Musician binds people through the deep emotion of song

Rylan Fischer performs for a crowd. Photos submitted

By Tom Victoria

Rylan Fischer makes music to express what words alone can’t do.

“Music says what words can't,” he said. “It's the easiest way to invite people into your universe. There's no art form quite like it.”

Rylan, 22, explained why music is his art form of choice.

“You can imbue words with so much more energy and meaning,” he said. “When you sing them, it's like adding that extra element. It opens up people's minds to the more emotional piece of what you're saying. That emotional aspect of music is what really drew me to it. I've always been a super emotional person, so music has always spoke to me in that way.”

Rylan, a college student in Washington State, described his style.

“I would call it ambient singer/songwriter,” he said. “It's some sort of meld between ambient electronica and singer/songwriter. Those are the two worlds that I love and I'm trying to bring them together.”

Rylan’s latest release has a dark tone.

“It's a song called BFF,” he said. “I would call it a dark, ambient pop song. It's about giving up too much of yourself for someone because you're so infatuated with them. I'm really excited about it. I've been working tirelessly on it because if you're not in the right headspace or you can't resonate with the words that you've written down, people will hear that in your delivery. It feels fraudulent.”

Rylan said the song is authentic.

“I want to be in that performance mind space when I deliver this song,” he said. “It's got attitude, and it's got this braggadociousness about it that I need to get in the right headspace for. Typically, I'm a pretty subdued, chill personality, but this song requires a little more energy. So I've been really trying to focus that energy.”

Rylan’s previous tune 2GO! debuted in August.

“It's probably my poppiest release,” he said. “I wanted to make a song that sounds happy about a really difficult concept for me, which is letting go of things that I hold on tightly to. A lot of my friends are graduated from college now. Relationships I've had that don't service me any longer. I've grown out of them. Things like not being able to have control over how my life goes.”

Rylan decided to turn the accompanying emotions into song.

“I wanted to take all those concepts, those hard things to talk about and turn them into a fun pop song,” he said. “It was so that I could allow myself to let go of them and give them up to the universe. I'm someone who makes light of serious things because serious things are difficult for me. It was a way for me to make light of all the serious things that were bothering me, but under the surface of that, express them and get them out of my body and into a song.”

Rylan said music is a way to link folks to their emotions.

“Part of my background is musical theater,” he said. “I thought it was so cool to see how you could tell a story and have all the emotional pieces of it reach people more quickly because it was a musical versus a stage play.”

Rylan said music connects people.

“It binds us all together,” he said. “A lot of my favorite memories with music are watching some of my favorite artists perform live and then thinking to myself how cool it would be to do that one day: reach people and bring people together and have people laugh and smile together and cry together. That's such a cool concept. A lot of people, especially right now, are out of touch with their emotions. I see it being a college student. A lot of people kind of robot go about their day and are so overwhelmed by stimulus that they can't even get in touch with their own emotions.”

Rylan said being a musician enables him to bring disparate individuals together.

“To be able to create a community in a space and have everyone feel together, that's an opportunity that I've always wanted to have,” he said. “Getting to do that on small scales, playing little shows and then hopefully scaling it up and playing even bigger shows, that's the dream, really.”

Rylan’s music is inspired from a variety of places.

“I pull from a lot of sources lyrically,” he said. “I've struggled with anxiety a lot and compulsive behavior a lot. It's gotten me in trouble in past relationships where I have so much I want to say at the time, but I can't. I write a lot about loves gone by or loves that I'm trying to build. Love is a really complicated and strange emotion, and I like to talk about it in an abstract way. I feel like the abstraction of love almost makes it easier for some people to resonate with what I'm saying.”

Rylan’s musical inspirations employ the same theme.

“If I turn a love song into a more abstract idea, people are more broadly able to relate to it,” he said. “A lot of my favorite artists do that. I'm really inspired by Frank Ocean as a writer because I think he says things so profoundly and poetically, but also so matter of fact. The duality of that has always inspired my writing. I would love to be as profound as Elliott Smith, but there are times you just have to say something and mean it. People saying something as potent as I love you, you're not beating around the bush, including simple statements like that and dressing them in poetry has always been my favorite way to write.”

Rylan finds melancholy songs easier to compose than chipper ones.

“I would say that's my bread and butter,” he said. “That is the easiest emotion for me to draw from. I feel like if me and my emotions were friends, sadness would be my oldest friend.”

Rylan hears a melody before thinking of lyrics.

“I'll be plucking away and I'll sing a melody line, and then I'll write words into it,” he said. “It's like the Lego foundation for the words that go on top of it. It's been melody most times.”

Rylan was drawn to the guitar at 10 because music runs in the family.

“My dad and my sister played the guitar while I was growing up,” he said. “Watching them play songs alone, it looked like a meditation for them. That peace drew me to the guitar. I was like, wow, they can just sit with an instrument and calm themselves down. I would love to be able to do that. One day I asked my dad: do you think I could play guitar? And he's like, sure, buddy. I've been playing ever since.”

Rylan learned he enjoyed performing.

“I do live on TikTok almost every night during the week,” he said. “I started doing that four years ago. At night, I would sit down with my guitar and I would play it to just put myself to sleep. My mind was always so busy. One day, I thought maybe this would be a good way to connect with people and play songs for people. I started doing it, and then I started amassing a following on TikTok.”

Rylan built a fan base.

“I noticed people started connecting with people and talking with each other and coming back,” he said. “I'd see familiar faces. I started to do it more often. I've been doing it on and off, usually during the week.”

