John Ralston
John Ralston
Credit Monica McGivern
Time was, John Ralston had a big cork board for his songwriting. He would fill it with index cards on which he’d written lyrics, ideas, chord progressions, anything that could turn into a song. It looked like one of those detective shows, where an obsessed cop litters a wall with photos and maps and evidence and connects them all with string.
“The songs were pinned up everywhere. There was a working list I was able to access and move things around,” Ralston says. “It’s a much different process now. It involves field notes rather than a wall.”
There are practical reasons for Ralston changing his songwriting style – these days, his daughters, ages 4 years and 18 months, would probably pick apart a multicolored wall and turn it into something involving princesses or ponies.
But Ralston’s circumstances aren’t the only thing that has changed. The man himself has. The music is as dear to him as ever, but after years of practicing the craft, Ralston has found that the songs come naturally.
“Now, when I write a song it’s one of two ways,” he says. “Either I mike up the drums and the guitar and we just play and I write the song, or I’m sitting at my desk and a song idea comes to me, so I put a voice memo on my phone, and I move on with my day. Instead of being so involved, I record as close to the moment as possible… Either way, I don’t have six hours to just chill and strum the guitar anymore.”
Ralston has had enough of those moments that his hard drive bursts with hidden brilliance.
“I made a hundred albums that I never made,” he says. “I love albums. I’m not interested in singles, EPs. But the downside of that is that there’s so many things that go unfinished.”
To rectify that, and in spite of his stated dislike for singles, Ralston is releasing two songs at Johnralston.bandcamp.com each month throughout 2015. The songs cover everything from the mid-2000s through the present.
John Ralston
Credit Monica McGivern
The first track that hit Bandcamp in January, “Anna Knows,” sounds like vintage John Ralston. A slight country twang to the guitars, a hurt voice singing about lost love. Its B-side, “The Stranger,” features only vocals and piano. It seems stark, even unfinished. Recorded during the songwriter’s two-year-long stay in Virginia, it also reflects time apart from his South Florida home as Ralston sings, “the stranger, could it be me? I don’t know, I don’t know.”
In “Magic Mountain,” one of the February releases, Ralston sings, “Here in the hollow of a frozen fountain, I wait for June.” Like the January numbers, the February ones have a wintry feel to them – sparse, cold. The first song from March, “I Will Become,” features background whistles and a more-optimistic message. “Like the moon and the sun, I will become.” Spring has arrived.
“I don’t have it completely planned out by any stretch of the imagination, but as I dig and find those songs in the hard drive, it’s definitely fit that kind of pattern,” Ralston says. “There’s a song called ‘Heavy Metal Summer’ that’s done and I’m just waiting for summer to release it.”
The new music may only amount to 24 songs, but Ralston could have gone on like this for years. He has been kicking around the South Florida music scene since the late 1990s, when his band Recess Theory released a split-EP with the then-unknown Further Seems Forever. Recess Theory morphed into Legends of Rodeo, which signed with the major label MCA Records and put out one album that, with little help from MCA, went nowhere.
“You have to be a shameless self-promoter in music,” Ralston says. “It’s not good enough to just do your job.”
Ralston put out a pair of solo albums on indie label Vagrant Records, which was also home at that time to The Lemonheads and Paul Westerberg among others, but by 2011’s Shadows of the Summertime, he chose to self-release his music.
“I’m finding out this fits me really well. I can record and write music and do the things I love,” he says. “I was never good at the music business. There’s so much marketing yourself and B.S.”
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Ralston has tried his hand at a couple bands since then – the eight-piece Invisible Music and the local “supergroup” Lightnings that also features bassist Dan Bonebrake, drummer Steve Copeletti, guitarist Chris Horgan, and the publisher of this very magazine, Steev Rullman. But for the most part, Ralston has stayed solo, with his usual collaborators including Bonebrake, Copeletti and his most long-term compatriots, Jeff Snow and Nathan Jezek, who played with Ralston in Legends of Rodeo. Local musicians Elliot Shaw, Chris Wood, Marc Ward, Susan Snow and Jon Wilkins also added their skills to some of the songs being released this year.
For Ralston, who so values the traditional album, these singles are not only an opportunity to get some of this music off his hard drive and out into the world, but also a chance to revisit those almost-albums, the ones that have peeked into the light of day but haven’t yet broken through.
“I have a record called IV that I finished up in Virginia. That one I’ll probably release this year. And hopefully I’ll release some of these other ones early next year,” he says. “Sea Garden Blues is just sitting there. So I’m sort of finishing those too as I work.”
Even with the monthly singles though, each one comes with a little sense of accomplishment. “Just finishing a couple songs a month has really been satisfying. So I may just keep working in this singles mode,” he says. “Instead of being lost in hard-drive purgatory where they’ll never get touched again, one by one I’m dragging these songs over to this folder on my desktop. I’m ready to throw myself a party every time I get a new one in.”
Photography: Monica McGivern
Design: Jacob Kaplan
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