Chapter 20
Twenty
Subject: Hey
Hey Ellie.
Just a proof of life to prevent you from calling mom on me. Yes, I’ve gotten all your messages. Sorry I don’t really feel like talking at the moment. I’ll let you know if/when I do.
Tbh, I’m still trying to figure out what happened myself.
The gist of it I guess is that she and I almost got caught together.
It wasn’t the first time. Maybe that was the problem.
I thought I’d noticed a car following us when we came out of Logan, but when we got out of the city everything seemed fine.
My mistake. That same car found R and I over in Hamilton when we split from the group. Must have tracked us that far.
We were parked on a side street, stealing more time together, and all I remember is seeing a flash through the windshield, and then she flipped.
She knew it was a camera before I did. She was out of the car, running toward the guy—she paid him $700 on the spot to delete the photo and she posed for another one, making sure I was well out of frame.
Once he was gone I was like why the hell are you carrying that much money on you?
But she was . . . not in the mood to discuss it.
She was raging. She kept saying something like the one thing, the one thing I can’t afford to lose—which I guess is me, which should make me feel great, but obviously not now.
She didn’t want to lose me so she got rid of me before it could happen.
I tried to convince her. We had this whole knock down drag out fight and I’m not especially happy at how I reacted, but I was pissed.
Why does it matter? Why can’t you have both your career And me?
Why can’t you get over your dumbass hangups and stop being so weird about a normal adult relationship?
I don’t know, Ellie. It’s an unbeatable gig, but I might see what my other options are.
I can’t bear to be around her and yet be apart from her.
Nobody knows what we’re going through—S and J will talk business to me like everything’s normal and I smile and nod while meanwhile I’m just crumbling inside.
I’m going to have to play songs about myself, do you realize that? Our most intimate tracks, the ones we wrote together. I’ll be physically closer to her onstage than I ever am off it anymore.
I’ll stick out the rest of the album and tour. Then we’ll see.
—W
Mari
Look. I can’t speculate on what happened. That’s your job, isn’t it?
All I know is what I told you. And Ryan and Wilder were frosty with each other for the rest of the time that I knew them.
Both of them.
Jasmine
When Ryan got back to the studio after her trip to Hamilton, Wilder didn’t join us. I asked her where he was, and she shrugged, and I thought, Girl, we can’t be having another songwriting crisis.
I don’t know what happened between them, and I’m not going to gossip about any rumors to a journalist. I did pull Wilder aside and ask him if he was okay.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he said, and even when I stared him down for a long, hard moment, he didn’t break. So I let it be.
But to Ryan’s credit, it wasn’t a songwriting crisis.
There had been a few other melodies she’d been toying with before she left for the trip.
So far on the album works in progress, we had “Flowers on the Sill,” “Comeback Baby,” “Keep Me,” “Homecoming,” and “Wisteria.” I pulled up our recordings to continue where we’d left off, but Ryan shook her head.
“I think I’d like to go in a different direction for the second half of the album,” she said.
“Show me what you have in mind,” I told her.
She began to pick out a melody on her banjo, something dark and complex like I hadn’t heard since she’d started her career. It was minor, unpredictable, but something in me didn’t want to stop listening to it.
“Where did that come from?” I asked her. “Play it again.”
When she finished, she said, “At least I’m not having writer’s block anymore. This feels . . . more like a flood.”
Skip
We ended up naming the album Waterfall. It was the first project where Ryan and I had a real stylistic disagreement with each other. See, you had the first half—all those lovely romantic songs, these sweet wistful melodies, what have you.
And then, after “Wisteria,” you go off the deep end.
It starts with that eerie, melancholy song “Ropes”: Hands tied, tongue tied / Catching in my throat / I found myself immobilized / When you drove home alone.
/ There’s no going forward / And there’s no going back / When all these ropes have got me bound like that.
Then you have that anthemic, echoey “Way Way Down,” “Deliberate,” a grittier nod to old country in “Out of Gas,” “Unentwined”—more rope stuff—and finally “Hush,” that ends on a single haunting piano note.
