Ryan Davis “I ultimately felt like I reached a point of terminal velocity…”

You seem to have mastered the art of the “long song” on this record.

I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered anything, but yeah, I’ve learned to comfortably inhabit a song of substantial length. It’s not something I ever set out to do. In fact, every time I sit down to start writing new songs, I consciously tell myself that I will make a concerted effort to be more direct, to write more impactfully without dragging the listener through such winding trenches. But here we are now discussing my seven-song 2LP and further into the trenches we appear to be going. I’ve come to accept that maybe that’s where I flourish, in some ways? A better songwriter than myself could derive a similar vehemence with far fewer words. But I do what I can within the space I know how to carve out for myself.

You’ve said you recently took a hiatus from writing “song songs” – was that a healthy thing to do?

It was an imperative thing to do. I started writing songs for what became the first State Champion demo in summer of 2005. I was living abroad as a college student, shy and alone, far from home and without much reason to be there. I had just turned 20. I wrote and toured those kinds of songs for the next 14 years. I put so much of my life and identity into it, and I owe a lot of who I am to that work and those experiences, but I ultimately felt like I reached a point of terminal velocity with the completion of Send Flowers [in 2018]. I’m incredibly proud of that record, we all pulled a lot out of ourselves in order to make it, but it felt like an organic and necessary end to that phase of my life. It isn’t entirely easy to talk about or explain. I just knew it was time to take a break from putting my mind through the endless song cycle, without really knowing what would fill its void.