ryan meyers band

I’ve got TONS to write about this summer, but I wanted to make sure there was a nice friendly Mississippi welcome to all the young people I met this summer! It was a real joy to share the weeks with you, and I can’t wait to hear from you guys about how you’ve brought what you’ve learned home to your communities!

As a little teaser, I’m going to spend a couple weeks with Joby sometime very soon and record some full-band versions of the songs we sang this summer. My goal is to make it as inexpensive as possible while still paying all the songwriters their royalties (and Joby for his time). Probably like 10 bucks. I’ll also make sure that it’s available on iTunes and all that business as well. Here’s a tentative list, feel free to send suggestions to summersongs AT ryanmeyersband.com or just comment on this thread.

• Witnesses
• Now
• Trading my Sorrows
• Micah 6:8 (Help us love mercy)
• Psalm 40: Here I Am
• You Will Be
• Let the River Flow
• Let’s Go Outside (written by St. Leo’s Youth)
• Lean on Me
• Wherever Your Treasure Is (Hurricane Song)
• Maybe a bonus: The Turtle & The Eagle or The End of Summer

OK, so I’m not the best at keeping things updated here at RMB.com. I’ll admit it. I don’t have any excuses, only a litany of updates and my normal promise to do better next time… Without any further ado, here’s what’s going on with the band:

* We’ve pretty well moved off of MySpace in favor of Virb. We’ll still add you as a friend and all of that, but the odds of getting an answer to a message in MySpace are slim to none. You wouldn’t believe the amount of SPAM we get every day. It just got overwhelming, and the gain wasn’t worth the cost anymore. You can always get in touch with us at [insert band member’s name here]@ryanmeyersband.com, through Virb, or any of the million other social networking sites we’re bound to have to join.
* Speaking of social networking, you should (1) join our group on Facebook and (2) add any of our songs with the new “Audio” application. Everything from Quiet Cities can be added to your profile, and we’ll try to get everything else up soon.
* Speaking of recorded music (how are my mad segue skills holding up so far?), we’ve been recording some demos, and are almost finished with the mix of “Bigger Than”. It’ll be released on the first volume of BURN/GIVE, a new project where we’re encouraging fans to (you guessed it) burn and give away our music. Joby should have that mix done this week, and you’ll hear it here first.
* Speaking of Joby, that air-haired rockstar is getting married this summer! You can send congratulations to joby@ryanmeyersband.com. I doubt he’d complain about an Amazon.com gift certificate as a wedding gift either!
* Speaking of weddings, my best friend Jonathan Barlow just got married. Big shoutouts to Barlow and his new bride, Susan. I got to sing in their wedding, and am super excited for them. Nothing to do with the band, except that Barlow’s had me lead a retreat for his youth group in Atlanta.
* Speaking of Atlanta, it’s looking like I may produce Atlanta singer-songwriter Grace Buford’s next record, and that Joby will probably (hopefully) engineer it. The odds are good that it will feature the collective talents of RMB, plus some other guys from around our area. I’m excited to get to work on someone else’s material, and to get back into the studio!
* Speaking of Grace, she goes by Cylindrian Rutabaga in a virtual world known as Second Life. The newsworthy thing about that is that I too have an SL identity: Bobby Fairweather. When the band is off the road, I’m often performing live concerts “in-world” under that pseudonym, trying out almost exclusively new material for a worldwide audience. It’s been a great practice in songwriting, and is like the open mic of the future.
* Speaking of songwriting, Sarah Bauer’s new CD will feature a song that I wrote called “All I Want.” It was really the first song I’ve ever written specifically for another person to sing, and I’m super excited about how it’s turned out. In 10 or 20 years, this is much more what I see myself doing professionally, and I’ll always cherish the fact that my first “deal” was with a friend.
* Speaking of friends, our friends in Friday Mourning recently broke up. We were super bummed about it, considering we had planned to conquer the world together. We’re still mourning (pun intended) the loss of great music, but the blow was softened by the fact that they gave us their van. “America” is now in the hands of RMB, and I feel certain that a Youtube video commissioning it will surface sooner than later.
* Speaking of Youtube, we put up a couple of videos in our lazy attempt to take over the internet. The reason I say that is that there are at least 10 other videos that just haven’t made their way up yet… You can catch them there or on Virb. Whichever floats your boat.
* Speaking of boats, Josh graduated with a Marine Biology degree. I’m personally both thrilled and scared that I’ll lose my drummer. Josh has been the heart of the band for as long as we’ve existed, so let’s keep praying that gigs come in enough to pay bills and that he likes drums more than fish.
* Speaking of gigs, we’re launching a whole new way of gigging this fall. Instead of our normal rate (for those that were scared to ask before, we try to shoot between $1200-1800), if we can book a full week (Monday-Friday) in an area, we’ll play for $350 a show (plus a place to crash and food in our bellies). The main reason for this is that for the past few years we’ve basically ended up traveling for a week to play one-off shows. We’d much rather play music than drive, so if money’s been the issue, no more. These will very likely end up being “acoustic band” shows, thanks to the amount of sound we have to rent/haul for normal full-band performances, but it’s all something that can be worked out. What does this mean? This means that we could potentially play a concert at your birthday party for less than it would cost to hire a DJ. This means that you can offer a really awesome experience to your whole parish/school/community for less than it costs to buy one of those new Playstations. This means that you could sell tickets to a show and raise money for your conference or mission trip.
* Speaking of mission trips, I’ll be rocking Young Neighbors again this summer! For those that are curious, I’ll be in Detroit the last 2 weeks of June, off for the week of the 4th, on the Gulf Coast Response for the next two weeks, then back in Motor City for the last week of July. I know you’ve been holding your breath and praying hard to be teamed up with me this summer, so there you go. I promise Jesus still loves you if he separated us this summer.
* Speaking Jesus, he’s awesome.
* Speaking of awesome, I hope you have an awesome [insert time period here between this and next post] and an unbelievably grateful for your support. We couldn’t do it without you!

