Meet Ryan Woods ~ bad texter but a good songwriter
Rachel has a long discussion with singer, Ryan Woods on song lyrics, musical inspiration, and more!
RACHEL: How are you? Have you been doing anything cool recently?
RYAN: I'm working on rolling out my first EP, we actually just submitted my next single and it's on the Spotify release schedule thing, my next single is coming out in 3 weeks basically, and about 3 weeks after that, my EPwill come out. That's most of what's taking up my time I guess, but other than that, i've been doing a lot of self growth, and I've been reading a lot of books and trying to figure out this life shit. You know, I've been on a search to find true healthy confidence.
RACHEL: how long have you been making music, and what made you want to get into it?
RYAN: It was kind of a long journey of me actually getting into the music business and the industry, but I started guitar lessons when I was 5 or 6, I took those for about 6 months from this guy at my church. My family was super religious, so i spent a lot of my time when i was younger in the church, I was in my church’s kids choir, and I would go to the Sunday services and see the worship band, and i would see the guy on the guitar and think “wow that guy is so cool, i wanna play the guitar.” I started taking guitar lessons, learned how to play hot cross buns, I ended up moving from Orlando, Florida to Knoxville, Tennessee, and stopped playing guitar for a while. I went into all sports mode when I moved. I didn't have a lot of interest in music until about 5th grade, when I joined band at my school, which was so fun for me. I moved to a pretty small town, so there wasn't a lot for me to do there, so I was trying to figure out what I liked, and what interested me, and It kinda naturally became music. I have super bad ADHD, and i didn't take anything for it, so finding something i could focus on was impossible, but music always was something i could just sit for hours and mess around with.
I got into production when I was 17. My actual musical career journey started about 4 years ago, I was in band and I was learning a lot about music and music theory. I got to a point where I was kinda able to teach myself other instruments, and I understand the piano really well because I was a percussionist, so i played keyboard instruments that are similar to the piano. So I was able to teach myself guitar and piano, I just looked up tutorials on how to play songs. The first song I learned how to play was “When I Was Your Man” by Bruno Mars. So i posted a cover of it on instagram, and it had a really great response, so I posted more and more. That was in about 7th grade, and then I started getting a bit more into songwriting and production, and I grew a bit more of a following on social media.
That's when I was discovered by my management now, when I was 16. That's when I started to write more songs, because they were pushing me to do that to develop me, and to become an artist. So my manager asked me to show him a song I wrote, and he told me I had potential and to keep writing. SO he challenged me to write a song every week ,a dn this was in the summer of 2017, and the first week I didn't finish a song, I had an idea. The 2nd week, I had a little more of a song, a little more of an idea. #rd week i had written a whole song that I was proud of. It became this really intimate relationship with the music I make, because I've always been super soft spoken and anxious, I was kind of a wallflower. It was a place for me to have free range to speak my mind, and I had a lot of crazy ideas and thoughts on the world, and it helped me understand myself a lot too, because even though it wasn't another person, I kinda suddenly had someone to talk to, because I was really lonely. My EP is called King Of The Basement, because my room back home was my parents basement, because everything that is me now kind of originated from the basement, and it's kind of a general coming of age EP about me, and it related directly to my life.
I kept writing, started coming out to LA more, because my manager lives out here. My dad was a pilot, so it made it really easy for me to fly out here. So I started writing, and meeting with producers and songwriters, and watching and learning from them . About 30 songs later, I wrote "Bad Texter", and that was my first song I really liked and wanted to release. So it's basically just been baby steps for about 4 years, 1 step at a time. My manager isn't anyone huge, but when he found me, he was so set on me as an artist. He was like “I don’t know why but there's something about you, and i'm still making something of myself, but i think we can do this thing together and come up together.” So as a team, we've been taking incremental baby steps and making sure everythings the way it should be. and we’ve been releasing music, and it's been going really well, so I'm really excited for the future. If you want a short answer: we fucked around, and got really good at fucking around.
RACHEL: Who's your biggest inspiration non music wise?
