Ryan Ladell’s latest LP These Four Walls is a testament to the art of songwriting. If you haven’t heard of Ladell, even if you happen to be well-versed in Detroit’s robust songwriting scene, you’d be forgiven. He’s that rare bird for whom self-promotion is anathema, which is to say he isn’t channeling his energies into hustling for more attention and better shows; he’s living for and through the songs he writes. “I don’t wanna hear a knock at the door; I wish the world would just go away,” he sings in “Let Me.” This monastic focus shows up in his attention to craft, both in the incisive turns of phrase he accomplishes lyrically and the measured strumming attack he applies to the acoustic guitar. 

I first caught Ryan Ladell’s act at a place in South Dearborn Heights called the Dawg [sic] House, not the type of venue you’d wander into expecting to see a songwriter in the mold of Joe Henry. Not the type of venue where you’d expect to see a songwriter at all, in fact. You can find captive audiences in plenty of pristine listening rooms, but if you can get them to shut up for “The Death Song” or “Let Me” in a dive like the Dawg House, you’ve truly earned your audience. Ladell stands onstage every weekend, chasing well whiskey with Miller High Life and describing patrons’ sad sack stories back to themselves with that high nasal Midwestern delivery. And the people listen because they recognize themselves in what he’s saying.  

Ladell, along with songwriter Jesse Passage and others, has turned Jimmy Nikou’s 342 Bar and Grill on Pelham Road into a live music destination. When Ryan plays there on Tuesday nights, the bar is usually packed—for original music, on a weekday. Ladell has a stubborn mirth about him when he’s onstage. His love of music is an extension of his love of the people who support it. “I wanna be in love with everyone, yeah, but there’s just too many…” he sings in “Hideaway.” In a genre that trends toward sadness and interiority, Ladell’s joy (joy, as opposed to happiness) keeps us buoyant. “And you can earn laughs with those jokes, but I know you’re sad,” he sings in “what if i…?” and his songs do evoke the sadness that comes from loss, but he writes with a slightly off-center self-awareness and carries himself with a demeanor that lets the audience know that it’s all as fun and funny as it is tragic. 

It’s rare one can say that song lyrics approach the level of poetry, but on These Four Walls Ladell hits this near-impossible mark a time or two, most notably in “The Death Song”: “Tell my father I loved him; I just didn’t know where to start…” How many of us have wanted to express this sentiment? How many of us could in such a perfect way? The lines become even more poignant considering that Ladell has lost both his parents in the last year. Great songwriting evokes forgotten people and places or lends us new ways of accessing the ones that we’ve mythologized. I think of Ryan’s music when I wander the riverain in Dearborn Heights, where the baseball games go later and the beer is always cheap and the broken glass just shimmers on the banks of Ecorse Creek. 

I have this image of Ryan between sets at 342, coming off the stage dangling a rock glass in the fingers of his fretting hand, ducking out the side door to smoke a cigarette and share a joint with his friend Jesse Passage, stunned that people are turning out, wondering how long any of it can last because he acknowledges, as we all secretly must that “I’ll wake up if I’m lucky; it’s getting hard again these days… No, I really, I can’t explain.” 

Ryan Ladell’s music can be purchased at the following link:

https://ryanladell.bandcamp.com/