Artist: Ryan Liberty Megan & People
Album: El Songo
Album Release Date: October 1, 2023
Article Written by: Ryan Liberty Megan
Ryan Liberty Megan & People told us about each track on their latest album, El Songo. Let’s see what they have to say!
- The Tom Savini Intro
“So the album was pretty much done, and I was celebrating by spending the weekend at a Dawn Of The Dead reunion. While I was there, I met up with Tom Savini, who I had met a few times before. And it just dawned on me to ask him to do a spoken word intro for the album. Just because I wanted Tom somehow involved, because I’m a huge fan of his.
“And he said yes. And then I decided once I had that to produce a musical piece around just his quote. So I went back to Mike Snow, who’s been doing all my horns, and I described to him this fanfare thing that I wanted. He wrote it based on the instructions that I gave, and knocked it out of the park on the first run.
“So, I went to Samantha Bounkeua and asked her to do strings for it. Then, I was going to do the guitar solo, but I decided it’d be awesome to have someone cool to do it. So I had Robbie Seahag Mangano who’s an acquaintance of mine. He plays with all the former Zappa members like Grandmothers of Invention, and those bands that Zappa used to play in.
“So we worked on it and threw it together over a weekend, all these people remotely, and I put it through a bunch of tape modulation to sound like it was recorded to an old tape.
“And that’s it: It was good to go.”
- Chorus
“‘Chorus’ is a funny song. When I wrote it, the title was a funny placeholder for myself, where I would sing “Chorus” until I figured out lyrics later. I had the melody. I just didn’t know what the words were. And then it dawned on me that that worked perfectly for what the song was about.
“You get used to knowing yourself, or you get used to not knowing yourself, and it becomes kind of your identity to be lost. And you get good at being lost, and the song’s about finding comfort and the universality of that, to be lost and alone, but with everyone around you being lost and alone at the same time.
“Plus it just tickles the shit out of me to have a song named ‘Chorus,’ where the chorus has a chorus of people singing the word ‘chorus.’”
- Nevermind
“‘Nevermind’ was one of the first songs written.
“It’s one of the more personal ones. It’s about wanting people to love you and just clumsily trying to advertise your flaws to the world as virtues, but then just giving up mid-effort. Like, ‘Oh, never mind, it’s not even worth it,’ ‘I don’t need it,’ ‘I’m my own best friend,’ kind of thing. So that’s what that song is about.
“There’s a couple of songs on the album that are one-takers, which are songs that I sat and recorded on the fly, part of when I did the one-song-a-day exercise. So It just came out. That’s one of the reasons why I love it, is it just came out of me. All the words, the whole song. The only thing that came later was the guitar solo.”
- Oh
“‘Oh,’ is a freaking beast. I bit off more than I could chew with that one.
“It’s over 100 tracks. It was where I think I was going through a manic state, and I decided to spend all of my savings on session musicians. It’s got so much stuff going on in it. It’s got full string sections, full horn sections, a harp I think. Banjo. A whole choir of people. An organ – 2 different organists.
“So… yeah. It became just a very arduous song to finish. It was one of the last songs finished just because it was… there’s so much going on in it.
“And it’s a wonderful song about being glad that the world is ending. It’s just joyfully relishing in the end of the world.”
- Sweep
“So ‘Sweep,’ imagine it like a phone call that’s being made to the most fragile part of you, giving you instructions on how to survive other humans, how to survive humanity.
“And in the end, the most important part of that advice or sage wisdom is to be able to just sweep it away.
“You need to be able to let things go.”
- Fathers
“‘Fathers’ is the advice that I would give myself if I was my own dad. Like I was literally my dad, not me, but if I was my dad, David Allen Megan. But raising me.
“That’s basically what the song is. So it’s basically expressing the advice I wish my dad would have given me, or the perspective that I knew he had in him, but never gave to me.”
“My father had died shortly a few months before these songs kind of started. This was in the latter half of 2020.
