MattRyd.com: Great Music. Now with extra Awesome.

Jun 17

Apparently, the episode of Scrubs that featured my song was played approximately 800 billion times in Australian reruns (and once or twice as a rerun in the UK). As a result, ASCAP sent me money.

It’s little stuff like this that makes me feel like: “Hey… I’m actually kinda a legit musician.” It’s not a ton of money by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a reminder that maybe… just maybe… I’m not wasting my time by doing this whole “music” thing.

This is a ridiculously self-serving post, so my apologies for that. But when you’re desperately chasing a dream as elusive and difficult as “support yourself by making music,” you have to stock up on the small encouragements, ya know? I won’t lie, there are definitely times when I think that I should chill out on the rock ‘n roll, go find a nice career, and maybe resign myself to a life of only playing an open mic once every few months or so. But then something like this comes in and it’s enough to remind me: “Wait… I might actually have a shot at this.”

May 24

Veronica Mars is my newest “show that I watch as I go to sleep.” I’m halfway through season 1, and I’m more than a little bit obsessed.

I have this habit of discovering and falling in love with shows long after they’ve been cancelled (I just watched Firefly for the first time earlier this year). Longstoryshort, I probably won’t have an opinion on the Lost finale until sometime in 2016.

May 19

Guest post on the Natiiv.com blog

When I played the @RedEyeChicago Great Outdoor Tweetup last September, I wore a shirt that said “I’m not a blogger, I just tweet a lot.”

I’m not sure if that shirt is entirely accurate anymore. First of all, I have this-here-blog-thingy that you’re reading right now. Second of all, I wrote a guest post for the Natiiv.com blog. Natiiv Arts & Media is a very cool company here in Chicago that focuses on training people (and brainstorming with them) on how to use Social Media in cool, unique and interesting ways. Click the link to read my blog post, and if you’re in the Chicagoland area (and especially if you’re a musician), I’d highly recommend setting up a session with Leah over at Natiiv.

May 13

Questions —> answers.

Per the suggestion of Mr. Matt Griffo (whom, by the way, you should check out for all of your comedic, musical, and comedic-ly musical wants and needs), I activated the ‘Ask’ option on this here bloggy-blog. So, if you have any deep burning questions (see what I did there?) that you’ve been dying to ask (or if you’ve been wanting to anonymously ask questions like “Why are you so stoopid?!?!”), there’s now a happy little ‘Ask’ link right in-between ‘About’ and ‘Archive’.

Sidenote: it took clicking through 4 pages of Google Image results to land on the above graphic, but I think it was totally worth it. But unlike the movie poster above, my ‘Ask’ page is not adults only.

May 10

I’d really like to take a one-to-two-week-long vacation, check into an Embassy Suites with a laptop, and just replay this entire series. Interspersed, of course, with the games from this series:

…as well as pretty much every other adventure game that Sierra released in the 90s.

I more or less stopped playing videogames when I started playing guitar. Obviously, I don’t regret that decision at all. But every once in a while, I have an overwhelming desire to regress to my childhood and play story-driven adventure and action games on a small CRT monitor.

May 2

A formula for Matt Ryd stage banter:

I received a compliment on my stage presence today, and I felt (in the interest of full disclosure) that it’s only right to explain that I use a very simple formula to create my between-song comments:

“Blah blah blah {Awkward comment} + blah blah blah {observation of my own awkwardness} + blah blah blah {something about Journey}”

If the Journey references start wearing thin, switch over to remarks about Hanson.

And if, at any point, you feel like you’re losing the crowd, just say a funny-sounding word. Today’s word was “syphilis”.

Apr 29

Christianity Today interview with Jennifer Knapp about coming out

Moderately-known fact: I come from a fairly conservative Evangelical family. I spent a good number of years working at a very strict Christian camp in Wisconsin. My first job there was editing the weekly “Camp In Review” videos, which were set to Christian music, and Jennifer Knapp definitely featured in a few of those videos.

I have spent a lot of time wrestling with (and have written a lot of songs about) my internal clashes with my upbringing. And I’ve run the gamut of possible “religious orientations,” going from super-ultra-intense-Bible-thumper to church-hating-athiest, and just about everywhere in between. Even now, although I’m very secure with myself and my views on God, faith and Christianity, it’s a subject that always constantly flickers in the back of my mind.

My issues are different than Jennifer’s, and I wouldn’t presume to say that I know what she’s going through, but I can say that her words resonate very strongly with me. The toughest thing for me is the knowledge that, regardless of what I say or do, regardless of how comfortable I am with my faith (or lack thereof), the friends and family that I have in the church will always be, to some extent, disappointed. Not necessarily disappointed in me, and not even disapproving. But when one of the biggest tenets of your belief is that it is that there is one Truth—and that Truth is the only way to salvation—then you are inevitably disappointed if someone you care about doesn’t also ‘know’ that Truth, and ergo doesn’t have that salvation.

That’s the thing that really eats at me. I hate letting people down, and I hate disappointing people. So I’m left with an irreconcilable decision between being true to myself and letting down others in the process, or pretending for others’ sake and feeling unfulfilled in my own life.

Longstoryshort: this interview is amazing. I have so much respect for what Jennifer Knapp is doing and saying.

(link via dannielle)

Apr 13

You guys, my new watch is a Casio calculator watch.

My 9-year-old self is so jealous of me right now.

So, the band and I had a chance to play at Lincoln Hall here in Chicago. This was a super-big deal to me—I have played all manner of dive bars and ‘okay’-level clubs in this city, and Lincoln Hall is the type of venue that makes people say “Oh, wow! You’re playing there? That’s really cool!”

We debuted a new cover for the occasion, and I was fortunate enough to get some high-quality audio and video to make a (in my opinion) pretty slick YouTube vid of the event.

This was also my first time editing and mixing multitrack live audio of a full band setup. Pretty much everything full-band that I’ve mixed before this has been extremely isolated in a studio, and it was definitely a new experience to work with something with this much bleed.

That said, I’m really proud of it. Of all of the music stuff I do, I’m probably least confident about my full-band mixing, and I think that this turned out really well.

Anyhoo. That’s enough with the rambley-rambling. Enjoy!

Mar 29

Mike Mentzer came over yesterday, and we did some recording for the ol’ Youtubes. Mike’s getting ready to launch his channel, so we’re going to do a crossover-type-thing where we post a video of us playing one of his songs on my channel, then a video of us playing one of my songs on his channel. It’s gonna be awesome.

If you haven’t heard Mike’s music before, I highly encourage you to click on through and check him out. He’s a fantastic songwriter, and easily one of the best singers that I’ve ever heard. Plus, he and I are pretty musically compatible/similar, so if you dig my stuff, you’re sure to love his.