It was an angsty album. And I told her, Ryan, we’ve got to be careful what order we put this in.
“It’s in the right order,” she said.
I didn’t have the balls that she did, I’ll admit it. But I also didn’t think it was the right time to take an artistic risk.
“What if we flip the album halves, or intersperse them?” I told her. “People want to leave feeling good, not like a ghost just walked through them.”
I think she took offense to that. She shot me with a glare.
“It’s in the right order,” she said again.
I called Andre about it. He said, “No fuckin’ way. You end on the summer bop, and in this case, it’s ‘Homecoming.’”
“I’m telling her,” I said. But she wouldn’t have it.
Maybe it was my own bias. I’d gotten too soft on Ryan, I was . . . worried about her. If an unknown artist had walked into Madcap with those songs, I’d’ve shaken their hand and congratulated them on being the next Johnny Cash or Springsteen in their dark and moody eras.
But Ryan’s songs, exceptional as they were, seemed to be coming from a place of personal difficulty.
Shows how much I know, anyway. Thank god I didn’t push it.
We released the album at the end of September, and surprise surprise, it shot right up like the others always did.
Sure, there were the few stupid headlines I’d been worried about, like Ryan Goes Emo or the meme that went around about her having such a hard life as a multimillionaire.
But the professional critiques were good.
Rolling Stone compared the mature depth of her voice to Adele, Hollywood Report said the album was a brilliant study in emotional control, how music can drag you through all five stages of grief even if you haven’t lived it yourself.
She kept on gliding. It was a good year for her—Album of the Year nomination, People’s Choice Award, Kids’ Choice.
The video for “Ropes,” another very avant-garde Serge production, won Best Pop at the VMAs.
I always sort of got the creeps from it, that sci-fi cinematography and all the CGI of the ropes snaking around Ryan while she walks through an abandoned research facility until she’s completely bound and emerges as some Ex Machina sort of cyborg. But visually, it was very cool.
I remember standing onstage with her at People’s Choice and looking out into that crowd, and thinking, How much longer can we sustain this momentum?
Where does she go from here, you know?
When you work with artists, you’re always looking out for the peak.
No one ever wants to reach that summit because of what’s on the other side.
But you will, someday. Like I said, even making one album is a miracle, and no one can do it indefinitely.
You’ll keep going until circumstances force you to stop, sure, but what do you do when someone newer and shinier comes along?
How do you forever produce new and original and groundbreaking stuff?
You don’t. We all have expiration dates, and that’s just the natural cycle of things.
People’s attention spans grow shorter every day.
I looked out into that vast darkness of the auditorium, and then I looked to my left, at Ryan, and I wondered if she felt the same thing.
And just for a moment there, she turned and looked back at me. And I knew she was thinking it too. I knew.
She smiled and nodded at me like we should set it aside and just enjoy this win. Because yeah, it was a good year for her. A really good one.
I didn’t know it would be one of our last.
Hollywood Report Magazine, February 2018
[The article is inset with a photo of Ryan on the red carpet in a long midnight-blue and gold gown, holding a gramophone trophy.]
Following a marathon award season sprint that saw her taking home People’s Choice, Kids’ Choice, and Best Pop awards among many other nominations and recognitions, Ryan Holding cinched a final win with Best Pop Vocal Album at this year’s Grammy Awards in January.
The star’s dualistic tour de force, Waterfall, has been described as Holding’s best work to date and comes with its own complement of gripping music videos directed by auteur Serge Chirkov and Holding herself.
With the win, Holding becomes the first female artist to earn the Best Visual Effects award and the first artist of any gender and genre to hold a Grammy for Favorite Country Album and Favorite Pop Album.
The wins come on the heels of a record-breaking world tour that has moved the needle of Holding’s wealth into the billionaire strata.
The only question now is: What’s next?
“Something big,” she told Hollywood Report with a smile Saturday evening. “The best is yet to come.”
Here’s looking forward to this pop sensation outdoing herself!