Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Martin Ryan. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Martin, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
My daughter and I have been writing, arranging, and professionally recording our original songs with engineers for the past 6 years. Just recently, Kristen and I agreed to a one-song so far recording contract with Ben Obi of Savannah Street Studios. to be released on the Savannah Street Label. The song is called Your Love is Fuel To Me, Krishawna will be singing this one solo, but she and I recorded a duet on a Snowy Saturday way back called The Chuck Harbey Memorial Song. Chuck was a dear Wall Street friend of mine and countless others.
Kristen and I are both visual artists and we have been singing and recording with various musicians along the way, then we got together and started viewing us as a team through a professional and business lens 6 years ago. We have written 150 songs, recorded 90, and published 75 on Soundcloud. Using the ageless metaphor Marathon v Sprint, we feel like Krishawna represents our crossing the hard-earned 13-mile marker.
The 2 biggest learning curves in songwriting in my experience:
1. Figuring out the right song structure, timing, and conventional mechanics. Some of my trusted music friends have said this is the primary ‘area of improvement’ we need to think about. Lyrics and song concepts are never the problem,
2. Then there is the reality that songwriting is an emotional, daunting, and vulnerable enterprise. Then throw in the day your daughter demotes you to assistant writer. Sometimes we have to fight on a Paul and John level to get to the destination.
It has proven to be very exciting and has brought us closer, especially since at the beginning everyone viewed us as totally far fetched, Kristen and I have been one another’s only belief and support system since the day we said out loud that we wanted to ‘make it’ as professional songwriters. We set out to get our foot in the door, then the door blew off its hinges when Krishawna and Ben Obi heard the song and wanted to take it on. I recorded the Beverly Album with Ben, Chloe and I were the singers. It took 2 years of knowing Ben for this to come together, funny.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
1. I am most proud of how collaborating with family comes with its own challenges and how we have talked through them all, been respectful of them all, and in some cases fought through them all, but family of course comes with unconditional love.
2. I am still in awe of the first time we recorded in St Paul, my then-long-time engineer had recently moved to his new studio and was having major technology problems. It did not look good. I went for a walk around the block to process that all of the time and preparation was about to be a waste, or at a minimum postponed. We had just come out of the most jacked-up rehearsal before we got there. When I got back it turned out that Kristen had taken over and fixed all of the technical problems, in Steve’s own studio, a music engineer of 30 years. That was a day I cannot explain.3. I am so fond of the day I was misfiring on one of my verses in one of our rare covers, The original Johnny Cash Version of Big River. Kristen suddenly took over, she told Steve to wait in the hall and then she looked at me and put me through several rehearsals, the lyric goes like this:
Now, won’t you batter down by Baton Rouge, River Queen, roll it on
Take that woman on down to New Orleans, New Orleans
Go on, I’ve had enough, dump my blues down in the Gulf
She loves you, Big River, more than me
It was the most charming thing ever, I indulged myself in an unspoken proud parent moment. Then the self-empowered and self-appointed producer of our first Album, Borrowing A Memory, generously invited the engineer back into his own studio, he of course was her bitch by this point. Kristen was in charge. The next take was a home run.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
We can all recognize how much talent there is in all of our backyards, and support the people who are pushing their own boundaries, and who have a strong and surreal connection to the success that they believe in, This can include art openings, open mics, or anyone anywhere in different fields who bring so much sincerity, inspiration, and belief in themselves. Follow them and support them! One of my favorite college memories is when Early Stage Phish played our dining hall one night at The University of Rochester, they could not book the much larger Palestra, where I played on the basketball team for 4 years and won a national championship, so they took what they could get, trampolines and all.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
2. Our agent in LA has been pitching us for years: let’s pull off some commercial success musically, then we market the film rights at 100 mph because it is such a real and amazing premise: The father and daughter songwriting team. without any meaningful music background, suddenly decide to go down the parallel paths of not taking no for an answer, and sheer willpower, working together to be their best selves and create a songwriting career from scratch. They get their commercial success break in Q1 2025, then they never look back. This film will have lots of real-life going for it, he is bringing the deal to Hollywood with me as co-writer. It will be more ‘Biopic’ and less ‘Based On.’
Contact Info:
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- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/
martinstpaul - God Wrote A Love Song: https://irsites.com/msp/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
martz_art_/
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/
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- My Creative Agency Website: https://
emerginggrowthservices.com/
- My Creative Agency Website: https://
