Ben Ryan

Downtown Again is out now.  Here's the story. I wrote this song way back in 2023. At the time, I was living in an apartment in Arlington, VA. At the end of the day, my standard operating procedure was to head downstairs, take up a barstool, and order myself a drink. The bar was Bronson Bierhall, and if you're an Arlington resident (ex-military, government consultants and tech homies unite) you may know the place. It was my ‘local spot’ and I spent many a night there. I was there during good times (success…

I've been thinking about guitars lately. Mainly, acoustic guitars since that's what everyone's playing in the Nashville songwriting circles. In the Army, you'd call it a primary weapon system. It's your tool, your companion, and you better make sure you know how to use it. The difference is that in the Army they hand you a rifle, but as a songwriter you get to choose your own guitar. I'm very interested in why people choose the guitars they do, whether it's purely aesthetics or an actual tone difference…

This week I turned 29. It’s an ominous number, and it carries weight. It has this air of “the next one’s the big one” that makes you want to pull up the covers over your head for a little longer. It’s kind of like riding the subway and counting down the stops until your destination. Even if you like where you’re headed, there’s a certain serenity to knowing you’re not quite there yet. But now I feel like the next stop is the big one, and I’m making sure I have my bag around one shoulder so I don’t miss it…

He said “I love the fall. The leaves. I wish it would stay like this all year."

“Yeah,” she responded slowly, looking away. After a pause, “But isn't it a little scary sometimes?” 

“What's so scary about leaves?” he laughed as one gently floated down and landed next to them, joining the canvas of already splattered oranges and browns and reds covering the sidewalk. “They're not gonna hurt you." He leaned back on the bench and imagined a world in which falling leaves were heavy enough to do real damage. That'd…

Here's a simple post about being proud of my friends. My friend Patrick Budd is releasing his magnum opus of a song today. It's called Cigarettes. I'm not a smoker, but Cigarettes has been in my life for over two years now. Through all the open mics, all the shows, all the demos, you could say I've secondhand smoked at least a few packs by now.  

The song is about reckoning with your hometown. It's about your future fighting your past. It's about having one foot in the life you've always known and the other…

What follows is a thoughtful analysis of the role of alcohol in my life. It's enlightening,  groundbreaking, and some might even say earth-shattering. As a musician living in Nashville, no one has done what I'm about to do. No one has ever, and I mean EVER, taken a step back and questioned their relationship with alcohol. So, take notes, and prepare to tell your friends that you were here first. 

That overdone sarcasm is purely to say “I know, I'm not special." But in the past few weeks I've been seriously…

Everyone dreams. That's not a groundbreaking statement, I know. We all sleep and we all have brains (some larger than others). We all have thoughts, concerns, hopes, relationships, and other confusing experiences that we have to work through in the middle of the night. The universe knows we need to live at least part of our life in the imagined, in the subconscious, in the impossible. The interesting thing to me is that we don't remember our dreams. As important as they are, we forget them. Why is that? Why…

Are we what we do or do we do what we are? A little chicken or the egg dilemma for ya. About a week ago I outed myself as an Army guy. I spent a month out in the field and felt obligated to share about it. Obviously, most people close to me know about my military self, but for some of the connections I've made in the music biz over the past few years, this was new knowledge. I've spent years in the military and only left active duty when I caught the songwriting bug. I serve part time now but as an officer…

A few weeks ago I had to take a trip to Fort Bragg, NC for an Army course. They call Fort Bragg “the center of the universe” but for me it was still nine hours away. I don’t mind a long drive, and most of the time I prefer it over flying because I get time to sing in my truck, and singing on a plane is usually looked down upon. Even if the person sitting next to you doesn’t mind, the flight attendants are generally protective over their monopoly on public address privileges. And since they control the…

You don't know what goes into a project until you do it. I figure that's the way it should be, since, if you did, you probably wouldn't do it. I feel like that's life in a sense, if you knew as a kid all of the trouble that would go into the next 80+ years of your life you might just say “holy cow no way I can handle that… I just wanna sit here and watch cartoons forever.”  But like life, once it's started you don't get to just call it off. You gotta see it through.  

Almost a year ago now I started the…