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@erikaryannsedmak
Except the Weeds - Erika Ryann
Written and recorded by Erika Ryann
I wrote this watching one of the most bittersweet sunsets of my life. Thought about naming it “Accept the Weeds” but I think the slight play on words would have been overlooked for a misuse.
-E.
Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends - Erika Ryann
Written by Kris Kristofferson
I’ll Fly Away - Erika Ryann
Written by Albert E. Brumley
Maybe not my best. . . just needed to get something down. Take some of the weight off.
- E.
Back Home Again - Erika Ryann
Original by John Denver
I’ve (officially) lived on this farm for a year. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything else. As that old George Jones/Tammy Wynette tune goes, “Even the bad times are good.”
- E.R.
Colorado Christmas - Erika Ryann
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band cover
The workload on the farm is finally slowing down. My sweetheart got our winter rye in the ground and I finally harvested all our potatoes and planted the garlic. Last spring's hogs were sent to the slaughter house and last Sunday we butchered the thirty seven or so broiler chickens we'd been caring for. They all had good lives: lots of space to run around and plenty of healthy food and good treatment.
So I'm more than ready for some restful winter days to catch up on recording, leather tooling, and other projects I've been putting aside. Here's to new creations, new songs, shows to be played and more hard lessons to be learned - which is really the only thing you can count on.
Merry Christmas, folks
- Erika Ryann
Till I Gain Control Again - Erika Ryann
Based on Waylon Jennings' Recording
To say the least it's been an eventful year. My body and heart have been through some things I hoped I would never have to experience and some I never dreamed I could. I've been given a beautiful life with a person I didn't think could even exist and everything I have always wanted out of it and yet I've been too stubborn to show it.
This much I know: I'm hard headed and need to seriously work on simply being happy and positive. I've always blamed it on it being "just the way I am" but loving your life and finding the good in every situation is a choice and I am determined to change that about myself.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't terrified about what will come next. The thought that the monster inside me could end up driving everything I love away from me scares me literally nearly to death. If my well runs dry I don't believe I'll hold myself together enough to get through it.
So it's time to make changes. It's time to gain control. In this I think my hard-headedness will aid me in never giving up, never veering from a better path if I am given a chance to step up to it. I need to make changes for myself and, more importantly to me, the ones I love.
And god dammit I love you so much.
- E.R.
Erika Ryann - Carolyn
This one is for my maternal grandmother.
I don't care to go into details, but if you're familiar with old country hymns you may understand a little better.
She was a saint. I doubt I'll ever meet a kinder heart and I miss her relentlessly cheerful spirit.
- E.R.
Home On The Range
Sung by my sweetheart and me on a quiet night in the farmhouse - in "our home on the range," he says.
Soon, anyway...
We talk about getting a piano, a record player, maybe new rugs or curtains and a dairy cow. We'd make our own corn flower and cheese. Maybe try growing tobacco. He says I can have any room in the house to set up the recording equipment or work on leather tooling and charcoal drawing, to process film and anything else I need to do to feel happy and free.
And I'd be there to help him with anything I can at the drop of a hat. I won't have to worry as much about something happening to him because I'll be there to tie off the loose ends around the farm that might have distracted him before. Once he entertained the idea of my job at the house being to just sit on the front porch with a rifle over my lap to keep rodents out of the garden. I somehow doubt that would be the reality of things, but it makes me smile when I think about it.
In fact I get all foggy eyed and day dreamy running my thoughts over every inch of the farm, through every memory path I've laid there so far.
My friends ask all the time:
"What do you do out there?"
As though they assume there is nothing to do because there are no other people there to witness what we do.
So what is it? Where do I go every weekend?
The first few things that come to mind turn my cheeks rosy and I don't feel the need to share them, but all together it's fairly simple: We do what we want.
We plan meals and cook them from scratch (he's an incredible cook). We sit in the kitchen drinking coffee, listening to Prairie Home Companion and passing my tobacco pipe. If the weather is nice we'll walk the property line and he'll tell me about his plans for crops in each field. Sometimes we'll go down to the river with the dogs, checking out the flood damage from last autumn, resting for a spell on a fallen tree. If he has work to do (and with spring around the corner, he does) I run around the farm with my camera, talking to the sheep and stalking the chickens with one of his dogs, Rex, by my side everywhere I go.
At night we dance around the kitchen to the classic country station on the radio while we make dinner and make up new country folk terms and I laugh so hard sometimes it hurts my side and I lose my voice. We draw baths with oatmeal and Epsom Salts and in the cool evening wind sometimes he'll take me out for a spin on one of the tractors.
At the end of our weekends we do everything we can to drag out our time together and it's become physically painful to leave the farm for Denver. During the week I feel like I'm on a business trip away from home, biding my time to pay off some debts until I'm back where I belong: With him. Out there. Where we can sit together for days on the high plains watching the grass grow and mimicking the birds. Where sometimes we sing together and play our guitars in tune. And sometimes between mistakes, forgetting the words, or fumbling my chords, I get a wild hair and record us just for kicks.
