There’s silence on the other end of the phone. Ryan Montbleau, known for his prophetic, delving lyrics, can’t seem to find the words to answer a rather plain question: “What do you do, when you’re not doing music?”
“It’s been tough, because it’s all rolled into one,” he says. “It’s tough to justify doing anything else for very long, without my head being like ‘you know what, we’ve got to be working on other stuff right now, I got to get these emails out, or I got to learn this tune for practice, or continue writing this song.’ The voice in the back of my head always brings me around to music, eventually.”
But it wasn’t always that way for the Bostonite, who actually came to music much later in life. Growing up in Peabody, Massachusetts, a nine year old Ryan was excited to receive a Fender Squire electric guitar as a Christmas gift from his father. He’d grown up hearing the sounds of his dad practicing bass with random bands, for even more random gigs throughout the years. And yet, Ryan never did quite seem to come around to picking up that guitar too often. In fact, by the end of high school, Montbleau had mastered bits and pieces of “Crazy Train” and “Back in Black,” but little more. He even went so far as to sell his axe so absurdly cheap that the person who bought it threw in a beat up acoustic to even out the deal. Fate? More like guilt.
But at least Ryan always sang, just not out loud. Ironically the artist known for his Martin Sexton-like croon and melismatic charm, did all his practicing within the safety of his own thoughts. “I had the voice in my head probably my whole life,” he recalls. “I could sort of hear the way I would sing something, but I never had the guts, or whatever it was to sing it out loud until I was 21.” Ryan was by then attending Villanova University in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. For the first time in his life, he was away from family, friends, and his girlfriend back home. He struggled emotionally. Depressed and lost, that guitar which never seemed to make much sense before, finally did. Moreover, that voice which never seemed to make much sound before, finally was.
Within six months, the man who hadn’t ever even sung out loud to himself was now singing to packed bars throughout the Philadelphia area. He’d found his outlet, he’d found his voice. And it quickly became obvious that he had a gift, with a fan base that seemed to grow with every passing show. In time, as musicians are wont to do, he enlisted help from some old friends, and made some new ones, and the Ryan Montbleau Band – James Cohen (drums), Jason Cohen (keys), Matt Gianarros (bass), Laurence Scudder (viola/vocals), and Ted Wilson (tuba/harpsichord) – was born. And they seemed to fit in, no matter where they went.
The band’s lush, orchestral ballads, anchored by Montbleau’s unnerving candor, resonated loudly amongst his peers – a demographic consisting largely of disillusioned, confused 20-somethings – within both the indie and folk scenes. Then again, the group’s appetite for instrumental jamming, and their ability to do it so well, immediately earned them an eager following amongst jamband lovers as well. Still, Montbleau’s warranted comparisons to Martin Sexton drew crowds from different generations who could appreciate his music. In short, it was happening for them, very quickly, and remarkably without any label support. Ryan realized, “at this point, there’s no turning back, I got to keep going.”
Fast forward 2009, Montbleau, now 32, tours throughout the country, making his living solely off his music, and refining the art of grassroots success as a completely independent artist – an experience as rewarding as it is challenging. As he’s found, “If you’re doing it grassroots, it’s still an industry, and it’s even more of a business, because you have to be on top of it that much more.” And though he could conceivably see the right music deal with the right people coming along, he’s just not willing to wait around till then.
“I always thought it was just ridiculous,” he says. “I have friends in the industry that go the other route, they need the tour support, they need the label, they need all this. When people go completely that route, there’s inevitably all this hurry up and wait. They’re waiting for a year for their album to get recorded, another year for it to come out, and then it doesn’t come out, or whatever. This idea of waiting, and not going out there and doing it was never even close to an option. We go out there, and build it one room at a time.”
It’s precisely that mindset that has led Montbleau to utilize an innovative system of fan donations in order to finance his upcoming album. For every donation, Ryan offers a live solo acoustic album, Stages: Volume II, which features many of his fan favorites recorded throughout a five-night run of shows in March of 2009. Every bit of the proceeds go directly into recording the next band album, which as he states, musically will have “a new approach,” and will be “more about what we take out from the tracks, then what we add in,” refining parts to avoid an over-produced sound. What’s more he recently initiated a series of auctions for solo-acoustic house concerts, with the proceeds directed to the cause.
Coming off their last release, the successful Patience on Friday, it’s little wonder that donations have already been streaming in, with eager anticipation of what the band has in store. Ryan hesitates to guess at a possible release date, but suggests a hopeful one around the spring of 2010, though many issues remain to be worked out. And with the band holed up in a rented house outside of Boston, penning the content of that new album, they’re equally focused on refining the production process and possibly using an outside producer for the first time ever in their recordings. But it’s an even greater change that may prove of interest to fans.
“It took me a long time to get over a previous relationship,” Ryan says. To cope with the grief, he wrote music, filling his songs with personal missives of love, and more acutely, loss. But that was then.
“Now, I’ve been in a relationship for a year and a half, and things are going ok with the band, and everything seems to be on the up and up.” He goes on to talk about his current project, “I’ve just been trying to look inward more, and just say, ‘Hey, everything’s ok.’ I don’t know, I can’t say for sure, but hopefully, not that we wouldn’t have hope before, but there could be some happier, more hopeful themes. We’ll see.”
