I like to hear Ed Ryan sing high notes, I like to hear his hard-rocking guitar solos. I like the melodies he writes, I like the rough mix of his records. I like the stories he tells. What’s not to like? Even Time is a great record.

What makes a good Ed Ryan song?

A good Ed Ryan song? It has to have some emotional resonance, be it through a memorable melody and a meaningful and/or clever lyric. It also helps if it has a good arrangement, a sense of immediacy and it rocks!

While creating the new record, what were the happy moments?

What makes me happy is when I hear the songs take shape and become part of a bigger whole. I loved getting to use all of my guitars and layering them. Seeing the beautiful cover art made me very happy indeed!

You included 4 songs by your old band The Rudies. They need to get out, don’t do?

The original concept for the album came from my son Jesse, he is also an artist and musician. He said that I had all these great older songs that had never seen the light of day, so I should record them and put them out. The Rudies were fairly successful in NYC back in the day, but we had very little recorded and only one single released. I just picked some of my favorites, that are over forty years old, and recorded them. No Time For Love from the Roadmap album is an old Rudies song.

Are you always writing?

I am always writing! As I was recording these old songs for the album I started writing new ones. Like Roadmap, it’s a mix of old and new. The title track, Even Time, is less than six months old. I have an album’s worth of tracks in a more American roots and garage rock kind of vein, like Petty, Hiatt, that kind of thing. I write all the time, it’s what I do. I’ll write three bad ones to get to the one good one!

‘Art’ ensured I didn’t go crazy the last couple of months. Why is it so hard to explain the importance of it to the people who govern the country (yours and mine)?

The Arts are an intangible, especially music. It is, or can be, abstract and emotional. A lot of people in government find art to be frivolous. To them, it’s just entertainment, decoration, and background noise. To your first point, it’s hard to imagine being in lockdown without music, art, and literature to remind us of our humanity, to feed our hearts, minds, and souls. It is a difficult concept for literal-minded people to grasp.

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You can now buy the record on Bandcamp and listen on Spotify. Keep an eye on the KoolKatMusik webshop because you can buy the CD there soon.