Singer Songwriter Ryan Bisio Captivates Audiences from the Rose Side of the Thorn
By Vanessa Garcia
Amidst the array of artists who play regularly at Monterey Live is Ryan Bisio. His music is a sweet and soulful blend of acoustic guitar, piano balladry, blues, folk, and jazz. This singer/songwriter started his musical career playing piano at the age of six, which he won, interestingly enough, in the Junior Olympics. As a child, the classically trained artist began playing Beethoven and Frederic Chopin, was influenced by Michael Jackson, inspired to play guitar by Dave Mathews’ Crash, and is somehow highly moved by the gloomy and sinister sounding Tom Waits. Bisio’s love for the written word as a talented writer also produces touching, poignant, and emotional lyrics that anyone can easily melt to if they’ve ever been in love.
Bisio’s first album, Sketches, released in 2005, is described as sketches of the portrait he would later make in his songwriting. He depicts that album as being made deliberately rough, the way a painter sketches a portrait he will eventually paint, because as he puts it, “I wasn’t a painter then.”
Well, if he didn’t consider himself a painter then, he is definitely one now. His new album, Rose Side of the Thorn, is set for release in early April. It’s a musical collection of 16 songs from the last 3 ½ years of his life, as he describes them touching upon an array of spectrums, genres, emotions, and stories. The album title symbolizes the “good and bad, black and white, the rose and the thorn, the honesty of life,” and the two sides of everything as there is “no love without pain, you can’t have joy without sorrow.”
Bisio’s songs were first introduced in Europe last year when he played both music and basketball professionally in Copenhagen.
Fortunately for us in the Monterey Bay you can listen to his new album monthly at Monterey Live. His performances are intimate, captivating, and endearing, as the artist contains the ability to both lull the audience in melodic performance, and crack a joke or two between songs. He incorporates the groove oriented, tap-your-feet, guitar playing influence of Dave Mathews with the gentle and heartrending inspiration of Elliot Smith.
It’s no surprise that Bisio is a talented songwriter because he is also a talented writer in general, avidly writing short stories and letters to friends and family. “If I’m not writing in general I’m probably not writing songs.”
With each song containing its own personality, he listens to his music as it tells him what to write.
“I treat my songs like people, I treat them the way that I would want to be treated, they all have different personalities, they were all conceived in different places…they’ve all been born in different ways and I have to treat them differently and I have to make them all get along with each other which isn’t always easy.”
Now that a good amount of Rose Side of the Thorn has been introduced to audiences in Europe and Monterey, Ryan Bisio will be touring it this spring in Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Denver, and other spots in between.
I asked Ryan what ultimately moves him as an artist and what allows to him to constantly create such moving music. Simply put, he said “I do it to perform, I do it to express, I do it to try to heal people. I do it to try to make them feel good. And in the end it makes myself feel like…myself.”
Check out Ryan Bisio before he goes on tour March 4th at Monterey Live 414 Alvarado Street. Show starts at 8:30pm.
Rose Side of the Thorn available soon!
www.RyanBisio.com
www.myspace.com/ryanbisio
