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Howie Day: Several years after releasing his commercial breakthrough album Stop All The World Now, singer and songwriter Howie Day breaks his silence with his long-awaited third studio album Sound the Alarm. The album is a stunning collection of the kind of emotionally resonant, melody-minded pop-rock gems that have earned Day a legion of devoted fans over the past 10 years. Sound the Alarm comes after more than a decade of touring, during which the Bangor, Maine, native self-released his 2000 debut Australia and became a full-time traveling musician. He became known for his powerful one-man shows, connecting with audiences through his charm, humor, the strength of his songwriting, and a warm tenor voice that "soars into fluttering, high registers, but also grates with real, pleading grit," as one critic put it.
After selling nearly 50,000 copies of Australia on his own, Day, then 21, signed to Epic Records. Epic re-issued the album, which went on to sell 300,000 copies. In 2003, Day released his major-label debut, Stop All The World Now, and hit the road to support it. The constant touring paid off big-time: Stop was certified gold in the U.S. and spawned two Top 10 radio hits: "She Says" and the platinum smash hit "Collide." "Collide" became inescapable; it was featured in scores of TV shows, including Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs, as well as in a variety of films. The track became Epic Records' first platinum single, eventually selling 1.5 million downloads. But despite all of this success, Day's demanding touring and promotional schedule took a heavy toll.
"I was just physically and mentally burnt out," Day says. "I toured for five years straight before Stop All The World Now came out, then for three years non-stop after it was released. Around the same time the album was becoming successful, my family was struck with tragedy. It was a period of clearly defined extremes, which plays with your head a bit." Day decided to take some time off, during which he sorted through his emotions by writing songs, many of which have made their way onto Sound the Alarm.
"The new album very obviously echoes my own life, in all of its highs and lows, but not all of it is explicitly autobiographical," Day says. "Some of the songs draw inspiration from people and places I've observed, and then bits of my own experiences find their way in. People often ask me what certain songs are about, and it's like, Well, I don't know, it's a story that just happened subconsciously. I didn't resist it or fight it. In a simple way, the album is a post-coming-of age story about that dream-like period of your early 20s, when you're trying to figure out how grown up you actually want to be. But in the process of all of that moving around during the recording, the album became a diary of those experiences as well."
The sound of the album beautifully underscores its emotionally complex spirit. Bold, textured arrangements - flush with acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, strings, and samples - capture a range of moods from upbeat and playful (first single "Be There," "Undressed") to introspective ("40 Hours," "Everyone Loves To Love a Lie") to atmospheric ("So Stung," "Counting On Me") to downright heartbreaking ("Sound the Alarm," "No Longer What You Require"). "Initially, I wrote a bunch of pretty sad songs about loss and relationships gone wrong, and then realized I didn't want to put out an entirely depressing album because that's no longer where I'm at," Day says. "So I deliberately threw a few in the mix that were a bit more light and up-tempo, like 'Weightless' and 'Undressed,' I think if there are too many similar songs on an album all in a row, they lose their identity because there's no contrast."
But even Sound the Alarm's heaviest songs build lyrically and musically toward uplifting conclusions. "Be There," which addresses the struggle to remain in a relationship, ends with the optimistic urge to give it a go, while the title track, a song about deep loss, concludes with the hopeful refrain: "I know we'll make it right / We'll be all right..."
To get the range of sounds and moods he was looking for, Day recorded in a variety of locations, including Los Angeles, New York, London, Minneapolis, and Bloomington, Indiana, between the spring of 2006 and fall of 2008. "I wanted to bring a sense of different places thematically and emotionally from one track to the next, and physically moving everyone around during the tracking process accomplished that," Day explains. He also collaborated with several musicians and producers, including Martin Terefe (Jason Mraz, KT Tunstall), Mike Denneen (Aimee Mann, Fountains of Wayne), Mike Flynn (The Fray, Augustana), and Better Than Ezra frontman Kevin Griffin - each one of them an expert in pulling superlative performances out of the artists they work with.
Sound the Alarm retains and builds on the appeal of its predecessor, showcasing an artist who has dealt with a lot in his past and is focused on moving forward. "This new album represents the end of one era and the start of another," Day says. "It's about tipping your hat to the past, living in the here and now, and looking optimistically toward the future."
Serena Ryder: Serena Ryder has already left an indelible impression in Canada, where her album If Your Memory Serves You Well has been certified Gold and contributed to her winning the 2008 Juno Award for Best New Artist.
For American listeners, this sets the stage for is it o.k., her full length debut for Atlantic Records on which Ryder paints a self-portrait that’s bitter in betrayal in “Sweeping the Ashes,” furious and yet not without affection in the hard-hitting “Little Bit of Red,” teasingly romantic on “Brand New Love,” struggling to understand another’s pain on “Hiding Place,” even careening through cascades of contradictory emotion, almost from one word to the next, on “All for Love.” .
