Chapter 8 Skip
Eight
Skip
But our budget for this sort of thing had grown. And so had Ryan’s ambition.
We had five singles planned for Firebird, and videos to go along with each: “Neon Dreams,” “Blue Jean Baby,” “Didn’t You Realize,” “Whiskey and Wine,” and finally, “Alcatraz.” There was a lot of creative opportunity there—Ryan asked if she could be more involved this time around, and I said of course.
She came ready to that first meeting.
“‘Shoes on the Dash’ was good,” she said. “But what if we did more storytelling? All these songs would be really great for a short film format.”
I was already seeing dollar signs—but in our expenses, not our bottom line. “What do you have in mind?” I said.
Ryan raised her eyebrows at me. “What’s our budget?”
I shook my head. “How about you write a proposal first. Then we’ll see what’s possible.”
Well, shit. Little did I expect her to pull out this huge manila folder, all fat with notes and screen directions and these crazy collages made out of magazine clippings.
I remember just looking over at Serge—this very serious, cerebral, well-respected director who had clawed his way up to the VMAs from Staten Island, where he’d spent his childhood filming the neighborhood with a Super 8 camera—and I wondered, What the hell could he be thinking?
Serge Chirkov, film director and auteur
She had grit. I remember watching her lay out all these, well, scrapbook pages, essentially, and hearing her talk through her ideas for each video.
A young girl her age, I would have expected them to be just that—ideas, and nothing more. But Ryan Holding had envisioned the piece from beginning to end.
People see a difference between cinema and music videos.
Perhaps they think of the type of music video that is simply a stand-in for a live performance, such as Ryan’s first foray, or the many videos of the ’80s and ’90s in which the artists sing to the camera and do little else.
But Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Madonna—I think Ryan took great inspiration from these.
“Material Girl” was most certainly included in her printouts.
The music video should be a little gem of cinema.
And no, Ryan was not an expert in what she was trying to convey. I know there has been criticism that she was never formally trained in film, yet she received writing and directing credits for some of these videos, culminating, of course in the magnum opus that was “Hear Me Now.”
But racking focus, depth of field, mise-en-scène—this is not what matters for a successful piece of media. Ryan was a storyteller.
“What if the video for ‘Neon Dreams’ features two lovers?” she said. “They’ve come to Las Vegas together—maybe back in the ’60s, so we can have all this original Ocean’s Eleven glamour—but their fate changes, and they have to leave separately.”
Her eyes had this light to them as she spoke. It was the look of someone who truly believed in what she was selling.
“What causes this change?” I asked.
“Maybe he loses all his money and can’t bear to face her,” she said. “And she wins big, but before she has the chance to tell him, he’s gone.”
“Ah,” I said. “Very tragic. So they have both lost, in the end.”
“Yes!” Ryan seemed to be pleased I understood.
She was able to convey the feeling, the thrust, the patina of the story that she wanted to bring to life, which is much harder to teach than technical skill. And that is why her music videos were beloved.
Skip
With Serge’s buy-in, we were able to strategize.
To keep costs manageable, “Blue Jean Baby” and “Didn’t You Realize” would be these sort of fun, homegrown videos.
Ryan was on a soundstage for “Blue Jean Baby,” with a set that we could put together by hand; we ordered a few pallets of fake silk flowers and had her sing against a really colorful background.
“Didn’t You Realize” was a cakewalk: just a video montage of Ryan’s performances to date with shots from fan meet and greets and exclusive backstage footage of her having fun with folks in the VIP lounge, goofing around with Dust and Roses and Montana Line.
This meant that the remaining three videos would receive a very polished, high-production-value treatment with all the stops pulled out: “Neon Dreams,” “Whiskey and Wine,” and “Alcatraz.” In fact, Ryan had an overarching vision for these three, a trilogy, if you will: They’d follow the same couple from their fallout in Vegas.
It wouldn’t be overt, but she wanted fans to be able to figure out the throughline if they were paying attention.
“Whiskey and Wine” would feature the man in a dingy piano bar in LA, where he’d run away to work after losing everything in Vegas.
His paramour or what have you, the woman from “Neon Dreams,” finally finds him there, but it’s too late—he’s planned a robbery in an attempt to regain some of his former financial stability, and he’s going through with it.
I mean, you know where this is going. He gets caught, and “Alcatraz” is the final installment. His lover leads a daring jailbreak, and they ride off into the sunset. I’ve gotta hand it to Ryan, though—she nailed that ambiguous ending.
Jasmine
I loved that final shot of “Alcatraz.” You have this action-packed story arc, these star-crossed lovers that you’re just rooting for—and this badass female character who turns the whole damsel-in-distress trope on its head.
But just as they break out of jail together and you think it’s gone the way of your typical love story, the camera pans from the man, who’s smiling out the passenger window, over to the driver’s-side window.
You see Ryan’s reflection, and the smile slowly fades from her face as she looks at the road behind her.
It’s a great moment. Is she regretting going to such dramatic lengths for this man? Is she wondering what she left behind? What will become of her now that she’s a fugitive too? We’ll never know.
People talked a lot about that trilogy after Ryan’s disappearance. It’s been picked apart for clues, just like her other videos. They say she knew she was going to disappear even then; that she started leaving secret messages for those who wanted to find her.
Do I believe those theories?
