Lost Time has a gorgeous ethereal vibe, and I know that this song is something highly personal to you. Where did the inspiration for this song come from?

It came from a number of sources and a number of different times. The chorus which has the lyrics ‘are we ever gonna wake up, are we ever gonna make up for last time’, that melody and those lyrics popped into my head actually before the pandemic. I don’t know why some things end up in my brain (laughs!), but the chorus, the lyrics and the melody were kind of together for that part. I’ve got a daughter who’s now 8 and before the pandemic I was and I’m still really, really busy but the pandemic was kind of revelatory for me. I’ve changed how I do things for I think the better. Early in my daughter’s life I was on tour, rehearsing, teaching a lesson or in the studio. I was so like not present and I think that this song was my subconscious telling me that I needed to be more available because that time never comes back. You hear people say it all the time but it is so true. I would come back from a tour and my daughter would look like she’d doubled in size! (Laughs!) At that age they grow so fast and I think it was maybe me singing to myself like ‘wake up, this is it - there won’t be another chance to do this’. The pandemic helped me create a reset where I could reevaluate what I was doing, why was doing it and how I was doing it. I learned that I could do so many more things remotely. I do so much recording now remotely and I do lessons remotely and I would never have thought to have done some of that before. There was a need for it. It’s made me more available. So the rest of the song, that was written after the pandemic and it was written with a little bit of a different light. And there’s a lot of desperation. Honestly, I think it’s kind of a depressing song but also I’d like to think that there is some string of hope in the music

I think it’s an absolutely wonderful song for the very reasons you have shared and an opinion that we’ve shared before in a Rock Today is that there is nothing more rock ‘n’ roll than being a great dad. I Wanna Destroy You has, for me, a Bowie-meets-U2 dancey quality to it, and it’s a very different version of the The Soft Boy’s protest song. Why did you choose to cover this song, and was it a conscious decision to bring the production up as opposed to doing a straight cover?

Yes, you are very correct again! Sometimes when I cover a song I want to do it totally different but with that song I didn’t want to take away from what was already just amazing about it. Something about that song has always resonated with me from the first time I heard it. It’s just one of those songs that is so internalised in my psyche, and when I think about why I chose to cover that now, it started to feel so relevant. As you say it is a protest song and I think that maybe it was my reaction to what was going on. I’m hearing the lyrics in a slightly different way now. I don’t think Robyn Hitchcock ever intended to say that he wanted to destroy anybody. He is singing about nuclear war or government, he was singing from a different perspective. What I was seeing around me, in the United States at least, was so much vitriol and so much ‘us versus them’. I guess it would be like tribalism happening here and it was disturbing and it’s still happening here. It’s maybe mellowed out a little bit but the days where people that thought a little differently or who didn’t vote the same, they could go out and have a drink and laugh and talk about their differences and why they think what they think, that was completely gone. There was just so much blocking of people. Communication, civility, listening to other people – it was out the window. So that’s how I felt. I guess I just wanted people to hear the song again, listen to it and think about how that might affect how they see things. It made me think about me. Like anybody, I can get sucked into seeing my perspective being the only right one. It’s never that simple. Most people aren’t out to get other people and it’s too easy to get that in your mind erroneously. I just thought it was a relevant song and that maybe there’s a new interpretation for it. As far as the production is concerned, rather than try to reinvent it, just as an example, a record I put it out in 2020, Moshi Moshi under Ryan and Pony, there was one cover on the album which was Prince’s I Would Die For You. Prince had recently died and it was interesting song to me and I always loved that song. The idea was to try and make it sound like ‘What if Joy Division or New Order had covered a Prince song? What would it sound like?’. And that was the idea, but on this one I didn’t want to do something like that. I didn’t want to try and reinvent it. When I hear the song I like the rawness, I like the guitars I like the tone. There are just some things that are here where I go if I recorded that song now I would do that. Like I always wanted to hear a break on that last chorus where the band stops and you hear the harmonies and they come back on the next bar. So I put that in in the version I did. I tried to be respectful of the original and make it with my own stamp on it of how I would like to hear it myself.

There are acoustic versions of I’m slipping and Lost Time within the maxi single release and they sound incredible in their stripped back form, and it made me wonder, did they actually start out as acoustic tracks, and is this where your songs and songwriting begins: always on an acoustic guitar? And picking up and what you said earlier about hearing the whole song in your head, can you actually be writing a song in your heard before you even go anywhere near a guitar?