I certainly wish I’d started that list with a checklist, but what can I say? It was an entirely unplanned bout of awesome that couldn’t be remedied. If you’re into keeping up with what I’m reading/thinking/watching that’s entirely unrelated to the band, you can check out my tumblog: http://rmb.tumblr.com.

Also, I just found out that you can download Chasing After Home for the free on mTracks. I came across that at random, and was psyched to see that GIA/Disciple Records has relaxed their pro-DRM stance in favor of music fans. For those that don’t know me, you don’t know how much I think DRM is stupid and unbelievably short-sighted. I assume that we’ll still get some lovin’ when you download the free mp3. If not, then that’s OK too. Stick your nasty unsanitary earbuds in your buddy’s head and force-fee them some RMB. That’s right, you heard me correctly.

Have a good one,
Ryan

Sometimes, when I’m feeling both brave and disgustingly dirty, I have to take a shower while Anna and I are at home alone. I shut the doors to anything potentially dangerous, give her a pile of books to read, and sit her outside the door of the bathroom. Normally, she sits there quietly reading her stories, occasionally singing a song when she feels inspired, and I semi-enjoy the shower with the door open.

Yesterday, Anna was feeling a little livelier than usual (and she’s an energetic kid), and decided that stillness was not her style while Daddy showered. I heard a loud *thud*, looked out the shower curtain, and asked her what she was doing. “Jumping.”

“Right, but why are you jumping there? You might slip on the wet tile and hurt your head.”

“I’m trying to reach the top of the door.”

Of course. Why wouldn’t I have guessed that my 2-foot tall daughter had her mind set on reaching the 7-foot doorway? “Don’t you think it’s a little too high? Why don’t you wait until I get out of the shower and I’ll help you touch it.”

Her response: “I can do it. I’m growing.”

Rewind to the day before, when I was informed that not one, but two performances we had scheduled 2 weeks from now were being canceled Now, I have just a BIT of an artistic tendency, which means that occasionally I go through a “WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING ALL THIS FOR?” phase. The answer, of course, is that it’s my vocation. It’s not that I couldn’t do anything else (Lord knows I’ve gone through my share of supplemental side jobs), it’s that I feel like writing songs and communicating the Gospel through music is the very best use of the talents that God has blessed me with and that I try to continue to build upon. I get discouraged sometimes when I hear a song on the radio that has poor structure or cheap rhymes, and I wonder why I haven’t achieved the success of some that don’t work as hard or even as well as I do. Sometimes it takes a 2-year-old to remind me, though, that the reason I\’m not “there” yet is that I’m still growing. It’s not that our band hasn’t been successful, just not quite as successful as I know we’re destined to be. So, like the life pundit that I call my daughter, we just have to keep on jumping.