—W
Mari
Look. I can’t speculate on what happened. That’s your job, isn’t it?
All I know is what I told you. And Ryan and Wilder were frosty with each other for the rest of the time that I knew them.
Both of them.
Jasmine
When Ryan got back to the studio after her trip to Hamilton, Wilder didn’t join us. I asked her where he was, and she shrugged, and I thought,Girl, we can’t be having another songwriting crisis.
I don’t know what happened between them, and I’m not going to gossip about any rumors to a journalist. I did pull Wilder aside and ask him if he was okay.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he said, and even when I stared him down for a long, hard moment, he didn’t break. So I let it be.
But to Ryan’s credit, it wasn’t a songwriting crisis. There had been a few other melodies she’d been toying with before she left for the trip. So far on the album works in progress, we had “Flowers on the Sill,” “Comeback Baby,” “Keep Me,” “Homecoming,” and “Wisteria.” I pulled up our recordings to continue where we’d left off, but Ryan shook her head.
“I think I’d like to go in a different direction for the second half of the album,” she said.
“Show me what you have in mind,” I told her.
She began to pick out a melody on her banjo, something dark and complex like I hadn’t heard since she’d started her career. It was minor, unpredictable, but something in me didn’t want to stop listening to it.
“Where did that come from?” I asked her. “Play it again.”
When she finished, she said, “At least I’m not having writer’s block anymore. This feels ... more like a flood.”
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We ended up naming the albumWaterfall. It was the first project where Ryan and I had a real stylistic disagreement with each other. See, you had the first half—all those lovely romantic songs, these sweet wistful melodies, what have you.
And then, after “Wisteria,” you go off the deep end. It starts with that eerie, melancholy song “Ropes”:Hands tied, tongue tied / Catching in my throat / I found myself immobilized / When you drove home alone. / There’s no going forward / And there’s no going back / When all these ropes have got me bound like that.
Then you have that anthemic, echoey “Way Way Down,” “Deliberate,” a grittier nod to old country in “Out of Gas,” “Unentwined”—more rope stuff—and finally “Hush,” that ends on a single haunting piano note.
It was an angsty album. And I told her, Ryan, we’ve got to be careful what order we put this in.
“It’s in the right order,” she said.
I didn’t have the balls that she did, I’ll admit it. But I also didn’t think it was the right time to take an artistic risk.
“What if we flip the album halves, or intersperse them?” I told her. “People want to leave feeling good, not like a ghost just walked through them.”
I think she took offense to that. She shot me with a glare.
“It’s in the right order,” she said again.
I called Andre about it. He said, “No fuckin’ way. You end on the summer bop, and in this case, it’s ‘Homecoming.’”
“I’m telling her,” I said. But she wouldn’t have it.
Maybe it was my own bias. I’d gotten too soft on Ryan, I was ... worried about her. If an unknown artist had walked into Madcap with those songs, I’d’ve shaken their hand and congratulated them on being the next Johnny Cash or Springsteen in their dark and moody eras.
But Ryan’s songs, exceptional as they were, seemed to be coming from a place of personal difficulty.
Shows how much I know, anyway. Thank god I didn’t push it.
