islands by a float plane stuffed full with our belongings, guitars, my banjo, sythns and keyboards…all which I had with me while up at the fishing lodge. Knowing virtually nothing about the islands, we began driving around checking out places to live, camping and meeting new friends.
Well, six weeks of camping later, complete with one night with a bear wandering into our camp and forcing us to flee our tent, we found our new home. It was awesome. The last house on the last road, high above the small city of Queen Charlotte. In the front, we gazed out upon the ocean and islands and could see the sites of former Haida villages. To our side we had a rushing stream of water and a big old growth cedar tree and behind us was nothing but trees for miles and miles.
We lived in that house for about two years. Within a little over a year, I wrote my first full album and wrote much of the short EP that would go onto win me the Pierre Falcon Award for Artistic Achievement in 2005. The main product of my work was an album called "Expansion" which I released under the name the Blue Arbutus. It is a lot different that the material that I am writing now. I was big into electronic music then and really wanted to release an album of chilled out downtempo music, which is how the album turned out.
During this time, my now wife and I also separated for some time. Things had become out of balance in our lives and we needed some time to let things sort themselves out. I was spending way too much time in my studio, furiously working out the arrangements of that first album and struggling to learn all the new technology that I needed to know to produce an album…all without internet, a music store or anyone local to ask who knew the programs better than I. I was, literally, in the middle of nowhere.
Fortunately for me, my wife and I were able to work things out and we got back together, only this time, back in Victoria where we had both been living for many years. The struggles that I had with that first album were not something I was eager to repeat. I also realized that writing music directly with a computer limited me too much. I love electronic music and really dig all the cool stuff you can do with technology now, but I realized that fundamentally, I felt best with a guitar in my hands or sitting at a nice acoustic piano. The computer put up too much of a barrier to my performances and I found that ‘playing’ a laptop just really wasn’t the same as hammering away on a guitar with real people.
So back to the drawing board I went. I knew now that I didn’t want to produce an album myself for fear of spending every waking hour in front of the computer again and I also knew that I wanted to write a good ol’ rocking album…one full of guitars, drums, bass…the good stuff.
Knowing this, I began to look for a producer. I looked all over the place and talked to a number of different people, none of whom quite jived with what I wanted to do…until I met JB. From the very start JB and I were on the same page. Similar to me, JB had an electronic background but he had a ton of experience recording and producing, right from small projects to big projects like Santana and Ozomatli.
We agreed to do the album together and from there, developed a wonderful friendship and relationship that I am sure will last for many many years.
So here we are…Groundwater…The album that got us all talking in the first place.
A lot of this album is very personal and many of the stories contained within it are written from a first person perspective. You will probably get a strong sense of where much of the album came from through reading the lyrics.
Musical influences.
My musical influences are diverse and have changed a great deal over the years. I have a real appreciation for old country and folk. There seems to be a certain truth to the music; the music is simple and the melodies and stories stand on their own. There is, I think, a lot to be said for simplicity.
The top influences in this genre would are: Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Ray Acuff, Woody Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie, the Hackensaw Boys, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Winston Wuttnee.
I have also been deeply influenced by a couple key piano players: Chris Martin of Coldplay, Joni Mitchell, Phillip Glass and Keith Jarret. I have listened to all of these players 1000 times. While living on Haida Gwaii, I used to wake up every morning to Phillip Glass' Glassworks album, and before that used to fall asleep to Joni's Blue and Keith's Koln Concert.
I think my piano playing has been influenced a lot by these players, each for their different reasons. I think Chris of Coldplay plays simply but perfectly and is a great example of not overplaying. Joni just writes such great piano lines again, while not going too overboard with them. Kieth I really respect because the Köln Concert is just a long improvisation and he really gets right into the zone. Phillip is just the master of writing mood...not really happy music, but pure mood.
I’m also into good rocking music and Pink Floyd definitely takes the cake here. Black Sabbath's Paranoid and the Doors various albums were also a huge influence on me. When I was younger, I was really into the Canadian indie rock scene and listened to a lot of Eric's Trip and Sloan who both came out of Halifax. I don't have any of my Eric's Trip albums any more...this is some of that music that I have to repurchase, especially the Love Tara album.
More recent influences are the Outkasts, Metric, Tribe Called Quest, M Ward, Sam Roberts and Ryan Adams. I also think Armchair Cynics are writing some great songs, coming out of Victoria, as are the guys from Jets Overhead.
I have been really influenced by friends of mine, including Roi Yalte and JB Eckl. I think these guys are really great guys and are writing really excellent music.
Far and away though, there are two points in my life that really stick out in my head when it comes to music. The first being the first time I heard Jimi Hendrix. A friend of mine had come over from Vancouver, where I used to live, and brought with him a bunch of Jimi, some Zeppelin and the Doors. We were down in the basement of my house, sleeping on the basement floor listening to music. I think I was about 14. He put on Jimi's Ultimate Experience Album, and the first song that came on was All Along the Watchtower. I was completely blown away...that sound and the song truly did blow my mind...maybe expanded my consciousness or I don't know what...but it did something.
The second moment that as huge for me came when I was sitting at a friends house watching music videos, right around the same time of my life that I heard Jimi. We were watching TV and on came Lenny Kravitz's Believe song. As soon as that song hit the guitar solo, that was it, I had to play guitar. To this day that image of him on the guitar playing that solo is completely burned into my mind and I can see it clear as a bell. Thinking about that song now, maybe there was something else going on there. It is a very motivational song, the lyrics being: "If you want it, you've got it, you just got to believe, believe in yourself." I think it was within a week that I went out and rented my first guitar and tiny little Peavey Rage amp.
When it comes to writing music, I draw a lot of my inspiration from the world around me. Some of the stuff I write comes directly from feelings that I have in my heart at a particular moment, some come from things that I see or hear, and some times I just wake up with a song in my head. I suppose on looking at my music, a lot of my songs do come straight from the heart, and I suppose that is because that is where I was taught to speak from. Stay in your heart, love from your heart and make decisions from your heart, it won't let you down.
The power of the earth really amazes me. I also find that power to be quite scary sometimes. Maybe this comes from spending so much time on and around the ocean as you can never turn your back on the ocean...it will squish you in a second and not even think twice about it. The degradation and pain that our planet is in also influences me and I do feel moved and saddened when I see life treated unkindly. Be it human life, humanity, or the plants and animals that we share this planet with, seeing and hearing a lack of compassion does affect me. Again, those are feelings that I try to stay with and I attempt to convey those emotions honestly and humbly through my music.
Thanks for reading. Ry