No. I’ll tell you that right now. I don’t, I can’t . . . because Ryan was so so smart, and if she genuinely wanted to be found, I believe she would have been found by now. I really do.
Either she went away without the intention of ever coming back, without telling any of us, and without contacting us since, which I find hard to believe, or . . .
I’m sorry, this is hard for me. Still.
Or something happened to her. I know that’s very much in the realm of possibility. She stepped on a lot of people’s toes.
So.
Mari
Ryan was encouraged by the secret messages she put in her first CD booklet; I think a lot of the fans told her about their experiences deciphering them.
It sounds like there was even a Myspace forum for people to talk about the different quotes and discuss what they meant.
So she wanted to give them even more for the videos.
There are breakdowns everywhere online of the Firebird arc, but the major ones are the bouquet of bluebonnets the gambler character brings Ryan in “Neon Dreams,” a nod to her Texas home base and first album; the Massachusetts state flag in the background of the “Whiskey and Wine” piano bar; and the Alcatraz inmate that has Ryde or Die tattooed on his arm in “Alcatraz.” Ryan really cemented the fans’ names for themselves with that inclusion—people went wild on Myspace.
People have theories about the other video singles and say that the plastic marigolds in “Blue Jean Baby” spell something out or that there’s secret messages in the scrapbook pages her character is crafting.
I remember stumbling into some really weird chat rooms when I’d procrastinate writing my college application essays.
There were these guys who were dead-on convinced the marigolds spelled OBEY and that Ryan was part of this government operation to rise to fame and control young minds.
Another group had dedicated themselves to picking apart every shot of the “Didn’t You Realize” montage to look for Simon McCarthy and, I don’t know .
. . prove that he was at her shows? We already knew that.
I sat in the chat room for a while and watched them debate the “evidence” ad infinitum—he was there in the front row in San Diego, he brought a friend with him in Las Vegas, there was a whole trafficking plot in the works.
I couldn’t stomach much of it and hoped Ryan was too busy to see anything like that.
I mean, these chat rooms were definitely fringe groups, but looking back, they were a sign of what was to come.
And you have to remember that she wasn’t even eighteen yet.
There were already people who were too online back then, who would rather sit in a basement on a desktop and analyze footage of a teen star’s concert to try to find a predator.
I told myself to look for a silver lining.
More and more people were finding Ryan’s music; the videos got into the CMT rotation and started to reach a larger audience even outside of the country sphere.
I even heard the stoners at Hamilton-Wenham who only listened to rock and metal talking about the prison-break scene in “Alcatraz” and how it was similar to Shawshank Redemption.
For the record, there weren’t any Easter eggs in the other two video singles, unless you count the old Hamilton and bluegrass festival clips in “Blue Jean Baby”—at least nothing intentional.
And I know for a fact that Serge and Skip were careful not to include any footage of McCarthy in “Didn’t You Realize. ” Those claims are bullshit.
My favorite Easter eggs, though, were the ones only we would know: the cabbie wearing a newsboy cap, Frank’s signature hat, in “Neon Dreams”; the I Survived Storrow Drive shirt, a nod to Boston; the characters stopping for the Italian ice that Ryan and Jas loved on their way out of town after the jailbreak.
And a harp charm on Ryan’s character’s bracelet in “Whiskey and Wine,” just for me.
Skip
Those music videos were gold for Firebird.
They built hype and intrigue that we could never have managed by repeating the first album’s marketing strategy alone.
I know I talk about momentum like I’m a broken record, but the beautiful thing about it is that the more bulk you add, the more you build on your existing success, the faster you climb.
You know those spinning merry-go-rounds on kids’ playgrounds, those metal death traps with hardly anything to hold on to?
Once you get them going, it just takes a little push to bring it to breakneck speed.
I was still working with other artists, of course. Madcap had a full roster to cultivate. But it was becoming more and more clear to me that Ryan was our diamond in the rough.
We released Firebird in September 2008 and planned it so that one video of the trilogy would drop per month to build anticipation, with “Blue Jean Baby” and “Didn’t You Realize” falling in between to keep them satisfied.
The buzz built itself. People were buying the album just to see if they could guess what would happen in the next video.
Ryan headed out on tour again in November, this time for a coast-to-coast run with a brief holiday break that would hit LA, Vegas, Austin, Chicago, DC, New York, you name it. We pulled out all the stops.
At our little team Christmas party that year, I gave Ryan a tiny box with a ribbon on it. She opened it to find the Post-it I’d folded up small.
She read it. “Eight weeks?” she asked.
But Jas looked over at me and raised her eyebrows. “Does that mean what I think it does?” she said.
I nodded. “Firebird’s been top of the Billboard 200 for eight weeks now,” I said to Ryan. “Know what the record is for a female country album?”
“What?” She sat ramrod straight.
“Ten,” I said. “So if you can keep this up . . .”
“Do you think I can?”
“I do,” I said. “But you’ve already broken your own record, and that’s pretty damn good in my book.”
It ended up being just before the Austin show that we got the news. I told Ryan just before she went on, and I swear she had tears in her eyes.
When she finished “Neon Dreams,” the first number, she indicated that the band should continue to vamp, and she went to the edge of the stage.
“Austin,” she said. “You know what I found out just before I walked out here?”
A roar went up.
“I just found out that Firebird broke the record for the longest-running female country album at the top of the Billboard 200! That is because of you! You are my heart and my everything!”
She brought the house down that night. She’d made it.