Ryan Bingham, Heart and Rhythm

Singer songwriter Ryan Bingham won critical acclaim for his first two albums, and then won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Critic’s Choice Award and a Grammy Award for his work on the soundtrack to the film “Crazy Heart”.  His third album was tremendously successful, and now, he’s releasing his fourth album, “Tomorrowland”.  He stopped by the SiriusXM studios earlier this week to talk about the new album with Ron Bennington and play a few tracks.  Listen to one of the songs he performed, and read excerpts from the interview, below.

* * *

Click Here to Listen to him perform “Too Deep To Fill” Live at SiriusXM

Ron Bennington: How you been doing? I know you’ve been traveling a long time.

Ryan Bingham: I’ve been good man, I’ve actually had some time off in the past year just writing songs, and recording this record. And just now getting the circus back together.

Ron Bennington: What is that like taking time off when you’ve been on the road as long as you’ve been.

Ryan Bingham: It was cool. I didn’t really realize it but shit, I’ve really been beating it up for the past ten years pretty solid and I hadn’t taken any breaks at all, and finally I was just like, man, I’m gonna shut her down for a little bit. It was actually really nice. You know, the thing about the record, with a lot of the electric guitar stuff…. I realized I hadn’t really ever had the opportunity to sit down with an electric guitar and an amp and some pedals and really kind of woodshed. You know a lot of times kids grow up and you’ve got the guitar in your room when you’re sixteen and all that. And I really bounced around so much growing up that I didn’t even start playing guitar until I was seventeen or eighteen and it was acoustic. By the time I got an electric guitar I was on the road just playing. So it was cool to get home and really experiment with stuff.

Ron Bennington: You had never really sat down and wrote. Because the way you write on the road– which I guess is in hotel rooms or the bus. So the chance to just sit at your house and work that way– so that’s a completely different experience I guess.

Ryan Bingham: Or even to have a house. Before that I was living out of my car. Somewhere in the middle of that I got a home and got married and all that stuff. It was like, I need to see what its like to be at home.

Ron Bennington: Was it a weird thing where you almost got up and packed every morning?

Ryan Bingham: I was a little restless there for the first couple months. Just kind of feeling…just going through the motions of it.

Ron Bennington: You had also said that you were working on some Dylan type songs. Is Dylan one of the people as a songwriter that still interests you.

Ryan Bingham: Definitely, he’s obviously been a huge influence on me as well as Woody Guthrie. The other day– with all the songs I’ve written on the record and thinking about the tour this fall, I was thinking I’d like to get out and play some songs by other people, you know do some cover songs, and so I was working up a couple of his older tunes.

Ron Bennington: What are you thinking about covering?

Ryan Bingham: There’s a song called Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall that was big for me growing up.

Ron Bennington: It is kind of amazing to look back at so many of those Dylan songs and seeing how fast he wrote some of those songs.

Ryan Bingham: And how much is in them too. When you sit down and start really going through the lyrics, and not only learn the song, but when you go to play it and learn the lyrics, some of them are really long and really intense.

Ron Bennington: They’re almost rap, they’re almost hip hop when you take a look at them. Scorsese did a documentary on him, and went back and found a lot of the stuff, and how many of the songs he wrote at a typewriter. He didn’t even have a guitar in front of him.

Ryan Bingham: Just poetry, yeah.

Ron Bennington: Just wrote it as if it were poetry, and yet for some reason was running the music in his head. But then again, he changes that music even now. It does seem to be more about words for him. What about you when you’re writing? What comes first?

Ryan Bingham: I always tend to have a bit of a melody on the guitar. That always seems to kind of set the mood for whatever I’m going to say. I’ve always had a hard time sitting down and trying to write something out just on paper. It always seems to more have to come off of the top of my head or my subconscious, or little ideas like that. And the music always seems to help to evoke..

Ron Bennington: Does it all come as one piece or does it take you several times before it all comes together?

