biography
Written by Stephen Deusner
For Ryan James Brewer, an Australian transplanted to Nashville, the word Tender carries a lot of weight. Tenderness is a virtue, a mood, a motivation, and perhaps the best word to describe the music he makes. On his debut record, which carries that word as its title, he writes and sings songs that collide bruised vocals with carefully crafted melodies, intricate beats with woozy soundscapes. He then intersperses them with curious interludes that blend found sounds and stray noises. But Brewer understands that Tender is also a verb, and he tenders his vulnerabilities the way you might tender a resignation, presenting them to his listener for recognition and approval.
“I wanted to find strength in vulnerability,” he says. “I wanted to challenge the masculine idea that vulnerability is a negative attribute. So this record addresses my struggles with depression, sexuality, guilt, and shame as openly as possible.” As he sings on “Limits of the Heart,” the record’s oldest track and rousing climax, “I’ll show you why together we might forget the limits of the heart.” He might be singing it to a potential lover, or he might be singing it to you, the listener, to hint at music’s power to connect us through our shared desires and weaknesses.
“I’ve been working on that song in some form or another for seven years,” he says of “Limits of the Heart.” “I always believed in that song because it was easy to write. Writing doesn’t usually come easy for me, because it takes me a while to pin down a line. But that one happened in an afternoon.” Brewer wrote it while he was living in Melbourne, where he was a mainstay on the music scene, but he already had his sights set on Nashville. While he was excited about making the leap to a bigger music city, switching hemispheres was difficult for him, as it would be for anyone. “You take everything you own—or at least everything you really care about—and go to another country where you don’t know anybody.” Brewer really cared about “Limits of the Heart” in particular, so he packed it away, checked it through customs, and dusted it off in Tennessee.
For seven years Brewer worked on the song doggedly, recording it and then recording it again and again as he tried to do justice to its thorny sentiments. Meanwhile, he set his solo aspirations aside and focused on booking gigs as a sideman and session musician. As a way to pay the bills, he played drums and keyboards on other people’s songs and toured with other artists, including Robyn Hitchcock, Ben Kweller, and Tristen. With each session and each show, he got a clearer vision of the kind of solo artist he wanted to be, and he got closer to figuring out “Limits of the Heart.” He knew he had to push himself musically and lyrically, taking risks with what he revealed about himself.
After writing a suite of open-hearted songs, Brewer flew out to San Pedro, California—and camped out at the studio of his friend Jon Joseph (Børns, Gothic Tropic). “I needed another person to bounce ideas off of. I needed someone who could say, No, you don’t need to do 45 more takes of this part because you got it on the second take.” Together, the two-man crew played every instrument on Tender and worked out every song in painstaking detail, even re-recording “Limits of the Heart” one last time, just to make perfectly sure it fit the sound of the LP. While they found inspiration and direction in the yearning poetry of Rimbaud, the ingenious beats of Madlib, and the meditative r&b of Frank Ocean, the record introduces a singular artist already confident in his abilities and eccentricities, rethinking pop music as a tool for self-expression: No one else but Ryan James Brewer could have made Tender.
“Traveling to California to work with Jon was an initially strange experience,” says Brewer. “Like a lot of people, I hadn’t really left my house all that much in the previous fourteen months. In the evenings after spending the day in the studio, I spent some time seeing a couple of mates I know in the LA area, but the majority of my time was spent in solitude. I did befriend a security guard named Brandon, who was on the floor of my hotel guarding new arrivals from the ships in the L.A. Harbor. On my final night there I brought him and his colleague dinner and we ate in the sixth-floor elevator lobby while he obsessed over UFO videos.”
Brewer and Joseph also came up with the idea of including short interludes between songs—curious sonic collages like the tense “The One with the Long Hair” or the appropriately funereal “Taps.” They serve as exclamation points on the record, amplifying the ideas and sentiments of the songs. “Chercher La Petite Bête,” the longest of these interludes, features scraps of overheard conversation between two French women on a train in Paris. Brewer liked the sound of their voices and the rhythm of their exchanges, so he recorded them and had the tape translated. “They were really mad at someone they worked with, and they used that phrase to describe their behavior. It means Looking for the little beast. It’s a way of saying someone’s trying to find the slightest imperfection in order to make a point.” For Brewer that conversation and more specifically that phrase became a reminder not to seek perfection in himself or his music, but rather to leave room for imperfections, for happy accidents, for moments of serendipity. “I wanted those interludes to help create this immersive world for the listener.”
Tender reveals an artist intrigued by startling contrasts of moods and textures—downbeat yet upbeat, hurting yet hopeful. Opener “End of a Life” pairs its ebullient pop energy with dark subject matter; it’s a bright pop song about death—specifically, Brewer’s own struggles with suicidal thoughts. “The way things feel tonight,” he sings as the music bounces around him, “feels to me like the end of a life—and that’s alright.” Then a guitar solo shatters the song, each note a shard pieced together and taped into place. “That’s what drew me to artists like Sparklehorse in particular, whose struggles with depression were very well publicized. I was eighteen years old when I first heard It’s a Wonderful Life, and I appreciated the fact that he wrote about it so openly.”Brewer wants to do something similar for his listener. At heart he wants to reassure them that they’re not alone, that someone else shares such dark impulses. By setting them to tape, he masters them.
Offsetting the heavy subject matter, Brewer’s sense of humor, defined by his deadpan delivery and pithy social commentary, shines bright on Tender. “The Ministry of Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Algorithm” is an unusual love song, one ideally suited for our times: what Brewer describes as “a post-ironic critique of social and digital media framed as a romantic conversation with an algorithm”.
Full of big ideas, intense emotions, and extremely catchy hooks, Tender is a springboard for an artist rethinking how pop music can sound, what it can say, and how it can connect people. “Making this record,” he says, “was definitely a way of working through some things for myself, but I wanted to leave the listener with some kind of insight, something they can identify with and hopefully carry forward.”