A Conversation with Ryan Montbleau – HuffPost 12.7.10

Mike Ragogna: Ryan, you have a new album called Heavy On The Vine that was produced by Martin Sexton, and this is your 6th album.

Ryan Montbleau: Yeah. I started making records around 2002. I like to think they keep getting better.

MR: What did Martin Sexton bring out in you?

RM: Well, what was interesting was that he was a huge influence on me from early on when I was first starting to make records. Martin Sexton was one of my biggest heroes, so now it’s come full circle. In this record, I think he did a really good job of getting us to ease up and getting us to sound like ourselves and play the best we could. He kind of freed things up. On previous records, we tried to make everything really airtight, and I think he freed it up and let us sing and let it sound as much like as ourselves as we could.

MR: Who are the writers that influenced you?

RM: Well, like I said, Martin Sexton was a big one. As far as writers, I always loved Paul Simon. As far as straight writers, I love Greg Brown, and Deb Talan from The Weepies has always been a big influence. But I’m also influenced by a lot of other artists, kind of like everybody. I would say though Paul Simon is a big one.

MR: Your song “I Can’t Wait” seems like it has a little Paulie in it.

RM: I mean, I hope so. I hope it’s in there without ripping him off. He’s definitely been a big one. A lot of his stuff sounds so conversational when it comes out, but so much work goes into those words in just making them perfect. He is such a master at presenting these images that in the songwriting process, he presents them for you and your mind can run with them. I think, in the past, I may have been too literal with sort of saying exactly how I feel or even bordering on telling people how to feel. I think as I go, I’m trying to whittle it down and do as Paul does and try to present more images for the listeners mind to run wild with.

MR: You have a song called, “More And More And More” on Heavy On The Vine. It’s a fun slam on commercialism and a little bit of a treatise on, well we kind of all want what’s on this shopping list.

RM: It’s funny, we were on the road in Atlanta, and I slammed my finger in the car door of our van. So, it was four in the morning and it was right after a gig and I just got my GPS and found the Walgreens right down the road from wherever I was in a neighborhood I didn’t even know just to buy some Ibuprofen to get the pain down. It just got me thinking about the neighborhood I was living in at the time. I would go to this huge drugstore all the time and it was right across from this other huge drug store right across the street. It just made me think about how much stuff we have. It almost just makes it harder to choose sometimes. So, I just started sketching it out right there in the van.

MR: You are Massachusetts-born and you have a little history there. Can you give everybody an update on the Boston scene in which you played up until your first album.

RM: It’s funny, I’m never home anymore. I’m always on the road. People ask me about the Boston scene and I’m like, I don’t know, I hear it’s pretty good. Yeah, I grew up north of Boston in Peabody, Massachusetts, in the suburbs. A lot of our band grew up outside of Boston. I basically went to college in Philly at Villanova and I got out of there in ’99, and that’s when I decided to do music. So, I came home and got a job at a club in Cambridge at the old House of Blues. That’s really where I started. I really didn’t know that I wanted to make music before then, I was 21 when I decided. I think the best part of Boston are these little hole in the walls. You have to hit them on the right nights, and if you do, there’s so much music going on in Boston. There’s so much happening, you just have to go find it. So, that was the beginning of that for me. I worked in the club for a couple of years and saw what went on. I started playing during that time a lot and I just kept taking any gig I could get. Bars, coffee houses, and sports bars. I even played TGI Fridays and in the street. So, it was cool to see. Boston is a pretty culturally rich place–a lot of music, a lot of musicians, it’s a really great place to learn. Ever since then, I’ve been on the road constantly. It’s hard for me to comment from New Mexico on Boston, but I’m sure there’s some great stuff going on there.

MR: You also won The Boston Music Award?

RM: I did. I got nominated once and won another one. I got Best Local Male Vocalist a couple of years ago. It’s cool that they do those things. I got a trophy. It’s shiny and I have it at home.

MR: You don’t take it on the road with you?

RM: No, though I want to. I want to put a chain around it and wear it as a necklace. It looks like a big Grammy in the shape of a B. It’s really nice. You don’t get many trophies in this line of work, at least I don’t. So, it was kind of nice.

MR: You cross genres quite a bit on this record. I can think of one song in particular–“Songbird.” It’s like reggae meets country. When you were recording with Martin, how did the sound and the arrangements come about?