“So a lot of these songs deal a little bit with that, and my wife’s dad died within a couple of months as well. Dog died, and uncle died, a couple of others died. It was a happy year. So, lot of death.
“And at the end of the song, there’s the last phone message that I got from my dad, which I somewhat regret. Because I’ve had to listen to that song like 5,000 times. And I feel a little guilty because I’m gonna give this to my family, and I don’t know, am I like emotionally abusing my family by putting this on there? Hopefully they see it as a nice homage – that’s what its intention is. Because you can hear his voice. He was just a very sweet man, you know, it wasn’t in him to give me salty advice.
“So I gave it to myself.”
- Break
“‘Break’ is one of my favorite songs on the album. It’s about envisioning life, using dream as a metaphor that you enter into life. You enter into a dream.
“And then at some point you wake up. and the dream’s over. and just existence as a dream. ‘Row, row, row your boat,’ and all that. And the bittersweet nature and beauty of being in a dream. And the splendour and glory of what a dream could be. And how that can be reality. And that can be life. You want all you want. And life is to be in the dream is to be in the dream world. Is it to be where everything is good? Where you can swim in an ocean of love. I never wanna wake up.”
”This was originally the closer and the idea was (when the album was still chronological) that this would be the end of the dream. So the end of that song is literally the end of the dream but I ended up liking the song so much, that I thought it’s gotta be in, you know. In the first 5, even 10 tracks or something like that. I ended up moving it down. But yeah, it’s no longer the last song.
“The concept of the album, in terms of running everything in chronological order. So it was the decision to move break that led to me being much more open to the tale of El Songo being a dream in itself, meaning it’s not chronological.
“It made sense to me, because dreams jump around and time is not linear. So it made thematic sense to move everything around.
“I knew it was the right decision before I knew why.”
- Spinning
“I wrote “Spinning” while struggling with adjustments to medication, so my head was literally spinning. When I originally recorded the demo of that song, I could barely lift my head, I could barely sit up.
“It’s about struggling with medication in a world where being on medication is seen as a weakness. It’s not easy. Because you have to expend all this extra effort hiding it. Whereas if it was a cast on your arm or wheelchair, or an IV or something like that, you wouldn’t get a second glance.
“So it’s just the struggle of knowing that I’ve gotta just spin through this and wait for it to resolve and wait for it to end. And I just have to be along for the ride. I can’t stop. There’s no going back. I have to wait for it to end. And being completely kind of out of control, but so detached from yourself that it doesn’t really matter. You have to make it not matter just to get through it.
“It was a really weird time for me when I wrote that song. The recording that’s on the album is me in that state. I made sure not to re-record that, to preserve it.
“It was also the first song that I started to learn harmonium and decided to try to put harmonium on every single song on the album. And now I’m addicted to harmonium.
“I saw Beck play one on stage once a long time ago, and it was one of the coolest sounding things, and I discovered that if you put a harmonium through layer after layer of different kinds of reverb that it has, it takes on this crazy whaling quality that sounds not like a harmonium, and you can hear in spinning. And “Spinning” was the song where I discovered that.
“And so now you can hear that wailing sound on several songs. Just because it became my signature thing.”
- Henry
“I wrote “Henry” in December 2020. I wrote it the day my dog died.
“Lived to 12 years old. Very good pup. Struggled with a lot of health issues. It was not easy. So yeah, that song.
“The great thing about “Henry” is that it emotionally captures me so well that I never have to struggle when I perform it, to get into the space that I need to be. It always puts me there thinking about that pup now.
“I thank Henry for a lot – it’s a good song, so I thank Henry for that as well.
- While
“‘While’ isn’t as spontaneous a recording. So there’s stuff like with ‘Sweep.’ there’s stuff stacked on top of it, but it was a first take, so the good ones are left in. The vocals on this one are of the first-take-run-through-of-me-writing-it kind.
“Very short, sweet song – I think it’s the shortest song on the album. Barely over a minute.
