
SINGLE
Please Don't Burn The Sage
How do you handle death? Does it drag you down like a weight? Or do you simply ignore it? We can’t know what lies beyond, so maybe we should find a new way to look at it. In this track Ryan tries to find a new way to square the afterlife. A tongue-in-cheek idea that we won’t ever really leave the ones we love and for those who outlive us, a simple request. Please Haunt us. Please find a way to keep interacting and loving us. Wishful thinking, maybe. But after years of heavy losses for the artist, this song comes as a cathartic means of trying to take control of something no one can. This piece aims to poke fun at death, taking comfort in the idea that things are never really gone.
Before this version was recorded, Ryan was approached by a grammy-winning studio with a cast of heavy-hitting studio players that invited him to record the track at their studio in the outskirts of Nashville. After getting the preliminary mixes back, Ryan was devastated that the direction of the song had pulled violently away from his vision. After rejecting the recording, Ryan started working with producer Shane Weisman. Working in both Shane and Ryan’s home recording spaces, the duo rerecorded the song from scratch, staying true to the original intent. What emerged was an authentic piece of art that could stand up to the weight of the concepts that inspired it.