“I want my music to carry multiple emotions, just like every experience,” says the writer and performer known as Eddy Lee Ryder. “Nostalgia, absurdity, humor, and sorrow.” It’s a deft summary of an album—Ryder’s 2024 release Sweet Delusions—that hits that bullseye dead center.
Ryder’s kaleidoscopic singer-songwriter material ranges from country-folk to traditional vocal jazz to classic rock; what binds it all together is Ryder’s unique persona and perspective, born of experience but also infused with stagecraft from the very start. For example: Eddy Lee Ryder is a moniker, a neon silhouette of the outsized persona and attitude that singer-songwriter Liz Brennan takes on when writing and performing.
Ryder has described Sweet Delusions as a breakup album, a catalog of life lessons centered around a friendship that flared brightly before crashing and burning. Each track here is built around Ryder’s penetrating, effortlessly charismatic voice emerging from within a sort of gauzy, dream-state sonic landscape, the kind where everything you want stays just out of reach.
The opening title track sets the tone, framed and arranged like a Motown fantasia co-produced by Phil Spector, complete with pulsing backbeat, heavy echo and sweeping strings as Ryder sings “You’re holding onto her / I’m holding onto sweet delusions.” The message is clear: even self-awareness isn’t always enough to save us from ourselves when we’re in the grip of a crush.
Next, Ryder delves further into her self-described “demented Americana” bag of tricks, as “Highwaymen” delivers a thrummy, pulsing number about the aforementioned friendship, complete with the suggestion that they “Take to the sky like Thelma and Louise.” Then “Bad Decisions” presents a laconic, soulful country-folk ballad featuring acoustic guitar and slide accents as Ryder sings: “Don’t say you love me if you’re just passing by… I feel the wild winds blow / And they’re blowing me apart.”
From there she offers a smorgasbord of slightly off-kilter renderings: “Joke Is On Me” is a cantering mid-tempo number drenched in shimmery echo; “Antarctica” features more echo and evocative piano; “Shoop Shoop Shut Up” is a bluesy Motown lament featuring Hammond and a chorus of background vocalists surrounding Ryder’s luminous lead; and “Only Real Cowboy” sketches a loping, countrified story-song.
Mixed in between and all around are a scattering of memorable moments. Ryder sings in the swaying, oh-so-bittersweet “Pennyroyal Tea” that “I was never home to you / You were home to me” (ouch), before returning to the chase with “Simple Touch,” an upbeat entreaty for a little physical affection, as straightforward as its title. Later on, “Smoke and Mirrors” brings a taste of honky-tonk rock and roll to the party as Ryder and her married friends play a game of “the grass is always greener.”
The album finishes with “Country Fair,” dreamy acoustic ballad of longing and missed opportunities. “If I write you a beautiful song, will you call for me today? / I got me a wandering heart that was yours to lock away.” Ryder receives sterling support here and throughout from producer Dave Cerminara (Father John Misty) and longtime FJM drummer / musical director Dan Bailey, along with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Chae (Zach Bryan, Kacey Musgraves) and keyboardists Todd Caldwell (Crosby Stills & Nash, James Taylor) and Dave Shepard.
Sweet Delusions is one of those albums that feels like it takes place in a pocket universe all its own, a series of familiar soundscapes tweaked and reformed around the distinctive, beguiling voice and songs of Eddy Lee Ryder. As its gently kitschy album art suggests, Sweet Delusions offers a ride you won’t soon forget.
