Ryder discovers her Utopia
Millbrook singer brings new hit album home to the Peterborough stage in December
Serena Ryder certainly hopes listeners are ready, willing and able to lend an ear to her new album -- in its entirety.
But, should they opt to take in only one of Utopia’s 17 tracks at a time, the famed Canadian singer/ songwriter vows she won’t sing the blues.
“I think the great thing about technology these days is that it is either or,” Ryder says. “You can make a playlist out of whatever songs are your favourite on the record or you can choose to listen to the whole thing, which is awesome.”
Ryder performs at Showplace Dec. 15 at 8 p.m., with special guests Reuben and the Dark. Tickets are $64 and available at the Showplace box office or by calling 705-7427469 or at www.showplace.org.
Utopia comes more than four years after the album Harmony. Ryder insists the gap wasn’t due to a dearth of material. Far from it.
In fact, more than 70 songs were penned over two and a half years. The challenge, insists the six-time Juno Award winner, was pruning pieces to accommodate an album-sized package.
“It wasn’t just a body of work that I wrote in a very small snapshot period of time,” Ryder says. “The thing I love about this album is it really is an album and it really is a journey. I love that it gives people the opportunity to be able to listen to it as a whole. But, at the same time, because I wrote it over two and a half years, each song that I wrote was just that song. So, it can sit by itself in its own world, as well.”
Ryder even toyed with releasing a triple album -- Utopia has also been issued on vinyl -- but had a change of heart. One thing that hasn’t altered is her love of the album, which she contends is alive and well, despite reports that attention spans these days are at an all-time low.
Perhaps Ryder is secure in the belief there are countless kindred spirits out there, fellow thirty-somethings and those even younger, also weaned on the classics which, in Ryder’s case, included her parents’ Beatles albums, among other treasures from that era. Essentially, people who bask in music-listening marathons.
She concedes that in current pop culture, it’s a “singles world,” in which many performers are happy to release songs, single by single.
“That’s in the pop world,” she says. “There’s always the underbelly, the underground of music and what’s going on. And, for me, the concept of an album is never going to die. It’s a diary, it’s a photo album of your life. It’s something that’s always going to be there.”
It appears Ryder is on to something.
Utopia debuted at No. 1 on the album charts last spring and has, so far, logged two Top 10 singles.
Such numbers are far from foreign to the Toronto-born, Millbrook-raised Ryder, who began penning songs at 11 and left home in her teens to pursue music. The move paid off. She was still in her mid-teens in 1999 when her debut, Falling Out, was released on the indie label Mime Radio.
Things really blossomed for Ryder when a 2003 CBC Radio performance was heard by producer Hawksley Workman, who recruited Ryder to his label Isadora Records.
A number of critically and commercially successful albums followed, as did industry kudos; Junos included artist of the year and songwriter of the year. Her mega hit, Stompa, from 2012’s Harmony, went triple platinum in Canada and was featured in a Cadillac commercial, as well as on the hit TV series Grey’s Anatomy.
Now 34 --and performing since eight -- does Ryder grieve for things she might have missed -- including receiving a high school diploma?
“I get the chance to travel around the world and be in the world,” she says. “When it comes to the arts and things like that, it’s like you could go to school for it or you could do it. For me, doing it always was my school and travelling and being with different people, different cultures and learning different things first-hand.”
That doesn’t mean she would ever promote pulling the plug early on an academic career.
“No, I wouldn’t endorse anything to anybody “I think everybody has their own path,” Ryder says.
And her advice to fledgling artists who believe YouTube is the best way to be discovered: Be able to back up anything you post.
“Make sure you can actually play those songs, make sure you can go out there and tour that stuff and make sure you are into working your ass off,” Ryder says.