Matthew Ryan continues to be one of the few artists creating great music out of our strange historical moment, struggling to provide us with understanding, catharsis, faith, hope, and beauty out of unsettling times. Now, he is releasing a new EP, Fallen Ash & Embers. As Ryan explains on his website, the EP is “inspired by the moment we’re in, but not tied to. It’s more interested in who we’ll be after this fever breaks.”
Fallen Ash & Embers follows another three-song release earlier this year that featured “On Our Death Day.” Like many of us, Ryan is questioning the current state of affairs in the United States and around the world. And he is using his talents to create great music to let you know you are not alone in the battle to save our humanity and the earth. Ryan recommends listening to these songs with headphones, and that is good advice for capturing the music and the lyrics of this EP that is essential listening for our time.
“Are You the Matador?”
The first song on the EP asks the question “Are You the Matador?” The song came out of a poem Ryan wrote that he later matched to music written by Doug Lancio that Ryan describes as “Spanish noir.” Ryan explains that he offers the song of “inclusion” with “acknowledgement, affection, thanks and welcoming to Hispanic and Latino people, and their cultures.”
Ryan often writes of his love of Leonard Cohen, and the beautiful lyrics, as well as the sound of the song, reverberate like a lost Cohen masterpiece. But where is the question of the title directed?
Are you the matador?
Or are you the bull?
Are you the weapon,
Or a tool?
Or are you a third thing,
Something like air,
That’s felt and fluid and moving
Like a water that wasn’t there?
The opening made me think of a question well-worth asking about our current president. While a listener might instead think of someone they know, I hear a question about whether our president has been the reason for the misfortunes of our country (i.e., the matador), or is he merely the result of darker forces that have controlled things (i.e., the darker side of politics)? Or is he and the hate for immigrants a “third thing” like “air” that has been present around us all along but we just didn’t see it?
It is an essential question of our time, and one not being addressed adequately. And that is why we need more artists to ask questions that need to be asked.
“Warm Lightning”
The other songs on the EP remind us what is at stake from the questions of the lead track. It is not just democracy or our government that is at risk, but everything that really matters, like our loved ones and the world.
“Warm Lightning” is a radiant love song that Ryan explains is “about the now and the room to still explore and grow while together.” It’s a deep and complex painting of mature love, and all of its depth makes my eyes water every time I hear it.
Ryan notes that the song was inspired by Elvis Presley’s haunting version of “Blue Moon.” I hear that connection in the ambient music of the song. But the new song reminded me more directly of one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen album tracks, “Dry Lightning,” from The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995).
The songs convey two sides of love. Both begin with a portrait of a part of the day with the singer getting dressed. Springsteen begins his song, “I threw my robe on in the morning / Watched the ring on the stove turn to red,/Stared hypnotized into a cup of coffee . . . .” In Ryan’s song, it is nighttime, and the singer is not alone: “I buttoned my shirt; She laid on her side; I leaned down to kiss her; She put her hand over her eyes.”
The similarity in the titles first made me connect these two memorable songs. Springsteen’s “Dry Lightning” is about a man who cannot lose the memory of a lost love. But the lightening in Ryan’s song is “warm,” as he reflects on a current true companion. Even though she asks him to “leave” in the opening stanza, you soon realize that it is not a request to never come back. The singer is just going for a ride in the dark.
And unlike Springsteen’s protagonist, Ryan’s subject is not lonely in the morning. The singer recounts how he enjoys the mornings when his lover is up before him and he can still smell her perfume. By contrast, it is a similar smell that instead haunts the brokenhearted in Springsteen’s song (“But you can’t lose your memory,/ And the sweet smell of your skin.”).
The tragedy, if there is one, of Ryan’s story is that time goes by so fast, and the aging singer laments that sixty — or six hundred — “years can go by in a minute.” But it is a warm lament, like the warm lightning of the title, as the singer reminds her, “Wherever you go/ I want to be near.”
“The Last Event”
The final song on the EP, “The Last Event,” ties together themes from other two tracks. Ryan calls the ballad, written by him and David Ricketts, “the centerpiece” of the EP. It is “The Last Event” that also features the lyrics that gives the EP its name, Fallen Ash & Embers.
“The Last Event” is a warning that reminds us what is at stake. We risk the world and all that we love. And in the story, we lose it all in “the last event” that we should have seen coming: “Don’t say it comes as any shock / Things just go and go and go until they stop.”
What causes the “last event”? Ryan doesn’t say, but one could easily hear the unheralded warnings about climate change as well as other stupidity in governments. In the tale, Ryan recounts how people “smiled and cheered” at people in “rented black sedans” while “Monsters crept behind tall buildings.” And we were not blameless ourselves, “We were so beautiful we forgot we were human.”
Even as we think things will never end, they “go and go until they stop.” But as the singer of “The Last Event” recounts the end, he is still thinking of those he loves and how they were something (even if they “weren’t too bright” about where things were leading).
Although the singer in “The Last Event” is telling us about the end that came step-by-step in ways that we should have seen, Matthew Ryan is trying to tell us something now before it is too late and the last event becomes “falling ash and embers.” As he also recognized in the previous song, “Warm Lightning,” time goes by fast.
After this post initially published, Ryan announced that he was adding a fourth song to this EP, “Avalanche of Stars.” This additional song features Kate York on lead, and as Ryan says, it is a “beautiful ending to this collection.”
The entire EP Fallen Ash & Embers is essential listening for anyone who hopes, dreams, and wonders about where we are, what matters, and where we are going. Ryan’s new EP does what the greatest music sometimes is able to accomplish in a timely and timeless way by making us question, think, feel, and even dare to hope.
Fallen Ash & Embers will be released October 4, 2019 and is available for pre-order (with immediate download of “Are You the Matador?”) through Bandcamp. Buy it and listen to it through over-the-ear headphones as Ryan recommends (and over and over again, as I recommend). Leave your two cents in the comments.