RM: Well, he had ideas. What he wanted me to do was to make solo acoustic, really stripped-down demos of all the songs I had and sent them to him, which I did. Then he picked out the ones he liked the most and had ideas for arrangements. “Songbird” was already a song that we had been playing as a band and playing out. It had a pretty strong arrangement on its own. To me, it was a reggae tune and to all of us, it was, and we sort of had the arrangement down for the record for that song. Martin’s idea for that song was more of a Jack Johnson-type acoustic kind of thing, which we never really did because that was a song that the band already really had a strong arrangement on. Once we played that for him, he liked that just as well, so we went with that. But on other stuff like “More and More and More,” we had never played it that way. We kind of had a long day in the studio, and we had recorded a different version of it and he had us go in there and try a Rolling Stones goes to Nashville version of this. We were like, “Okay, whatever this is, it’s stupid,” and we just went in there and did it. That is the one that ended up on the record, so he had great ideas like that which would sort of take us out of our own element.

MR: I wanted to get to “Fix Your Wings.” You added those great wiseass, gospel-ish background vocals.

RM: Well, the gospel choir was a lot of Martins idea. He does that a lot on his own records where he sings his own background vocals and he has different groups that he creates just using his own voice. He has the cowboy trio and the gay men’s choir and just some funny stuff he can do with background vocals. He had us go in there and do this gospel thing.

MR: And then there’s the instrumental, “Hands.”

RM: I was really proud of that one because that was all the guys. The band just wrote that song on their own and came up with the arrangement and did it. I love that stuff.

MR: Which introduces the song “Here et al.”

RM: Yes, which was always called “Hear It All,” but “Here et al” made sense too, so I changed it. I figured it kind of gave it a little bit of an interesting twist.

MR: Back to touring for a sec. What’s it like touring as hard as you guys do?

RM: It’s pretty intense. It’s pretty great, but it’s pretty intense. We have been doing around 200 shows a year for the last seven years. We tour as much as anybody else I know. We play a lot. I mean, it’s been great. It’s made us gel as a band, and it makes you hear things that you’ve never heard before when you play with the same people night after night, year after year. It’s been great and it’s something that we’ve needed. We also run the risk of kind of burning ourselves out or not spending enough time on the writing or the recording as we’d like. You’re always trying to find this balance. That was actually a part of the title of this new record, Heavy On The Vine. I like to give the records titles that relate to the material, but also reflect where we are as a band or where I am in my career. That’s why I called the first one Begin because I was like, alright, it starts here. Heavy On The Vine is this latest one. We’ve been at this for so long now for a fair number of years, playing so much together. It gets intense and it gets heavy sometimes. At the same time–I know it sounds kind of corny–but we keep ripening, we keep getting better, and we all want to get better. And we are like a ripening fruit. So, Heavy On The Vine is that. We are just kind of sitting there heavy and fully-grown and ready to drop into something bigger.

MR: So, you’ve just finished promoting this album. You’re thinking of the next album, aren’t you.

RM: I am, yeah. It tends to happen. You get this big burst at the end of trying to finish a record and then it frees you up for new stuff. At soon as we finished this, I started writing a bunch of new songs and some old ones that I hadn’t finished. I’ve been doing a little bit of co-writing too. I’m already dying to make the next one. Early next year, we are taking our first break in a long time and then planning on doing some more touring. I’m definitely looking forward to recording some more. I feel like we keep getting better and better with the records we make.

MR: What is your advice to new artists?

RM: It’s funny now. Sometimes, I’m the guy that people ask advice from, and that kind of blows my mind. I feel like the little pipsqueak at the end of the totem pole trying to talk to the big guy. We’ve definitely made some progress, I’ve definitely made a career. The only way I know how to do this is how we’ve done it, as far as building a career–just building it one room at a time, playing shows and playing out. It’s hard to get your foot in the door at first, but it doesn’t take long before you can get a lot of gigs and do them. You just have to really want to do them. So, I tell people get out and play. If you can only get a crappy gig in the beginning, go play the hell out of that crappy gig. As far as recording, it’s kind of the same thing. You’ve got to go and do it, you have to make something happen. With as much touring as I’ve done, I haven’t spent as much time as I would have liked on some of the records. We just had to get them done early on because we had to go on tour. It’s good when people can take their time on it too. The bottom line is if you want to go out there and make music, then you have to just go out there and do it.

Tracks:
1. Slippery Road
2. Songbird
3. I Can’t Wait
4. Fix Your Wings
5. Carry
6. Chariot (I Know)
7. Hands
8. Here et al.
9. Love Songs
10. More And More And More
11. My Best Guess
12. Stay
13. Lonesome Serenade
14. Straw In The Wind

Transcribed by Theo Shier