Most of the time I like this hiding spot. I save these images and keep them for myself besides the few photographs I share.
This time I'm sharing it with you.
- E.R.
I'll Be Here In The Morning - Erika Ryann
Original by Townes Van Zandt
This was my first time recording my slide guitar playing so... be kind.
- Saturday at twelve o'clock in the afternoon I get to leave my house on my own accord. Unfortunately I still have to leave the Rolex on until next Thursday, but it won't control my whereabouts any longer.
First order of business: I'm getting the blazes out of this filthy city. I'm loading up one of my favorite cameras (a 1920's medium format brownie to be exact) and I'm truckin' my ass out to the country. That farm has my name written all over it. I was told this morning that the property is now covered in snow and I've been grinning like a kid all day thinking about it... In fact I was thinking tonight as I was walking home that a lot of things having to do with that place make me smile. Out loud. Teeth and all, and I catch myself like it's an accident. That has to be worth something. Even if it is just for now.
I know that almost everything in my current situation is extremely temporary. Places I frequent and people who surround me will become use-to-be's in the not too distant future. Subconscious motivations that drive me and seem so strong now will become the very last of my desires as new worries and challenges take their place. I'm in a waiting room and my current company is Ms. Nothinglasts, Mr. Enjoyitwhileyoucan about to see Dr. Youwillonlygrowfromthis. I know exactly where I am, more than anything by way of knowing that I won't be here long.
"I'll be here in the morning
Close your eyes, I'll be here for a while..."
I've done a lot of disappearing this year. To those I care about who don't know me well, it might seem unfair or as though I never think of you. I never forget you. I fall asleep away from you but in dreams I run around endlessly exploring by your side, finding every opportunity to tell you I love you still and that I am here if you need to run.
* * *
The highway's call to me is louder than any rhythmic heartbeat set to the impossible task of keeping time with me, keeping me in time. My heart flutters and rattles and pounds until I let it out. There is no steady beat, only a constant lust for miles and miles of honky tonks to play and freedom. Miles and miles of freedom...
But for now, aw' close your eyes...
I'll be here in the morning.
Goodnight,
E.R.
Darlin' You've Been On My Mind - Erika Ryann
Originally "Mama, You've Been On My Mind" - Bob Dylan
It just occurred to me that I should read On The Road again sometime in the very near future. Sometimes I get so distracted in the city with all of the people in my life and obstacles I've been faced with over the last couple months especially that I forget who I am a little. I forget how much I love spinning a record and watching grass grow. How at peace I feel to completely deny the existence of the modern world.
I had one last free day before recently being required to stay in my house (long story) for quite a stretch. A person I've known only a little while but whom I care about dearly manages a farm out in Johnstown, Colorado. I think he could sense that I might seriously lose my cool if I didn't get out of the city before getting what we affectionately call the "rolex" and so invited me to see the farm.
He says the house was built in 1917. There is no shower - only an old bath tub. The floors creak and the rooms echo some when one speaks. The whitewashed front porch looks out on a vast front yard with another chicken coop to the right. He tells me he wants to plant a vegetable garden in that spot, maybe some apple trees, and we agree that every house should have a piano.
Walking in, the foyer had a sweet leather smell and I received an excited greeting from his dogs, Rex and Cormac, while he checked on the hens. In the dark, I couldn't see much around the farm aside from a couple other old buildings (what used to be a blacksmith shop, chicken coop, and shelter for the sheep) but looking out the kitchen window the next morning revealed acres of green and golden autumn growth. Starlings swarmed one of the giant cottonwood trees in chirping madness, alerting everyone that the sun hadn't abandoned us. It came back!
He listens to a white-bread, country talk show on the radio when the George Jones cassette ends and makes cornbread from scratch. The 1930's oven smokes and fills the kitchen with a faint sepia-toned ghost of burnt bread's past - but leaves the cornbread unscathed. As I flip through his recipe book, he jokes about making himself the Blueberry Boy Bait - apparently he's hooked... himself. Gets him every time.
We walked the property line. Here he missed a spot night-planting the rye. There he might build a cabin with a wood stove ... and a piano... if the landowner moves back. These cornstalks are drying for feed, they use those flowers for an herbal body product. Those must be asparagus seeds, here's the root cellar - "maybe I'll just move down there" - wait, where are the sheep?
I learned one of the herbs growing on the patio table by the clothes line would make your mouth tingle if you let it fall apart over your tongue. He was certain that since I cut my own hair, I'd have no difficulty trimming the overgrown locks that stuck out like towheaded straw around his hat. I warned him it was likely to be a disaster but still, in the quiet remaining light in the back yard, I attempted a modest gentleman's cut.
It's still crooked. Thankfully he says he doesn't care.
A swarm of starlings clouded over our heads warning us that the sun was escaping. It's leaving!
