Bill Ryder-Jones releases second triumph ‘If Tomorrow Starts Without Me’ from ‘Iechyd Da’
I caught up with Bill Ryder-Jones the other day over Zoom, he was in a t-shirt, boxer shorts and was almost certainly about to be late for a dinner with his label. But he was feeling chipper and fairly certain that lechyd Da is among the very best things he’s ever done. After the two singles he’s shared so far, ‘This Can’t Go On’ and now ‘If Tomorrow Starts Without Me’, even those that predicted a smooth Brexit would have a hunch that he’s on the right lines.
While you’d be hard-pushed to find two more maudlin track names even among the trashcan of Morrissey’s scrapped ideas, contrary to their titles, Ryder-Jones is brimming with hope. Soaring and euphoric, the songs have served up the sense of a glorious morning whereby the curtains part themselves, shaving seems like more of an achievement than a chore, and the birds whistle in harmony as you stride out into the sun.
With crunching strings borne form the Penguin Cafe Orchestra school of thought, ‘If Tomorrow Starts Without Me’ quickly eviscerates the suicide note implied by the title and hauls a fresh sun across the horizon. And amid a bright new day, Ryder-Jones races through memories, arriving at the conclusion that what we retain is always what we share; memories aren’t often insular, but a marriage of moments among fellow passengers on this ride.
‘If Tomorrow Starts Without Me’ will likely become a song that soundtracks thousands more memories played forward. It’s sweet and perfectly performed, with Ryder-Jones opting to go with chunking sounds in production. Never safe, he gives it some wallop, and allows the instrumentation to boldly make itself known. In an era where bedroom pop frequently subsumes components into a ‘soundscape’, here, cellos, pianos, and a volley of oohs offer firm handshakes with a live immediacy that leaves you longing to get out there and hear this in some Nordic concert hall.
These cognisant choices resonate, in part, because they’ve arrived after years of forethought. “It contains probably the oldest lyric I’ve ever written,” the former Coral man says about the song. “Which comes from when I was about 15 watching Eurotrash. There was a Thai sex-worker reading from a diary and she just read the words: ‘What if tomorrow starts without me?’ I just loved it. It’s always stuck with me.”
That in itself is a beautiful backstory. Who didn’t watch Eurotrash when they were 15? It’s a right of passage akin to the odd primordial ritual off having a few cans in a rural area, lighting a fire, and proceeding to leap over said fire like intoxicated tribesmen in highly flammable shell suits. But not many of the kids watching Eurotrash, in fact none to my knowledge bar Ryder-Jones, paid enough attention to that dialogue to sew it into a tapestry of memories that heads off into the blank extent of the future with renewed hope, sprung from the trampoline of reflecting on past connections without any harness of trying too hard to hold onto them. The bouncing melody here is always moving forward, the chords don’t resolve but rather spring onto the next.
“As I’m fading into blue, let’s just hope that somehow I’m with you,” he sings in a song that happily embraces loveliness, free of dissonance, or anything else that would get in the way of Ryder-Jones’ renewed message. There is much hope for lechyd Da in every which way.
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