With a healthy output as producer, arranger, composer and of course multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter these 10 songs make up West Kirby man Bill’s fourth album and features The Orielles and Our Girl on guest vocals plus Rod Skip on Cello. PS. Bill was the guitarist for and co-founder of The Coral. A bell like guitar chimes out. A smooth wash and gentle fuzzy guitar ripple like the fur on a Persian cat in the woody bass rumble. Soft almost crooning hushed choruses of vocals weave coaxing, enticing spells. A hazy dream-washed guitar hovers and swoops it’s somnolent sounds. Songs build, swell and permeate your heart. A languorous stretch of an album easing into beleaguered ears with a treacly flow of comfort.
This musical belief of delayed gratification is something Bill learnt from classical music as a child, from Elgar and Debussy in particular – and over the long hall of his short life, you can hear these riches being polished on Yawn. Most of the 10 songs clock-in over the 5 minute mark and this wide-angle lens affords us time to interpret and translate meaning – or just to revel in it.
Multi-instrumentalist, producer, string-arranger and composer Bill Ryder-Jones has had a career spanning 15 years, a rarity in a world that so often looks to the new. From his musical interpretation of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winters Night A Traveller (If… in 2011), 2013’s A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart, the acclaimed West Kirby County Primary (2015) and now to Yawn, Bill has constantly widened his scope, weaving in an overarching sense of authenticity, intimacy and wryness as he goes.
Yawn was recorded and produced entirely by Bill himself, with a little help from friends including guest vocals from The Orielles and Our Girl, cello by Rod Skip and mixing by Craig Silvey (Portishead, The Horrors, Arcade Fire). Bill has also been steadily building up a list of album production credits for other musicians including Our Girl, Hooton Tennis Club, Brooke Bentham and Holly Macve, who he records at his own place in West Kirby, aptly titled Yawn Studios.
