I caught Ryan Culwell — singer-songwriter, panhandle poet and father of four — on a recent pass through town, to talk about songwriting from a personal perspective, growing up in the Texas Panhandle, and what made him move back after a decade in the Nashville hopper. I’ve know the man for almost twenty years. I’ve been his fan and I’ve caught his shows. A few weeks ago I saw a post he wrote in white heat and flung against the wall like a dish in a fight. Anyone who has driven five hundred miles too far to play a show that didn’t mean much beyond the comped meal will recognize the pain and frustration and insane hope in it.
“Sometimes,” he writes, “I wake up in a panic at 3am or drift off into nightmares at the dinner table only to have my kids pull back into the real world when they ask if I can pass the salt.”
I don’t have kids but I do know the kind of paralyzing scary that comes with the head-first approach to life-leaping. Take your shots, sure, but miss too many and the hunger stops being poetic.
It’s one thing to do that when you’re twenty-two and single, it’s another thing when you’ve got a wife and a family. Ryan’s been married I don’t know how long, and with four kids, prudence might suggest a turn toward the surer waters of life’s long river. I asked him about that. It was the one time in the interview he got emotional.
I won’t spoil the surprise but I will say there’s a celestial oasis out there somewhere for the artist partner. These brave and faithful men and women are hitching their wagon to a summer tornado. Aren’t sure where you’re going and you don’t know when you’ll land.
This was one of the more candid conversations we’ve had on the podcast. Like Ryan, it was raw and honest and with a kind of heartbroke hope I’ve come to recognize in artists who do what they do because there’s nothing else they can.
We talked about how pretending everything is awesome gets you nowhere. The idea that if you leave home, you won’t come back; even if you do, home changes, you change. He landed on Wendell Berry’s advice — that you can’t fix the world, but you can put two things back together. We discuss Voltaire’s similar take two centuries earlier, take that the best you can do in life is tend an admirable garden.
In discussing his rural Texas background, we hit on Ryan’s love for people with a “knowledge of the hands” who can fix things, build things and the pleasure that comes with seeing the results of your labor.
Finally we pick a couple songs together — two Ryan Culwell originals.
I hope this conversation puts a crack in your heart. I hope it makes you less sure about what you think you know. And I hope it compels you get a little more familiar with Ryan and his music. He’s a good one and he’s out there. Go find him.
Find Ryan
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanculwell/
website: https://ryanculwell.com/
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