Ryan Bingham: Sometimes it changes. Sometimes I can sit down and it will all come out in three or four minutes. It will just kind of just pour out and the song is there. And then other times, I’ll write maybe like a verse or something, and kind of get hung up on it. And I’ll just set it down for a while, maybe come back to it a week later and play around with it. I try not to force anything. If I’m having trouble with something I’ll set it down and walk away from it. Kind of got to give it its space.

Ron Bennington: You’ve always been ready to write about the American condition, and not everybody’s doing that these days. What keeps you connected like that in your writing?

Ryan Bingham: I don’t know…I just feel like there’s really not any way around it. Any songs that come to me are just really about the places that I go and the people that I meet and the things that you really experience. As much as we travel on the road night after night, you’re always just waking up in a new town and a new environment every morning and it just feels like you get exposed to so much so fast. With everything on the news and in the media, every day you get bombarded with information and stuff that’s going on, and whether you process it or not, or whether you want to think about it or deal with it…when I talk about writing songs off my subconscious, things just kind of start coming out and I guess it’s just the way the world makes you feel day to day and how a lot of that stuff affects me. I just can’t help it.

Ron Bennington: And hard times are back. We really have fallen back into– and you brought Woody Guthrie up earlier– but it does feel like that same kind of thing out there in America right now.

Ryan Bingham: Yeah, I just feel it too, playing the songs every night. Just to play them…every night…for months. It has to be something that I’m inspired by. So I guess it kind of keeps me going day to day as well.

Ron Bennington: It is kind of surprising, the condition that the country’s in, don’t you think? The slide has been awhile. But it is time that we just wake up and say this is exactly where we are. This thing isn’t bouncing right now.

Ryan Bingham: Obviously I’m no political analyst. I wasn’t on the debate team in high school or anything like that. I’m just an average joe kid, I’m from the streets like a lot of kids and people out there. And just because you’re not involved in politics or the debate team doesn’t mean that stuff doesn’t influence you and make you feel a certain way. And it is. It’s been going on for a long time and it always goes in and out and I don’t know how anybody can really ignore it.

Ron Bennington: Is this the first time that you’ve been producing on your own album?

Ryan Bingham: It is, yeah. This is a first. I’m selling on our own record label as well. Everything is independent and ourselves. A good friend of mine, Justin Stanley, he’s wonderful engineer in Los Angeles co-produced the record with me.

Ron Bennington: How’s that experience different for you?

Ryan Bingham: It was cool. I had a little time off and really had some time to work with the songs and was playing a lot more electric guitar. It was pretty cool just not having anybody else in the room. You know, there were no other agendas or anything like that. I set up and recorded the whole record in a friend’s living room in their house. It was just me and Justin pretty much in there at the start, just tracking the songs. And then we had some other musicians come in and lay some other stuff down. It was pretty liberating and it felt creatively free. To just say whatever I wanted. I guess you could relate somewhat to shows in radio. If you had the FCC standing in the room next to you all day long, you’re kind of like…that same kind of feeling. Just not having anybody else in the room.

Ron Bennington: Just to have that freedom to maybe waste a day– well we thought we had an idea there but it didn’t work out. I think it’s an amazing difference doing it in a living room compared to the studio that has a kind of formality, and there’s a clock ticking that’s costing everybody money.

Ryan Bingham: Mmm hmm. Yeah. We weren’t on clutch time or anything like that. And we had a bbq pit going in the back yard and a campfire and a tent set up outside, and just camped out and slept outside under the stars and just had fun with it. [song]

Ron Bennington: Ryan Bingham, the new single is out on iTunes, The Heart of Rhythm, and the album Tomorrowland comes out September 18th. It’s rock and roll, it’s rhythm and blues, it’s country, it’s folk, it’s real American music. When people start to worry about where the good stuff is coming from, we’ve got some right now with Ryan Bingham. Thanks so much man, what a great songwriter in the tradition of great American songwriters. We’ll see you next time through.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Visit binghammusic.com for more information or @ryanbingham on twitter.

You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

.

You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.

.