But just as they break out of jail together and you think it’s gone the way of your typical love story, the camera pans from the man, who’s smiling out the passenger window, over to the driver’s-side window. You see Ryan’s reflection, and the smile slowly fades from her face as she looks at the road behind her.
It’s a great moment. Is she regretting going to such dramatic lengths for this man? Is she wondering what she left behind? What will become of her now that she’s a fugitive too? We’ll never know.
People talked a lot about that trilogy after Ryan’s disappearance. It’s been picked apart for clues, just like her other videos. They say she knew she was going to disappear even then; that she started leaving secret messages for those who wanted to find her.
Do I believe those theories?
No. I’ll tell you that right now. I don’t, I can’t ... because Ryan was so so smart, and if she genuinely wanted to be found, I believe she would have been found by now. I really do.
Either she went away without the intention of ever coming back, without telling any of us, and without contacting us since, which I find hard to believe, or ...
I’m sorry, this is hard for me. Still.
Or something happened to her. I know that’s very much in the realm of possibility. She stepped on a lot of people’s toes.
So.
Mari
Ryan was encouraged by the secret messages she put in her first CD booklet; I think a lot of the fans told her about their experiences deciphering them. It sounds like there was even a Myspace forum for people to talk about the different quotes and discuss what they meant. So she wanted to give them even more for the videos.
There are breakdowns everywhere online of theFirebirdarc, but the major ones are the bouquet of bluebonnets the gambler character brings Ryan in “Neon Dreams,” a nod to her Texas home base and first album; the Massachusetts state flag in the background of the “Whiskey and Wine” piano bar; and the Alcatraz inmate that hasRyde or Dietattooed on his arm in “Alcatraz.” Ryan really cemented the fans’ names for themselves with that inclusion—people went wild on Myspace.
People have theories about the other video singles and say that the plastic marigolds in “Blue Jean Baby” spell something out or that there’s secret messages in the scrapbook pages her character is crafting. I remember stumbling into some really weird chat rooms when I’d procrastinate writing my college application essays. There were these guys who were dead-onconvincedthe marigolds spelledOBEYand that Ryan was part of this government operation to rise to fame and control young minds. Another group had dedicated themselves to picking apart every shot of the “Didn’t You Realize” montage to look for Simon McCarthy and, I don’t know ... prove that he was at her shows? We already knew that. I sat in the chat room for a while and watched them debate the “evidence” ad infinitum—he was therein the front row in San Diego, he brought a friend with him in Las Vegas, there was a whole trafficking plot in the works.
I couldn’t stomach much of it and hoped Ryan was too busy to see anything like that. I mean, these chat rooms were definitely fringe groups, but looking back, they were a sign of what was to come. And you have to remember that she wasn’t even eighteen yet. There were already people who were too online back then, who would rather sit in a basement on a desktop and analyze footage of a teen star’s concert to try to find a predator.
I told myself to look for a silver lining. More and more people were finding Ryan’s music; the videos got into the CMT rotation and started to reach a larger audience even outside of the country sphere. I even heard the stoners at Hamilton-Wenham who only listened to rock and metal talking about the prison-break scene in “Alcatraz” and how it was similar toShawshank Redemption.
For the record, there weren’t any Easter eggs in the other two video singles, unless you count the old Hamilton and bluegrass festival clips in “Blue Jean Baby”—at least nothing intentional. And I know for a fact that Serge and Skip were careful not to includeanyfootage of McCarthy in “Didn’t You Realize.” Those claims are bullshit.
My favorite Easter eggs, though, were the ones only we would know: the cabbie wearing a newsboy cap, Frank’s signature hat, in “Neon Dreams”; theI Survived Storrow Driveshirt, a nod to Boston; the characters stopping for the Italian ice that Ryan and Jas loved on their way out of town after the jailbreak.
And a harp charm on Ryan’s character’s bracelet in “Whiskey and Wine,” just for me.
Skip
Those music videos were gold forFirebird. They built hype and intrigue that we could never have managed by repeating the first album’s marketing strategy alone. I know I talk about momentum like I’m a broken record,but the beautiful thing about it is that the more bulk you add, the more you build on your existing success, the faster you climb. You know those spinning merry-go-rounds on kids’ playgrounds, those metal death traps with hardly anything to hold on to? Once you get them going, it just takes a little push to bring it to breakneck speed.
I was still working with other artists, of course. Madcap had a full roster to cultivate. But it was becoming more and more clear to me that Ryan was our diamond in the rough.
We releasedFirebirdin September 2008 and planned it so that one video of the trilogy would drop per month to build anticipation, with “Blue Jean Baby” and “Didn’t You Realize” falling in between to keep them satisfied.
The buzz built itself. People were buying the album just to see if they could guess what would happen in the next video.
Ryan headed out on tour again in November, this time for a coast-to-coast run with a brief holiday break that would hit LA, Vegas, Austin, Chicago, DC, New York, you name it. We pulled out all the stops.
At our little team Christmas party that year, I gave Ryan a tiny box with a ribbon on it. She opened it to find the Post-it I’d folded up small.
She read it. “Eight weeks?” she asked.
But Jas looked over at me and raised her eyebrows. “Does that mean what I think it does?” she said.
I nodded. “Firebird’s been top of theBillboard200 for eight weeks now,” I said to Ryan. “Know what the record is for a female country album?”
“What?” She sat ramrod straight.
“Ten,” I said. “So if you can keep this up ...”
