SWEDE DISPOSITION: HELEN RYDER MAKES A CHOICE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE
- Bernard Zuel
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
SOME OF THE FINEST MINDS of your generation, and before, have devoted themselves to working out how to sell an idea, how to contextualise a concept, how to explain a piece of art to an audience, or the media types between the art and the audience. It can take genius, or good money. And then sometimes it falls into your lap, or as Helen Ryder found, in the seat next to you on the plane from Melbourne to Sydney to attend a wedding.
But let her set the scene, to be soundtracked by her lush adult pop that leans into its orchestrations, reverberates with a bluesy soul, and occasionally has a touch of the child-of-Laura Nyro about it.
“When I got on the plane, this guy turns up and I looked at him and thought, oh my goodness you are just drop dead gorgeous. Like he had the high cheekbones, he had the blonde hair, he was dressed kind of casually, he had a couple of tatts but nothing too much. And then he was like, so nice,” she says, sitting on a bench in Hyde Park, talking over the noise of streetsweepers and hole diggers.
“Anyway, I reach up after we have landed to discover that my American Tourister bag – which is quite common, black, plain, wasn’t there. I did go into panic. I said ‘somebody’s taken my bag’, and nobody cared, they just kept going out.”
Off the plane and at the airline’s desk, Ryder reported the missing luggage, in which was all her clothes, jewellery, vinyl samples of her new album and anything else she would need for this trip. Her request to go back on the plane to look for it was denied, as was, at least initially, her request that passengers who had been sitting around her be contacted.
“I said, and I may have embellished a bit here, but I thought I need to get something happening here, I’m here for my best friend’s wedding, I have nothing to wear except what I’m wearing now, and then I said my mother is very elderly – my mother is 95 – and it’s her jewellery. That’s when she said, I’ll make phone calls for you.”
Calls were made, time passed, more calls were made – including to the mother of the bride to advise that she may need to supply a dress for her guest – and then Ryder got a thumbs up.
“Guess who brought the bag back from Bondi,” she says now.
Mr Studly Swede?
“That’s it!”
If this was a movie this meet-cute would have them going to this wedding together, in love and possibly married by now. Probably in Stockholm. But maybe there’s something better.
“I showed him in what’s in the suitcase and is for my vinyl and said, oh I’m a musician too. We had this 10 minute conversation about touring and music. I checked out his music on Bandcamp and …” Ryder laughs. “He is metal, heavy metal and I thought, right well we’re not going to be a match.”
As bizarre as all this is, the weirdest thing about the story is that in essence Ryder has just exemplified the text, subtext and intent of her new album.
Love Over Hate, her first record in a decade, is about making a choice to find the good rather than its opposite, to trust in a positive outcome rather than linger over bitterness, and live accordingly.
“Just about every song that is written is a love song but for me, with this album, I didn’t want to write a bunch of love gone wrong or we’re in love scenarios. There were things going on in the world that affected me and I wanted to put them in songs because I didn’t want to be writing about myself the whole time,” she explains. “I wanted to be telling stories about other situations.”
Some of this impetus comes from another strand of her career, a Bobby Gentry-themed show, where she could immerse yourself in those southern narratives and stories of different but familiar folk. Some comes from her own experience in this past decade where apart from the pandemic, a life-threatening car accident (followed by two years of PTSD that meant that among mental and physical challenges, she could not play gigs) forced a re-evaluation of many things.
“I’m not holding any of this hate inside me. That was my way through,” Ryder says, adding that she recognises now another lesson came from being forced to pull everything back to basics, whether that was her daily life, her songwriting or politics.
“The song In The Slow Lane [on the new album] was all about slowing down and looking out the window at the trees and then at the news, which is where Weight Of The World comes along because I saw this image of the little boy, in the Syrian war, who had lost his family and had blood all over him. I just burst into tears and thought what’s wrong with the world?,” she says soberly. “I wrote that song about him but that song for me is and isn’t political because it’s about children and the effect war can have on them, and my response to it.”
If there is something extra from the accident, the isolation, and the visual and emotional soundtrack of some pretty shit years for the world recently, it is that thankfully, Ryder is not believer in the everything happens for a reason blather, but instead found value and a reason from what had happened. And chose to put trust in things rather than blame.
It’s not an attitude that is going to work for every one of us, but given the soundtrack she’s made for living this way has more than an ounce of grace and class, there are worse and sillier and more harmful ways to live. And let’s not rule out a collaboration, a guest vocalist on the next album from Sweden’s best looking metal band. Why not?
Helen Ryder’s Lover Over Hate is out on November 7.
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