Eddy Lee Ryder Releases New Single 'County Fair'; Will Play Brooklyn Show in June

Continuing to build anticipation for her first full-length album, self-proclaimed “demented pop” chanteuse Eddy Lee Ryder releases the new single, “County Fair,” on May 2, 2024.

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, Sweet Delusions will be available everywhere on July 19, 2024.

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 of our own. Penned and performed with uncommon brio and invention, the album 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.

“‘County Fair’ is about letting go of someone you love but still desperately hoping they will reach out,” Ryder explains of the newest single. “The silence was the most painful experience of my life, so the first line of the song, ‘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,’ was my way of asking myself, ‘What do I need to do to hear from him again?’

The lyrics include a nod to “Tainted Love,” with the line “I’ve given you all that a boy can give you,” because, as Ryder bluntly explains of the relationship that inspired the song, “Tainted, it was.”

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.

Once Ryder hit the studio, armed with a cache of songs inspired by “an extremely bad ending with someone who was my best friend,” 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.

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.

“County Fair” drops on May 2, 2024. Keep an ear out for one more single before the July 19 release of Sweet Delusions. Eddy Lee Ryder will next be performing at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, NY, on June 16, 2024.

Photo credit: Jeff Harris