GAS Featured Musician: Ryan Bozeman

BE:  When did music become important to you and who were some of your influences?

RB: Music has been important to me for as long as I can remember. My mom is a huge Beatles fan, and I grew up listening to all of her records and tapes. They are my favorite band and earliest influence. As I reached my teens, I got into grunge and alternative music, especially Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains. Stone Temple Pilots, and Smashing Pumpkins. It’s funny that those artists are now considered classic rock to some. I still listen to these bands and others from the same scene. It never gets old to me. Later, I became a huge fan of several other post-alternative bands like Deftones, Failure, Hum, which pushed my musical tonalities toward a spacey, heavy sound. These days, I’ve been listening to bands like Sigur Ros, Bon Iver, American Football, and Frightened Rabbit, along with heavier bands like Volumes and Code Orange. 

 

 BE: You came to my attention via Jared Morningstar and Chris Bodor who posted their poetry videos in my group. When one of them mentioned you were looking to collaborate with poets I jumped on it because your music is beautiful and accomplished and I love collaborations. Could you tell us about your background in music.  Have you been in bands or always solo? Any CDs available?

 

 RB: I’ve been in various bands in the past, starting in high school. We played the local scenes around Ocala and Gainesville, Florida but never really caught the break we needed to go to the next level. I last played actively in a band around 2007. Yes, we made a few albums here and there over the years, but nothing that was sold outside of our shows. Over the past few years, I maintained a long-distance rock project called The Hope in Our Lungs, along with my former bandmate Micah Beller. We just trade ideas back and forth and eventually they turn into full songs. We share co-writing duties, and Micah sings and plays the drums, along with some guitar. I play most of the guitar and lead guitar, and I make the lyric videos. He’s a great singer so he’s able to sing the songs that I write that are usually out of my range, haha. In 2020, out of the pandemic, I wrote and released my first brotherwell album, an EP called Old & New, Black & Blue, and I’ve released several other singles since then. My solo songwriting has taken a back seat to my poetry collaborations these days. 

 

 BE: Soon after submitting my poetry you announced you were doing a series on Recovery. What prompted that?  What are your goals for this project? How do you plan to get it heard?

RB: It came out of the pandemic. As a collective, our society was just being hammered with Covid. At the same time, the political divide became an absolute chasm, punctuated by January 6. This period of time, a lot of us were at our lowest. Mentally exhausted. Physically exhausted. Coping. Developing bad habits. A dark time. Some of us have moved on, but the scars remain. Months later, while scrolling around on Facebook, I noticed that there was a local group of poets here in St. Augustine called the Ancient City Poets. I reached out to Chris Bodor, an active member, and out of the blue, just asked him if he wanted to collaborate with me on a spoken word piece. I was just ready to try something new creatively, and I wanted to get back to feeling a sense of connection with my music. Thankfully, Chris agreed to work with me and I made a score for his poem The Last Man on Earth, which we thought turned out really well. He then put me in touch with Michigan-based poet Jared Morningstar, and after a brief conversation, we decided to collaborate on one of his poems. From there, and lucky for me, I saw a random video on Facebook of poet Donny Winter reading his poem A Soluble Tablet. I immediately reached out to him and we started working together right away. The ball was really rolling at this point, so it was then that I decided to collect a group of poets together to work on this recovery-based project. What started out very small grew into a group of 12 poets, all with a unique and stylistic take on their own recovery. I have loved every second of working on this project. 

 

 BE:  Have you written and sung your own songs before the Recovery project?  I noticed you added lyrics as well as music to my submission and there after added lyrics to other videos.

RB: I’ve been writing songs since I was 14. I’ve never really considered myself a natural singer so most of the songs I’ve written in my life have been for someone else to sing. It’s funny - I never really planned to sing on these re:covery songs. But while I was working on the first song for the project, I just decided to write my own lyrics and sing them, kind of on a whim. At first, I didn’t know what the other poets were going to think, but I received a lot of positive feedback from them, which made me feel more confident with my singing. Adding my own lyrics to these songs has also allowed for me to string together my own take on recovery, while elevating the original poem at the same time.

One of the first compositions in the Recovery Project:

See more videos from the Recovery Project and sample Brotherwell's music.