RYAN: My manager. I've watched him grow just as much as I’ve grown. And he's like 10 years ahead of me, so when I get to a place where he was 10 years ago, he knows what to say. Deciding to pursue music was one of the first things I truly did for myself, I was always kind of a backseat guy, and I was never really sharing. I never really had something that was MY thing. And the first person who believed in me and made me start thinking that way was my manager. Coming from a small town, the mentality there is so different than in LA. There wasn't a lot for me to look up to where I came from, whenever I told someone I wanted to do music, they told me I had to go to college for it. But i didn't want to. So yeah, he was kind of the first person who believed in me, other than my mom. She’s another big inspiration, she's superwoman. I don’t know how she did it.
My parents split when I was 3 or 4. For about 4 or 5 years after, she was single moming it, she worked 4 years, 2 of them were full time. She was going ham trying to provide. My sister was in a really prestigious gymnastics program at the time, which was very time consuming. I always did the really weird extracurriculars. And my brother was an infant, and we had to take care of him, and pay a lot of attention to him. I don’t know how she did it honestly, but at the time it felt like nothing was missing. She protected us from a lot of the mental trauma that kids go through when their parents get divorced. It did affect me still , but just in different ways. So yeah my mom and manager are my huge inspirations.
RACHEL: Who's your biggest musical inspiration?
RYAN: Bruno Mars, because from the time I was little, my grandma got me a Doo-Wops and Hooligans CD, and I listened to that thing religiously. I'm a quarter filipino, she’s full, and she loves finding filipino artists, because she's all about filipino culture and pride, so she kinda set me on the journey. Yeah, I just love the way Bruno Mars carries himself and is so confident and free with the person he is. I love the way he carries himself and treats people with mutual respect, and I just loved watching him become as big as he is now. I used to listen to his songs that were only on YouTube from before his first album, so yeah I’m a day one Bruno Mars fan.
RACHEL: So you recently came out with your new song, Doubt of Revival with Jordana. What inspired it, and how did covid affect the whole process?
RYAN: So yeah it was a really cool thing. My manager has another act at another label, which Jordana is also under. She had already started the song, and they wanted to get me to collab on it, so I checked it out, and I loved it. So I met Jordana and her people on a call, and we vibed instantly. She gave me her perspective on what her part of the song meant to her, which was about when you hit that age where you realize you’re an adult and need to get your shit together and find yourself throughout the complexity of the entire universe. Like when you realize how tiny you are compared to the universe, so how do you know who you’re supposed to be? So at the time, that was a really big product of my thinking, and I was really trying to figure out what this all meant and who I'm supposed to be.
So yeah, digging into my lyric “Been a minute since since my business wasn’t someone else’s”, I was talking about how I have a manager and a label who I have to report to and who demand stuff from me. And also family is a big part of my life, we’re very close, especially with our extended family on my moms side. They spend so much time together, so it was like me coming out here and seperating myself from that bubble, and meeting people who don't really feel the need to get to know me was weird. I was trying to be myself in that moment of confusion, but I didn’t even know what that means, like I was so confused about the world. I talked about religion, and that was a thing recently, that I was trying to figure out, like is there a God? What is God? Is there something more than this? You know, like those huge questions. Getting back to the song, “Gotta live it, you can't quit it” is about how you the world isn't just gonna wait for you to piece yourself together and figure everything out. At the end of the day it's on you to cultivate yourself. And it's also about being okay with not knowing everything. And i've been trying to adopt a healthier mindset of how I'm growing up and how I want to be myself. And my lyric “Got permission from a cynic he said live your life,” it’s about how someone told me that nothing really matters, and that I just gotta do me. And I found power in that, like not in a depressing way that nothing matters, but in a way that negativity doesn't matter. And being sad is okay, like crying is healthy, but the way we process those emotions is what's important. It’s about separating those tainted emotions from pure emotions. I’ve always been super analytical about everything, and not everything deserves an intense amount of thinking.
