Matthew Ryan is doing something that I really like.  Taking his songs and giving us intimate and unique versions of them by recording them in (so far) intimate and unique locations.  I also like it as I still believe Ryan is one of the best acoustic guitar/voice combinations in music today.  I think he could sing the ingredients to cough syrup and have it cut right through me with its beauty….just sayin’.

A little about this song and the project itself from Ryan:

This is the first video of a series I’m calling The Raw Version. I’ll be recording performances of songs at home and in various locations and sharing them with you. It’s gonna be interesting to see where this heads, I’m gonna try and get creative as far as locations and such. I’ll mainly be focusing on songs from Dear Lover, but there will be older songs, maybe even a cover or two, and songs that you request as well that I’ll be sharing in this fashion.

To request a song, just reach out to me via the various social sites that we communicate on (scroll down to see all the link). Please understand that I’m pretty busy these days, so be patient about your request. I’ll do Raw Versions of the songs I get the most requests for.

Raw Version #1 is The Wilderness. The Wilderness is Track 7 from my newest album, Dear Lover. I’d been thinking about doing this for a while. I finally sat down to do it last Monday, January 18th, 2010. It happened to be Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday (one of my heroes), so it felt fitting to start with The Wilderness. It was recorded in my living room at about 11p.m. I hope you enjoy it.

Dear Lover, my newest album, is now available at all the trusted online digital music stores (itunes, amazon, emusic…) and will be available at traditional independent record stores on 2/16/10. You can hear the entire record right now on my website. Just go here (you can also purchase CDs and digital versions of Dear Lover directly from my site as well):

Visit his website at http://matthewryanonline.com/

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To request a song for The Raw Version, just reach out to Matthew Ryan at one of these social sites:

Enjoy a track that I hope is next in the RAW series – “Some Streets Lead Nowhere”
taken from the Dear Lover album (see my overview of the album HERE)

~Smansmith