“I’m gonna be totally honest, I had never gone on a tour this long, and I wasn’t sure how my mental health was gonna be, but I’ve honestly been having the time of my life!” says budding pop star and Island recording artist Stacey Ryan, who’s been serving as support on Jake Wesley Rogers’ Peace Love & Pluto Tour for more than a month. Although, she admits that the whirlwind of being on such a major tour has made individual highlights a bit hazy: “We play every other night, so they all blur together, but in Columbus, I had never heard applause that loud for me in my life.” The tour will find Stacey Ryan alongside Jake Wesley Rogers at The Foundry at The Fillmore on April 9th, and when I ask Ryan what can be expected of her live show, during a recent phone chat, she tells me, “My show is just me and my friend Jacob on guitar, doing more acoustic, broken-down versions of my songs that are already out and songs from my upcoming EP.”
“My goal at the end of the day is to make music people can relate to,” says Ryan, a classically trained jazz pianist (who also plays guitar, bass, ukulele, and trumpet), who admits that her music is mostly pop, but suspects close listeners can hear other influences that she explored while in music school (She tells me Daniel Caesar, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and Raye’s My 21st Century Blues are all currently major influences.) Ryan first made a major splash when she scored a streaming sensation with “Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk.” The song began as a viral clip in late 2021, with an “open verse challenge,” before going on to be recorded as a collaboration with Zai1k in January of the following year. Since then, she’s released a string of singles, toured as support for PHILTHY friends Lawrence, and even opened for Duran Duran at BST Hyde Park 2022.
Earlier this year Stacey Ryan released “Over Tonight,” a soul-pop ballad and her most recent single, which she’s already performed on The Late Late Show with James Corden, her late-night debut. Of the origins of the song, she tells me, “That track – and every track on my upcoming EP – was written in a span of three weeks in February of last year, out in LA,” before going on to tell me that that particular song was written during less than favorable circumstances: “I was in a bad mood, and not having a great day… So, it’s kind of funny that that one ended up being one of my favorite songs ever.”
While Stacey Ryan’s debut EP is yet to received a release date, she tells me that it is essentially complete, and will include a few familiar numbers: “We had co-writers and producers coming in and out, and we had 20 or 21 songs, and picked our favorite songs and the ones with a common thread for the EP… Some of the songs I’ve released recently will be on there.” And her three most recent singles – “Fall In Love Alone,” “Deep End,” and “Over Tonight” – all have music videos that were collaborations with a friend of Ryan’s: “We worked with the same director, Nina Kramer, for all my music videos, except ‘Don’t Text Me When You’re Drunk.’” And apparently the videos for “Deep End” and “Over Tonight” were even recorded in the same day, at the same house, utilizing the outdoor pool for an afternoon shoot with “Deep End,” before bringing the cast and crew indoors to shoot “Over Tonight” that evening.
After this run of dates with Jake Wesley Rogers wraps on April 12th at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, Stacey Ryan will be headed to Europe and the UK to support Joshua Bassett, which she tells me she’s equally enthralled about: “I’ve never been to the Netherlands, and I’m super excited to go back to Paris, because I speak French! But the end of Spring and beginning of Summer is just such a nice time to be in Europe in general… But I feel like the shows are gonna be very different, which is also exciting, because Jake Wesley Rogers and Joshua Bassett are very different artists.” And while she tells me that the music on her EP is something that she’s been anxious to get out for quite some time, she also lets me know that there’s even more music well in the works: “This is music I’ve been waiting to release for probably a year now… It was my first experience with producers and songwriters, and the songs are exactly where I was a year ago, and to be able to hear that is really cool! But the album we’re looking to put out probably at the top of next year is already something different!”
*Get your tickets here.