All of these moments Ryder brings to life with a performance that resonates in memory long after its last notes fade. .
Passion, humor, playfulness, anger and exultation: is it o.k. offers each in abundance. But truth? Here, Ryder draws the line. .
“This whole record is about realizing that the more we think we know, the less we do know,” she insists. “It’s about me coming to terms with the fact that I’m imperfect, about being comfortable with feeling what I’m feeling and embracing being human in any way I possibly can.” .
This she knows because Ryder has been a searcher herself. Growing up in Millbrook, Ontario, surrounded by forests and fields, she sensed that there was something beyond the surrounding woods. Music encouraged that idea, through her father who performed as a musician and her mother who danced and sang backup vocals. Their record collection, offering the Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and much more, whetted Ryder’s curiosities. Then, as her father gave her a guitar after she turned 13, two doors opened, toward distant possibility and into her own undiscovered promise. .
“I’d been writing a lot since I was maybe 11 years old,” Ryder says. “I wasn’t doing diary entries; I needed to express something a little deeper than that, which I couldn’t express in conversation. And I’d been singing since I was a little kid, doing cover songs at gigs. But when I got my guitar, a whole other world opened up to me. I realized I could put the poetry I was writing to song and bring two very separate things together.” .
Things changed quickly after that. Ryder cut her first indie recording at 15. Two years later, she escaped from Millbrook and settled into a community of artists at Peterborough, the nearest larger town. Within a year, seasoned by a routine that combined shows with local bands, work at a Cajun restaurant, and a few formal lessons in music, she sang nationally on CBC radio. Tours followed, taking her initially across Canada and stretching more recently to Australia, Europe, and to Bonnarroo, Lollapalooza, South by Southwest and Denver’s Mile High Music Festival. .
Reviews surfaced in her wake, comparing her to “the teenaged Aretha Franklin” (Elle), noting her “impressive fearlessness” (Boston Globe), lauding her “pipes, presence [and] potential” (No Depression), and observing that “Ryder brings a range and vocal maturity of someone twice her age” (American Songwriter). She accepted an invitation to tour with Steve Earle and performed on bills with acts as diverse as Aerosmith, Marc Broussard, Cheap Trick, and Xavier Rudd. .
These experiences nurtured Ryder’s creative growth and led her eventually to Atlantic Records, which previewed her with an EP, Told You in Whispered Song, in 2007. Her reflections on life broadened as well. And just as her guitar helped bring the muses of music and poetry together in earlier years, is it o.k. combines two sides of Ryder, the seeker and the artist, each invigorating the other. .
Begin with its contrasts, its parallel images of being wounded as well as toughened by love, its innocence tempered by bitter wisdom. These dualities, Ryder says, live within her. “Most people have so many different characteristics inside of them all at once, and when one doesn’t fit they try to turn it off and not listen to that part of themselves. So this record is about listening to all parts of myself and therefore being able to listen to all parts of other people too.” .
It’s another paradox, she admits: listening to herself in order to hear what others have to say. “But that allows me to open up to the possibility that not everything is the way I thought it was and that most things that are told to you, growing up, are bullshit. No part of me has to fit into any sort of a box. Why do you have to know exactly what you’re doing with your life? Why do you have to know exactly who you are in the world? The process of writing this record was about figuring out where I was coming from regardless of the fact that that could change in five minutes.” .
Ryder’s vision for is it o.k. took shape at the Village Recording Studios in West Los Angeles. With Grammy-winning producer John Alagia (Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Jason Mraz) at the controls, Ryder and an all-star backup band brought these extraordinary songs to life over a run of six or seven days. .
“It was unbelievable,” she says, smiling. “They made me see my songs from an outside perspective, which is a dream for songwriters because we’re so inside our own world. They brought up so many elements and emotions that I didn’t even know existed in this music. It was almost like I had folded up the origami, and then they pumped air into it.” .
History surrounded Ryder during these sessions – literally, in the vocal booth, among the mirrors, candles, and stained glass that Stevie Nicks had included in her design for the space. But there was a sense of history being made too – a personal step forward for Ryder, and something bigger for those who would hear this music. .
“To tell you the truth, I think with this album I’ve just started to write good songs – songs that connect with people by relating my own contradictions to them,” she says. “I’m realizing more and more that I’m not on a one-way street or even a two-way street. It’s a street with an insane amount of twists and turns, and not everybody on it feels the same thing as you. I’m feeling a lot more on this music than I ever have before. I’m feeling the cold a lot colder and the heat a lot hotter. It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time, because it’s opening my windows a lot wider to the world.” .
Through those windows, the sound of is it o.k. heralds the arrival of Serena Ryder, an artist unlike any other – an artist who is ready to change your world.
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