Prowling around the celebrity-stuffed tables at this year’s Brit Awards ceremony, comedian and host Jack Whitehall singled out stars such as Nick Grimshaw (“a competition winner”), some “McFlies buzzing around” and “hangers on – look, someone’s brought their drug dealer!” The camera zoomed in on Sam Ryder mid-pint, dressed in double denim, laughing his head off.
“It was quite cool, good for my brand,” Ryder (who would probably describe “positive energy” as his drug of choice) jokes a few weeks after the ceremony. The Essex singer isn’t exactly known for his hard-living lifestyle; the night before we speak, he shared a video of himself wearing a lavender facemask while preparing a bubble bath lined with painkillers, throat sweets and a series of Battlestar Galactica. Now he’s nursing a mug of ginger tea with honey, a final attempt to ward off the sore throat that has decided to manifest moments before he plays an intimate showcase of new music. Rock and roll, baby.
The world knows Ryder as the man who brought the UK the closest it’s come to a Eurovision victory since 1998, when he performed his original song “Space Man” at the 2022 contest. Before that, he’d spent some time as the guitarist for a glam metal band in Canada, dabbled in construction and toured the wedding singer circuit until the pandemic brought social gathering to an abrupt end. It was during lockdown that Ryder started posting to TikTok, mostly covers of pop and rock classics using nothing but his phone and a backing track. By the time he was announced as the UK’s Eurovision champion, he’d already amassed a following of 13 million on the app.
Since then, and where other Eurovision contestants might have faded into obscurity, Ryder has established himself as one of the most endearing new characters in UK music, for whom the term “golden retriever energy” could have been coined. He’s charming today, despite his cold, with those resplendent blond locks framing his kind, open face. I’m disappointed at the lack of gossip he has from the Brits afterparties, though, as he was apparently more preoccupied by the buffet. “It was pretty interesting,” he says. “They had four cabbages just sitting there, and a communal tiramisu, just like, one slab that people were tucking into. Weird!” Three years in, and these events still feel like a bit of a zoo to him.
Really, it’s wonderful to hear that (so far), this notoriously brutal industry hasn’t knocked the stuffing out of him, just dented his immune system. Hanging around during his soundcheck at the George Tavern in London, I see his perfectionistic nature as he asks to repeat a verse or frets over his voice. He has an extraordinary range, which stretches from a blues-soaked holler up to a glass-shattering wail.
Tonight he’s flexing it for a debut performance of “White Lies”, his first big step since parting ways with major label Parlophone, with whom he signed a one-album deal, in 2023. He brought his former team with him, who were laid off during a company restructure and who Ryder considered “instrumental” in his success to that point. He seems intent on doing things his own way, believing the slow pace that majors often operate at is at odds with the way we consume music today. “We’re building something totally new that I think is the direction the music industry is headed,” he says. “It’s not any shade to [major labels], because I know they want to be able to provide a good service, but the level they run at, nothing is quick, so it’s like you’re waiting for the industry to change.”
Ryder’s first order of business after going independent was releasing a holiday song, the Eighties-influenced “You’re Christmas to Me”. Nominated for Best Single at the Brits, it challenged Wham!’s “Last Christmas” for the No 1 spot and ultimately came in at a respectable second place. He recently bought a home in Nashville with his partner, jewellery designer Lois Gaskin-Barber, having fallen in love with the music city when he first visited over a decade ago. There, he’s built a studio for his team, who foster an “ethos of kindness”; the majority of its members are women, which he finds refreshing after the male-heavy major label scene. “It’s really changed the dynamic, and I much prefer it now – it’s way more measured, nurturing and much less ego-driven, and helps me stay more present,” he says.
He’s also coined his own genre, “frontier soul”, influenced in part by the westerns he grew up watching with his grandfather. Ryder wanted to be an astronaut when he was a kid, but now he seems more inspired by films such as Sergio Leone’s 1964 classic A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood. “There’s a sprinkling of Tarantino desert, spaghetti western vibes going on in there,” Ryder says of the track, the first from a new album that will be announced later this year. “It’s super breezy, like the story of a road trip from Tennessee to Texas I took a few months ago, and inspired by all those golden era Hollywood westerns.”
Indeed, fans of the camp rock of “Space Man” might be surprised by what they hear. “White Lies” sneaks in on a slick synth beat, adding gospel-style harmonies and shuffling R&B percussion: think Plan B’s “She Said” or Teddy Swims’s “Bad Dreams”. It’s something of a warning Ryder wrote to himself, when he realised he was getting a kick out of people telling him what a “super positive” person he was. Suddenly, his natural charisma felt more like a brand, as though he was performing to expectations: “It was like finding a currency, and I was telling myself these white lies that it was normal, when actually… no human being is one-dimensional.”
His comment reminds me of an Instagram post he shared in January last year, after missing out on an Emmy Award for “Fought and Lost”, the song he contributed to season three of Ted Lasso. Success was “relative”, he wrote, and “it can become all too easy to measure it against our desires rather than past experiences”.
“The Emmys was a circuit break moment where this all started,” he reflects now. “Ed Sheeran won the award (big up, Ed), and I really had to stop and ask myself why I felt like it needed to happen for me. Because for the first time in my career ever, I felt a pang that we didn’t win something – I’d never felt like that before, because I do not care.” His usual response, he says, is to be grateful for any kind of acknowledgement of his music: “You have to do a lot of work to feel like that, because sometimes it’s just s***, you know? But that’s what I want to stand for.”
Right now, he’s in the “best place, spiritually”, that he’s ever been. “It’s been a tough one, building something from the ground up, but I have so much to be thankful for,” he says. “I feel validated because of who I’m surrounded by – the kindness in this project is huge. And the chance to go and show people who you are – that, for me, is a win.”
‘White Lies’, the new single from Sam Ryder, is out now
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