“It’s about waiting: waiting for life to show up.
“It was one of those songs where after I was done with it, I was like, ‘Oh, that could make a better, longer song,’ and I never bothered because I just loved the little moment that it captured.”
- Within
“‘Within’ is about repressing emotion until it turns you beautiful. It’s a positive spin on emotional repression – finding the positives of something that’s usually not very good, which is bottling up everything instead of dealing with things.
“It’s a scenario where you bottle up all the things that want to destroy you emotionally, all of your toxic crap, until it turns into a burning supernova and makes you beautiful from within, makes you glow with the radiation of the toxicity.
“It’s optimistic, you know?
“It has a choir that’s more masculine because men have problems with emotions and repression. They think that it makes them stronger. So this is kind of envisioning that perfect world where repression of emotions makes you better. Even though we know it most certainly doesn’t.
- Cookies
“‘Cookies’ is the ever-shifting focus of what matters to you in life, and coming back to the same realization that it’s actually love. What matters is love.
“Jumping around, finding all the things that can matter or aren’t supposed to matter, yet all you really want is love.
It’s kind of a recurring theme. When you’re alone, when you’re lonely. you expend so much effort to convince yourself that it’s okay not to be loved. But that’s a lie. and we all know it.
- Xmas Alone
“This was also a December song. This was actually a song written as a part of Christmas gifts that I wrote and performed spontaneously on Christmas of 2020 as gifts. And this one was to my step stepmother for spending her first Christmas without my dad. But it was retooled a little bit to be a little bit more broader lyrically later on. But that’s the genesis of that song.
- Where Ever
“This is another one-take song. It’s about being connected to someone, and no matter how you rationalize why you shouldn’t be, the connection persists. You just get connected to people sometimes, and there’s no apparent reason why. It’s inexplicable.
“I have people like that in my life where I swear I can go years and years without thinking about them. And then all of a sudden, they walk through that mental door, and it’s like not a day passed by. They don’t have to physically be there. I don’t have to see them. I just know that connection never really went away. They can be dead and that connection will still be alive.
“Generally speaking, it’s not a good or bad song in terms of emotional weight. It’s just acknowledging that It doesn’t have to make sense, why we’re connected to people. It’s just in us to be connected to people.
- Held
“‘Held’ is inspired by a family member of mine who is a narcissist, and has treated people (women, in particular) really badly throughout his whole life.
“It’s kind of a bird’s eye view of the push-and-pull dynamic between him and the women that he has in his life. It’s about that sense of ‘I’m entitled to everything and all of you. I’m entitled to your love, I’m entitled to be held,’ versus the impostor syndrome of like, ‘please, please let me hold you,’ and how those forces are toxic as hell. Bad forces that combine poorly together.
“And that’s why the chorus is kind of so huge and so big. Each chorus is from the perspective of either the narcissist or the enabler and each one is a call out – basically calling them on their bullshit like, “No, everything that you’re saying, everything that you’re doing, all these rationalizations, all of it boils down to this: you just want to be held.
“You both want the same thing, but from completely different perspectives and wanting to hold someone for yourself versus wanting to hold someone for someone else can destroy. When those two people get together, it can destroy both of them.
“I don’t know why I chose to end the album on that song, other than it’s a banger.
But it was really important for it to be. It became important to me, during the mixing of the song. to remove myself vocally, that my vocal presence was not needed in that conversation.
It happened by accident, because I was layering in background vocals, and I had mine turned off. And I realized it was far more honest without me in the mix.
“It was surprisingly one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, taking myself out of my own song. I mean, I still play instruments on it, but I don’t sing in it. so it’s the only song I don’t sing on.
“But again, it became very important for me. It was important for me that the center of the song not be a masculine one. Because the power dynamic needs to change in that relationship. I was really pissed off at a certain family member when I wrote that song. I was horrified by how they were treating the women in their life and I wanted a choir of women to answer that, to shift the center of power back to where it should be.”
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