Artist: Ryanhood (Ryan David Green & Cameron Hood)
Hometown: Tucson, Arizona
Song: “Appy Returns”
Album: Under The Leaves
Release Date: April 16, 2021
In Their Words: “I love instrumental music, having grown up on electric gunslingers like Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson, and later becoming infatuated with acoustic masters like Béla Fleck and Chris Thile. While most of our repertoire features vocals, we’ve been peppering our live concerts with instrumentals for years. I came up with the main theme for this one in a green room, just before a show back in 2016. I continued to tinker with it for years until I realized the main motif had some similarities to another instrumental of ours, ‘Appy Jam,’ which is a staple of our live set. I decided to lean into this resemblance and make it a full-blown sequel, referencing some of the rhythmic motifs and phrasings from the original, but taking the listener on a whole new journey. What made the song especially challenging to write was the fact that getting together to play-test it wasn’t always possible due to COVID-19. So I used music notation software to make ‘digital versions’ of each of our parts. This allowed us to practice playing the song (with our digital counterpart) for a couple of weeks before going into the studio and cutting our guitars together.” — Ryan David Green
Photo credit: Taylor Noel Mercado
