Or at least that’s what the website says. I’ve been listening to Ryan for about 5 years now and his sound and style have evolved quite a bit. He is a self taught guitarist and began with a very percussive sound which has slowly smoothed out as he has built his band around him and moved out of coffee shop gigs and into larger venues.
These days, Ryan hits the road with the Ryan Montbleau Band. Catching one of their shows is high on my list of things to do. Still waiting for that confluence of time and opportunity but from the live recordings alone, I know that it will be a fantastic experience.
As always, I love to give the artists a chance to speak for themselves, so lets see how Ryan describes the group as it currently exists:
…Montbleau’s never been one to get too hung up on genre. “For the song ‘More and More and More,’ we had done another weirder version in the studio, with a strange old synthesizer. But Martin said, ‘We need to try a Rolling-Stones-in-Nashville, country version of this,’ with an untuned upright piano they had in the studio. And it turned out great. For another kind of country thing, ‘I Can’t Wait,’ I always had in mind that sort of 1/5 Johnny Cash feel. It was all Martin’s idea to add a gospel element to ‘Fix Your Wings.’ On the other hand, ‘Songbird’ was always supposed to be a reggae tune.
“We just have fun playing all these things. We try to do our homework, too, because we’ll go back to some Johnny Cash recordings or Bob Marley recordings or whatever it is to try to get our playing better. But I hope no one ever takes it that we’re faking this authentic music or something, when we bounce around so much. We’re not trying to force it, or going ‘Hey, we need a calypso tune!’ We just write tunes, and whatever style suits it, we try to play it as best we can.”
Though he’s long since embraced the full-band ethos, Montbleau spent a number of years as an acoustic solo artist at the beginning of his career, so it’s no wonder that he’s making up for lost time by so fully embracing the range of stylistic possibilities fuller arrangements offer. Growing up in Peabody, Massachusetts, he got his first guitar at age nine, but didn’t get the bug to become a serious player or writer till he was attending Villanova University, and then there was no looking back. His first album (the out-of-printBegin.) was released in 2002, followed by the live Stages — precursors to the first Montbleau Band recording, One Fine Color, in 2006.
The unusual makeup of the band was somewhat accidental, as he tells it; he never had it in mind, for instance, that he needed a full-time viola player. “It just evolved over the years, because I really didn’t have a sound that I was going for,” he says, before qualifying that claim. “Well, I knew I wanted an upright bass, I guess. And I knew I wanted the drummer in some ways to be more of a jazz drummer than a straight-ahead rock drummer. But that was all I knew. I’ve personally always loved the B3 organ, but the keyboard approach really comes from Jason (Cohen), who’s a vintage gear nut and tone junkie who loves old Rhodes, organs, Wurlitzers, Moogs, etc.”
The video below shows a lot of what originally drew me to Ryan along with a good example of how well the band works together. Ryan’s music tends to be infectiously upbeat and fun. Ideally, I’ll get to see him at an outdoor venue on a clear day when it is truly 75 And Sunny.
And for a touch of Ryan in solo mode, here is one more video describing the previously mentioned forecast.
