We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Serene a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Ryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
Music has always been an outlet for me. It’s been a safe space for me to open up about the many challenges I’ve experienced throughout my life. As a child, my mother was an addict, my father an abusive alcoholic, and during my teenage years my father committed suicide. As a result, music became the creative space where I could express a wide range of emotions to help work through my own issues. At the same time, while working through my feelings, I found that music also created an open line of communication between myself, and anyone else going through similar situations in their lives. That was the moment I realized that making music and connecting with people was one of my greatest skills and gifts in this life. That feeling I get when I’m able to connect with someone, complete strangers in many cases, and they share with me how I made them feel, that is the most beautiful and rewarding part about making music for me. So once I started getting more and more feedback about my songs, my lyrics, my emotions and my storytelling, that’s when I knew I wanted to make music for the rest of my life.
Ryan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Born and raised in the Chicagoland area, I’m a hip hop artist who has been making music for fifteen years. I consider myself an emotional rapper and songwriter. Honestly, some of my favorite songs to write are the ones that pull at the listeners heartstrings. As an artist, I pride myself on my lyrics, my content, and the real-life events I describe. A large portion of my 75-song catalog is directly associated with my personal life. I rap about my grandmother, my parents, my childhood, and my experiences as a young adult. I also share insight into my perspective on life and what’s important to me as a husband and a father. My ability to be real, honest, and authentic through my music is something I believe listeners appreciate the most about me. I find music to be therapeutic, it has helped me process various emotions throughout my entire life, so my hope is my music can be helpful to others who have experienced similar challenges in their life as well. Truthfully, I am someone who has overcome a large amount of adversity at a very young age, that includes exposure to drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, suicide, and the loss of a loved one. At the same time, when I look at myself, I also see someone who has managed to find strength, purpose, courage, and confidence through all of life’s challenges. That’s a very powerful personal story, one of tragedy and triumph, and I believe it resonates with people because it’s a reminder “we are not alone” and together “we can overcome anything”. At the end of the day, music for me is about having a positive impact on the lives of others, so I share my story in hopes to do exactly that. Throughout my music career, I have released multiple albums, “Shock Therapy” in 2012, “The Perfect Mistake” in 2016, “The Perfect Mistake: Buried Tapes” in 2022, and most recently my newest album “The Tide”, which includes my hit singles Drip, Bandit, and Longing. “The Tide” was released in March 2024 and is available now on all streaming platforms.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I did not find success early in my music career. I’ve been making music for a long time, and I’ve faced many headwinds along the way. One of the biggest challenges for me as an artist, is balancing my “real-life” and my “music-life”. For instance, there is an enormous push and pull between music and life that has constantly been an obstacle for me to overcome. As an artist, I’m taking a large amount of risk to chase my dreams. I had to make sacrifices, financially I had to invest in myself, and I also had to manage my personal relationships while also trying to prioritize time to write and create. At the same time, the hardest part about all of this, is that fact that I struggle to risk some of the things I cherish most in this world, like my relationships with my wife and my three daughters because of the experiences I had growing up. For me, family is everything. That is a direct result of me coming from a broken home. I was raised by my grandparents. My parents divorced when I was young. My father was not part of my life at all, and my mom had her struggles with alcohol and narcotics throughout my teenage years. On top of that, when I was 19 my father committed suicide. So, for me, I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to build the family I didn’t have, while also trying to embrace my dreams of becoming successful in music. Truthfully, it’s no easy task and it’s something I continue to struggle with to this day. The truth is, I cannot be two places at once, so each day I must be extremely intentional with my time. I must be disciplined, efficient, productive and create healthy boundaries between my family and my music career. If I don’t, it will create conflicts in both worlds and that is the last thing I want.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
One of my personal quotes is, “It only takes one person to believe in you, to change your entire life for the better”. For me, that one person was my grandmother. As an artist, that quote has never been truer because my grandmother was the first person to ever believe in me. She is 100% the reason I am who I am today, both as a man and an artist. My grandmother saved my life. She not only raised me, but she gave me the life skills, the confidence, and the support to creatively explore making music. She also did in the most beautiful and open-minded way. I’m a hip hop artist who talks about many of life’s challenges. I talk about things that make people uncomfortable. Real issues and situations that many people and families choose to keep to private. After all of that, my grandmothers feedback to me was “never stop writing”. So, after my grandmother passed away unexpectedly in 2018, I really struggled with the idea of making more music because I wasn’t emotionally or mentally ready to go to that place. I knew if I was to write, my mind would immediately take me to the loss of her and I wasn’t ready to express my feelings of pain, sadness, and heartbreak. As a result, I took a 5-year break from making music. It wasn’t until I finally dealt with my grief in a healthy way and started writing again that I remembered my grandmother’s words of encouragement, “never stop writing”. So, for me, I’m at this place as an artist where I’m constantly reminding myself that I don’t need to have millions of people who believe in me. Truthfully, I just need my grandmother who believed in me on day one, because it’s her love and support that has got me this far, and I have no intentions of slowing down any time soon.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ryanserene.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanserenemusic/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Serene-Music/61560465466765/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanserenemusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/IamRyanSerene
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ryan-serene-962526393
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2nZ26uQpqWgLR7CFqQpRdt
Image Credits
Karli McManaman