The phrase Doubt of Revival means different things to me and Jordana, but to me it was like fear and doubt of revival, fear of losing yourself and becoming someone completely different, and not staying true to your goals from when you were younger. So we worked on the song for about a month, and we kinda just vibed out on a zoom call with the producer, Cam, and he knew what to do, so that made it really easy to do everything. We just recorded our pieces individually and he helped us add harmonies and stuff like that. And me and Jordana have become really great friends and the song is doing really well, so that’s awesome!
RACHEL: That’s awesome! What’s your favorite lyric you’ve written and why?
RYAN: “No offense but you look like a mom.” It’s from Pillow. When I first wrote it, it took me a week to decide if I wanted to put it in the song. The whole song is about meeting someone I liked, which made me realize how lonely I was. I didn’t realize it until I met someone I liked, she was just a girl I met at a Christmas party a few years ago, and I was like “You look like a mom, in the best way. Like I’d wife you up.” Another lyric is from my EP, there's a song called Sorry/Happy Sad. The main chorus lyric is “I’m sorry, you wanted me more than yourself.” It’s a song I wrote about me realizing that I was in a toxic relationship and that I had to break up with her, because it would have been unfair to both of us to keep it going. It was like this thing where she was so unhappy with herself that I was her source of coping, which is sweet to an extent, but it was extreme, where she was like, suicidal without me. And that can not be the way a relationship works. I was so sorry but like I really had to let her figure those things out on her own. I was crushed by that realization, but you want me more than you want yourself, and that's wrong to me. I think a healthy relationship is two happy complete people who meet each other and they are happy together. Toxic relationships come about when there's codependency and boxes on a relationship. It’s not that crazy of a lyric, but I love it because it was a perfect way of saying something I wanted to essay, but if I said it a different way it would’ve come across as mean, and if i had put it another way, it would have come across as sugar coating it. Like this was the most neutral way of how I viewed it, and it's always cool to come up with ways to put things. As a songwriter, I'm obsessed with language and words, and finding cool ways to say things.
RACHEL: What are your hopes for the future? And what kind of impact would you like to have on the world?
RYAN: My goal is to be able to make pure art at the highest level I can, with the intention of bringing as many people together as I can, and being able to touch people with music and spread love in that way. I wanna fill up my potential. I wanna make sure there's no room left in my life that I didn’t fill out or explore. I wanna see how high the ceiling goes. I like to look at John Mayer, like he's just able to create beautiful pure art at the highest level, and I hope to be recognized for that, and not just like a sell out pop artist. And if that’s your lane, great, I'm not knocking that, but I have such a deep emotional connection to my music, and I try to balance that pop perspective and that creative artistic perspective as well. I use this analogy, I thought of this because I thrift a lot, and I find pants that I love that don't fit me at all. But I love those pants, so I buy them anyways, and alter them myself. And that's kinda been my view, like life is a big ass pair of pants, and you don't want a different pair of pants. You want those pants. So you gotta make them fit somehow. That's kinda what life is, you have one life. One pair of pants. You can't trade the pants in, you already bought them, so you just gotta make it work. So I wanna grow into these pants. I wanna make them fit. And I want people to like my pants. I see my life as this big shelf of potential, and I want to use up all the room I have to grow, and see where it takes me.
RACHEL: Lastly, is there anything you want people to know about you?
RYAN: I just try to be pretty transparent and vulnerable with people, I feel like there are taboo subjects like mental health and things that should be talked about. I just try to keep my dirt on the surface, and I don't want to paint a fake facade. I just want to be real. I want people to know I’m just as human as everyone else. I’m just another guy who's also trying to figure out how to… navigate his way through life and all the gray areas. And anything I can do, you can do. Anything that's humanly possible, if a human has done it, then it's also possible for you. My philosophy is that we’re all interconnected in some way and were all trying to figure it out. So I cut you slack, because you cut me slack, and vice versa. There's definitely shitty people in the world, but people in the middle just wanna figure it out and be good, and feel love, and love others.
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