I don't believe he knows fully how much good that trip did for me. Every time I need to step away from the stale energy of the city, I'm able to close my eyes to a hazy evening, waking from a nap and venturing alone to the front of the property. Peering down the country road that separated his farm from that of the neighbors and wishing I could record the clucking and cooing sound the laying hens made. I will at some point. At the same time, it only deepened my lust for open space, land to tend and time to breathe. I get there someday. I know.
...
It's been a long time since I played and/or recorded any Dylan covers. Amazing considering what a direct influence he's had on my growth and education as a musician and altogether emotionally expressive person. I've needed to get this one out of my system for a while now. Something made me pick up and go with it today. Perhaps it was the satisfied feeling I had today after playing a great show last night with my country band. Maybe needed to record something, anything, in the spirit of creating and sharing in wake of Lou Reed's passing yesterday. Perhaps because I've recently taken more and even bigger steps in a chosen direction, away from this crossroad I've been standing at...
Or maybe it's the weather, or something like that.
Anyway, you've been on my mind.
-E.R.
Always Late... Leavin' Baby - Erika Ryann
Written and recorded by Erika Ryann
Every time I start looking back, I try to remember the night I finished this song. My whiskey-burning eyes in one hand - a bleeding black pen in the other - staring maniacally across a warm, wooden bar-top. I had come home to an empty, cigarette-stenched apartment - windows closed, beer cans empty, and one of the blue and white ceramic candle sticks my mother gave me was broken on the window sill.
I sat for a minute on that torn couch - blood thumping in my chest:
Confusion.
Fury.
Defeat.
So I left.
Walked. Cried. Froze. Drank. Winced. Wrote. Tipped.
...Left.
In the (seemingly) impossible event that one couldn't detect a heavy reminiscence of Josh T. Pearson's Last of the Country Gentlemen laced into this song - Let me assure you, the influence was great. Around this time I was spinning this record at least once a day, typically while unsuccessfully wiping tears with soapy hands over that damned, bottomless, filthy kitchen sink. "Woman, when I've raised hell... you're gona know it..."
I spun out. I did everything I could to stay away while I avoided leaving. I slept on couches, fled to the country, cracked a dazed grin as I drove out on the plains with the bloody early sunrise to my Left...
Left.
Around a year ago I longed for a small weight on my left hand.
Now I have at least double that weight around my left ankle.
To keep myself from dwelling I convince my memory that both of these would be the result of a bad decision.
It doesn't matter now.
- E.R.
Heavy Left Hand - Erika Ryann
Written and recorded by yours truly.
Originally this song had a very swift finger picking progression backing it, but I needed to get it off my chest and only had a piano so, there you have it. Eventually I'll record a better version but after the hell I've been through today I'm satisfied with just tossing this one into the ears of anyone who'll listen.
Tonight I'm staying in the house where I grew up. It feels good to be out in the country, here in the forest for a spell before I'm locked down in Denver. It also feels good to play my piano again, even with my family clanging plates and talking over dinner upstairs. I wish I played better but for now my off-beat banging on the keys has to suffice.
Things are about to get very interesting. I wish I could say more.
Be well...
Drive safe.
-E.R.
Here's Looking At You, Kid - Erika Ryann
Original by The Gaslight Anthem
I've had this song ringing in the back of my mind too often these days not to sit down and record it. Its meaning has been changing... Remember when this song made you kind of sad because it made you think... what things would be like if I left? Funny, looking back now, how impossible that all seemed.
I don't know if I'm prepared to plow through this week.
It's amazing what can happen in three years...
...ain't it, love?
Colorado Bound - Erika Ryann
Townes Van Zandt cover
It's a good song for a quiet night. All I can hear right now is crickets, the Coors brewery, and the train going by.
I think (for my own sanity) I'll be recording a series of "throwaways" as often as the muse strikes to just lay a song down. Not that any of my recordings are highly mastered, but I imagine this new series will be of much lower production quality. I'm okay with it because it's mostly for me, but I'll share them with you regardless.
Always Late With Your Kisses - Erika Ryann
Based on the original co-written and recorded by Lefty Frizzell.
I've been wanting to record this one for a long while...
Today it finally came out of me the way I wanted it to. Must have had the bug. Nothing really beats Lefty singin' it, but it means too much to me to not put a piece of myself into its inferno before the song is forgotten.
Cheers,
-Erika
Hands on the Wheel - Erika Ryann
Original by Willie Nelson
It feels good to get this one off my chest.
I finally set up my equipment in the new house in Golden (Colorado) and this is the very first recording I've completed in the new "studio." I don't care to go into detail but this song in particular speaks to me these days. It hums in my heart in an aching way on a fairly regular basis and yet I don't believe I'll ever be able to listen to its album without stirring a memory that I'd rather just bury at this point...
I can't say I would take anything back - I gave and loved and burned bridges. I starved and drank and pretended to be asleep while another heart beat kept me restlessly awake. Wrapped in a blanket I stood barefoot looking out over the plains with a lust for the vast and wild nothing to be found upon them. I intend to keep these things close to me...
"Goodnight sweetheart"
-E.
