Eddy Lee Ryder Announces Debut LP With Title Track

Self-proclaimed “demented pop” chanteuse Eddy Lee Ryder makes her long-awaited full-length debut with Sweet Delusions, synthesizing timeless songcraft, dramatic introspection, and infinite pop smarts to create a breathtaking song cycle of apocalyptic romance and anxious regret, badly broken hearts, and wishful hope for the future.

Songs like the deceptively optimistic title track (out 1/31/2024) see Ryder – known to friends and family as Woodstock, NY-based singer-songwriter Liz Brennan – fusing chanson and country, indie and standards, into her own strain of modernist pop Americana, all informed by her distinctively wry sense of humor and classic rock spirit.

“Sweet Delusions” is “for anyone holding on for way too long and expecting an unrealistic outcome,” Ryder states. “This song started about one person and finished about another person, which shows endings can be doomed in so many ways but the delusional trajectory is all the same.” 

Having earned applause for her sadly beautiful portraits of love and life on the margins, with songs like “Smoke and Mirrors” featured in the cult hit horror film Terrifier 2, Ryder set to work on her long-brewing debut album in 2022, collaborating with producer Dave Cerminara (Father John Misty, Weyes Blood) between his studio in LA and the Outlier Inn in New York's southern Catskill Mountains.

Ryder arrived to both sessions armed with a cache of songs inspired by “an extremely bad ending with someone who was my best friend. I didn't even know it was possible to have that bad of an ending.” Compounded by quarantine, Ryder's existential turmoil forced her to write from the heart rather than the head, finding the sweet spot between those two aspects of her self-described “eccentric” persona, often while strumming her acoustic guitar among friends and multiple bottles of wine.

Once Ryder hit the studio, her apocalyptic romanticism naturally led to the album's “accidental country” sound, a rhinestone-flecked bed of twangy guitars, languid bass, and irresistible melodies created with accompaniment from longtime Father John Misty drummer/musical director Dan Bailey, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Chae (Zach Bryan, Kacey Musgraves), and keyboardists Todd Caldwell (Crosby, Stills & Nash, James Taylor) and Dave Shephard, along with harmonies and other help from NYC friends like pianist Abby Payne and Rebecca Haviland.

Penned and performed with uncommon brio and invention, Sweet Delusions sees Ryder musing on lust, longing, and lost love across shimmering choruses and a vertiginous undercurrent of contemplative melancholy, turning her raw pain into expertly wrought anthems that simultaneously hearken back to both truck stop jukeboxes and glittering art deco cafés.

Quirky and charming while still precise and powerfully personal, Sweet Delusions reveals Eddy Lee Ryder as a one-of-a-kind new artist, her unabashed heartache and beguiling humor completely her own yet as identifiable and real as any. Despite her love of guise and character, the clear through line that unifies Ryder's still evolving body of work is her storyteller's gift for cutting to the quick of her own complex, unconventional nature. Impossible to pigeonhole, with Sweet Delusions, Eddy Lee Ryder proudly avoids being fitted into any quickly particular category or genre, her creative adventurousness and tongue-in-cheek humor distinctly and undeniably her own.

Photo by Jeff Harris

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