That’s an excellent question! Those songs specifically I did not write on an acoustic guitar. In fact, with I’m slipping, the first thing I heard was that riff. I heard it in my head and I grabbed a guitar. I usually use Voice Memos on my iPhone to quickly put down ideas so I had made a Voice Memo with that riff and then I just kind of pieced things together from there. And then other ideas that I have for the sound like a lyric, I usually have a memo on my iPhone that I use for that. Other melodic ideas like other instrumental parts that I put in there, I’ll use Voice Memos. If I have time I will start building a track on my iPhone GarageBand. I use that for very quick documentations of ideas. Lost Time I actually wrote on a keyboard so I had the melody in my head and then I went to a keyboard first and then started building the track. In fact there were no guitars on it for a long time. I had to add the guitars because I felt like ‘this needs a guitar’. It was all keyboard! I put on an electric bass because there was some synth bass on there. I think there are four basses on that song. The guitars weren’t an afterthought but I came up with guitar parts after the track was fully built with keyboards only. The reason I do that I guess is because I’ve always believed that if a song can translate to chords, melody and lyrics, if that is going to be captivating - at least in my own opinion like when I’m writing a song - then I know that it’s a song that I can feel proud of putting out there. If the song is relying on other things then the substance of the song is not as strong as I would like it to be. Sometimes I do that as kind of an experiment but the other reason I do that is because I am doing acoustic shows and I thought it was kind of an appropriate thing to do since I would be playing them acoustically. They are still different because when I do it again I will loop things, like on the acoustic version of I’m Slipping, there is a mandolin and a ukulele and piano – stuff I can’t loop with a guitar live but I think it’s still more in the spirit of what I would do in an acoustic show.

It’s interesting because on more than one occasion you’ve used the term ‘experimenting’. These aren’t just great songs but sonically they are groundbreaking. How important was it for you to explore new sounds on this release? It sounds like this is a key part of who you are as an artist.

Absolutely! I guess I get bored easily! (Laughs!) So I like to find things that are interesting to me so I’m listening to other peoples music and I gravitate towards those things that make me wonder what they are and question how they did that. I never think that those are substitution for a good song, you’ve got to have the song in place, but once you’re into the production end of it and the arrangement it’s like that stuff is really interesting to me. So you’re totally right, that is a huge part of it for me and I always like to evolve it, I just don’t like staying in the same place for too long. But there is a spirit of experimentation that is always there that just manifests itself in a different way from time to time. I’m working on some stuff now… Brian Eno created this app (Bloom – Ed) which creates chord tones. You can say ‘G Lydian’ or whatever it might be and it will create soundscapes. So I’m working on trying to incorporate that into a song, taking the Brian Eno thing and then looping it, augmenting it with other things and using it as the basis of a track. That stuff is exciting to me! It still needs a song over it but it’s kind of cool way to get inspired to write.

The artwork with the black-and-white vortex is again simple but very powerful, the perfect visual representation of I’m Slipping. I’m just glad it’s stationary, although I can see how it would release all sorts of hypnotic repercussions were it to be on a turntable. Do you have any plans for a vinyl release?

Definitely! 100% there will be a vinyl release of this but it will be the full record. From the maxi single the only songs that will be on there will be I’m Slipping and Lost Time. I probably won’t put I Want To Destroy You on there. That’s kind of an exclusive to the maxi single. At least that’s the plan right now! So it will be other all new songs. I’m going to be doing more singles leading up to that – more singles, more videos and yes, vinyl for the full length release. The maxi single came as an idea because originally I was going to do a 7 inch single but I don’t know if you’re familiar with the amount of time it takes to get records back from press pressing plants, it’s like a year! It’s easing a little but I’m hoping that by the time I have the whole record mastered and ready to go it won’t take that long for the vinyl to come out but I figured I would wait. And then I just remembered seeing maxi singles, and that’s just something that disappeared. I remember that you can could buy a maxi single and it would have the single and then like a dance version remix and the acoustic version and all these other things. So I just thought ‘Oh wait a minute! That’s what I need to do – a maxi single!’ Cassette turnovers are way faster and there was just this fad hipster thing to make cassettes. They definitely seem to go better than CDs.

Check out the video to Lost Time below and then read on for part 3!

As our conversation draws to a close we reflect on what an incredibly special release the I’m Slipping maxi single really is. Full on electric tracks balanced with gorgeous acoustic versions and even a dance remix. The imagination, creativity and commitment to experimentation that’s gone into creating this package really shines through, and it’s with a highest of recommendations that we invite you to head over to www.ryansmithsolo.com to find out more.

In the meantime, check out the video to I Wanna Destroy You below.