Hand Habits at Gullivers, Manchester (Jessica Bartolini)
Jana Horn supported Hand Habits in Manchester.
The autumn North American and UK tour dates have been supporting Meg Duffy’s Hand Habits collection Sugar The Bruise; released in June comprising tracks which emerged from a spirit of collaboration and improvisation.
“Music, for me, has always been a spoonful of honey easing the intermittent and inescapable bitterness of the human experience,” Ryan said. “It’s been a thick sweetness in my loneliest moments.”
In my earliest memories of playing music, whether alone or in a group, the feeling of being connected to a greater force beyond explanation is the one that shines through. I’ve been deeply committed to the path of conjuring this elusive yet poignant feeling through playing guitar, through making songs and sounds and sharing them with others. Before I started writing songs with verses and choruses, improvising was primarily how I found myself in musical settings.
“It is still a bright beacon of my approach to songwriting and composition. Sonny Rollins said that improvisation is about forgetting, not remembering. That when one’s mind goes blank, the ideas that come are from an untraceable source.”
