Eddy Lee Ryder Unveils Latest Single 'Bad Decisions'

With the release of her first full-length album on the horizon, Eddy Lee Ryder unveils her newest single, “Bad Decisions,” on June 6, 2024, which is coincidentally the birthday of the heartbreaker who inspired the tune. 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.

“This song is a collection of fragments from a story marked by a string of bad decisions, beginning with falling for someone who misled me about their relationship status,” Ryder says of “Bad Decisions.” “However, it sat in the dust-bin for a long time until I knew it would ultimately be a story about crashing and burning.”

“It’s about being reckless and wild, which is the state we were in when we fell for each other,” she continues. “But when I was ready to move past being reckless and wild, to just stay home and watch crime shows together, that's when he left.”

Quirky and charming while still precise and powerfully personal, Sweet Delusions reveals the self-described “demented pop” chanteuse 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.

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), pedal steel player Rich Hinman (Sara Bareilles, Rosanne Cash, Josh Ritter), 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.

“I don’t how to not write from a personal perspective,” Eddy Lee Ryder says. “How do you sit down and write something that’s only surface?”

SWEET DELUSIONS TRACK LISTING

1. Sweet Delusions
2. Highwaymen
3. Bad Decisions
4. Joke Is On Me
5. Antarctica
6. Pennyroyal Tea
7. Simple Touch
8. Shoop Shoop Shut Up
9. Smoke and Mirrors
10. Only Real Cowboy
11. County Fair

Photo credit: Jeff Harri