Rylan also does shows with in-person audiences.

“While I've been in college, I've tried to do a show at least every month or every two months, especially leading up to new releases,” he said. “It helps bring everyone together. It's like a little party, a celebration of new art and success and a thank you to everyone who supported me so far. I'm just eternally grateful for the opportunity to play music for people.”

Rylan savors the live interaction with a crowd.

“That's definitely a huge portion of why I love music,” he said. “To have your music connect with somebody via them listening to a song is one thing, but to see their face when you play a song for them live and to make that human connection — that deeply emotional connection that transcends anything — it makes me want to do music forever. It makes me want to just bring more people together.”

Rylan recalled the first musician to impact him as a youth.

“Chris Thile from Nickel Creek,” he said. “My dad had a Nickel Creek CD, and he'd put it in the stereo. I heard his voice, and I was like, that's such a beautiful voice. I was too young to know what all the words meant, but they sounded so pretty to me that I latched onto that. I was 5 or 6 years old.”

Rylan later saw Thile perform live.

“Fast forward to when I was a freshman in high school, he actually came to my hometown in Edmonds, Washington, to play a performance,” he said. “I was 15. So 10 years later, I saw him perform solo mandolin, just his voice and a mandolin on stage. The things he could play on that instrument were so incredible and so moving that everyone's jaw was agape. Everyone was transfixed. He would go from playing indie folk songs to full concertos on his mandolin.”

Rylan then realized he wanted to be a musician.

“It was there in that moment that I was like, wow, I would love to do that, to be that for somebody,” he said. “Chris Thile from Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers.”

Rylan has been singing since he was a tyke.

“Probably 3, really young,” he said. “I have a twin brother. My parents used to say one of us would start making noise and the other one go back and forth. We grew up hearing songs together and singing them together. I remember right around the time I started doing guitar, they put my brother into songwriting classes. I would sit and play guitar and my brother would sing, and I'd learn my brother's songs, and we'd sing with one another.”

Rylan joined theater a few years later.

“Theater began in elementary school,” he said. “I must have been 8 or 9 years old. I was in the Jungle Book musical in my elementary school. After school every day, me and Kai would get picked up by our mom, and she'd drop us off at this alternative school where we'd do rehearsals. The first musical I was proud to be a part of was the Addams Family in ninth grade of high school.”

Rylan has a method to remember his lines.

“Note cards,” he said. “Writing the lines down is such a valuable way to remember them. More importantly, delivering them in the context of the scene acts on that part of your brain. It's basically another piece of your brain that helps you cement the line. Talking with your hands or talking while you're moving across the stage, anytime you can connect your physical with your voice, it helps your brain cement that somehow.”

Rylan wants to be a successful musician, but not necessarily an international celebrity.

“I would want to be a celebrity that your favorite celebrity knows,” he said. “There's a certain level of recognition you have to have as an artist in order to make a living. If I could just make a living and be in an apartment and write music, that would be enough for me.”

Rylan wants to be remembered as someone people can relate to.

“I would want people to know me like a friend,” he said. “Someone who you can talk to about anything because you feel like they understand you. I would want to be known as a friend.”

Rylan tends to his voice to ensure it’s ready for performing.

“The theater background helped a lot because I got some really cool vocal coaches who from a very early age were like, hey, don't do that,” he said. “That's not good for your voice. They beat it into my head. I'm always sure to warm up before I perform. It's so important, and there are days when I don't, and I always regret it. And then always before performance, lots of water. After a performance, if I can, if I'm winding down, hot tea and honey.”

However, Rylan doesn’t temper his enthusiasm to limit the strain on his vocal chords.

“I'm not an angry person, so I don't really raise my voice out of anger,” he said. “If it's out of excitement, I never try to avoid it because I want to bring performers that same sense of excitement if I were performing. I would want people to be excited. So whenever I'm watching a performer, I always bring my energy to them as well. I'll throw out my voice for someone I love.”

Rylan the musician represents Rylan the person.

“There are parts of my music that hyperbolize pieces of who I am, but I think it's all authentically me,” he said. “I had the opportunity to work with Warner Chappell, their music library, and when I was working with them, I was really excited about the opportunity.”

However, Rylan opted to remain genuine to who he is.

“As soon as I got paired up with a producer, that's where I wanted to start doing my own thing again independently,” he said. “He was always inviting me to be someone who I wasn't. A little more like a Netflix sex education singer/songwriter than who I wanted to be. At the end of it, this is a great opportunity, but it's not for me.”

Rylan stays motivated by working on music when he’s inspired and galvanized.

“There are times when I come to the drawing board and I can't even summon up the energy to do it,” he said. “I found that instead of fighting that, I just tried to open up my schedule to more moments where I could be inspired to go and create, like setting up my studio in a quiet and cool space. So when I come home, I feel inspired to create. Or when I'm feeling frustrated by not getting a vocal line right or getting a mix right, I'll be like, okay, gotta take my hands off the keys and step away and do something else fun for a while. At the end of the day, I always come back to it and I always come back to it recharged.”

Rylan offered advice to aspiring musicians wanting to create their own songs.

“You were born at the perfect time,” he said. “It is becoming so much more accessible to make your own music, even from home. I'd say get a day job, make some money and then buy yourself a little home studio and get to it.”

Rylan’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rylan_fischer/

Rylan’s Linktree: linktr.ee/Rylan_Fischer

Previous
Previous

Hybrid athlete elevates himself and others

Next
Next

Model savors variety of his job