If it weren't for 'Blossom', we may not have Serena Ryder
In an feature interview with Nantali Indongo, Serena Ryder reveals the unlikely source of her trademark image
Way back when, long before the huge hit Stompa, in a small town near Peterborough, Ont., a pre-teen Serena Ryder saw her future reveal itself in the opening scene of the 1988 film Beaches.
"What's the girl's name from 'Blossom'?" Ryder asked me as she remembered Mayim Bialik playing a young CC Bloom (Bette Midler's character) in the movie.
The singer-songwriter started imitating Bialik's over-the-top character, turning her mouth to the side, flaring her jazz hands and shimmying like a showgirl.
"She's this 9-year-old girl, smoking a cigarette behind the bleachers and singing and I was like 'Oh, I wanna do that!'" Ryder said, laughing at herself.
But dressed all in black, with her soon-to-be signature fedora (which was more Six than Blossom), Ryder says she never felt like she really fit in growing up in Millbrook, Ont. She had a sense of there being something for her beyond the sleepy town of 8,000 people.
"I always felt that I stood out like a sore thumb," said Ryder, now Toronto-based and a Juno award-winning musician.
"I always felt like 'Oh, there's something and I don't know what it is, but I know that there's something out there for me to be doing.' And I always loved music from the beginning ... always so passionate about it."
The love of creation
Contrary to the pop-country music that everyone in the town was into in the 1990s, Ryder loved soul and R&B singers: Mariah, Whitney, Linda Ronstadt and TLC.
Ryder's new album Utopia showcases a teeny-tiny bit of those influences: be it in the melody and cadence of tracks like Firewater or in the soulful runs that peek through on the first single Got your Number — a high energy track that she wrote jamming at the drum kit in her living room.
At the time of the impromptu session with the drum kit, Ryder didn't even know she was writing a new album.
After the excitement of touring the platinum Harmony, she says she needed to take time for herself. She moved to a beach in California for a year-and-a-half.
She had no plan other than getting back to writing music for music's sake.
"For me it was writing from a place of loving creating again," she said. "Loving experimenting, loving the art of writing, doing it because I just felt like it, which was so awesome."
Almost 100 songs later, Ryder realized that there was a narrative that linked her new songs together, and she had more than enough material for a full-length album.
The first song she wrote during that period, Saying Hello, reflects the story of someone who needs to reconnect with herself from time to time. Other songs deal with the rollercoaster of life: love, loneliness and loss.
The music on Utopia was also inspired by Ryder's reality of being a person dealing with mental health challenges.
"I was writing about my journey, years of going up and down with my different moods," she said. "In the past I've been diagnosed as having really severe clinical depression and even with having bi-polar disorder."
Not knowing much about her family roots, Ryder says, might have contributed to her psychological difficulties.
During our conversation, she talked about her mother, Barbara Ryder, having Ojibwa family but not knowing her biological parents. Serena Ryder doesn't know much about her biological father at all.
"My biological father was from Trinidad, but I never met him, didn't know where he was from," she said.
"So it was always like 'Where am I from? Where's my history, where's my family?' And so I felt like that might have perpetuated the imbalance as well."
Utopia as a place of balance
Although the creation of Utopia was spontaneous, Ryder did go to several different sources for inspiration. She drew from her personal stories, but also stories from First Nation communities.
Her friend and fellow Canadian songwriter Simon Wilcox told her of the Cherokee legend of the Two Wolves, which holds that within us all there is a battle between good and evil, represented by two wolves; the one we feed is the wolf that will prevail.
"But I was like: 'What would happen if you satiated both wolves, and they're not fighting with each other anymore," she said.
"So that's the grey area. And that's my utopia: finding that balance, finding that grey area"
Serena Ryder will perform at Metropolis July 8th as part of Montreal's Jazz Festival. Nantali's interview with Ryder will be broadcast on the July 8th edition of Our Montreal.
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