Stream: Ryan Pollie, ‘Get Better Soon’

Kevin Bronson on April 25th, 2019

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On his two full-lengths released under the band name Los Angeles Police Department, singer-songwriter Ryan Pollie proved a maker of beautifully sad songs that he’d sing with a cherubic smile — plumbing heart and soul in a game of musical grin-and-bear-it, as we wrote once.

About the time last year he shucked the LAPD moniker and began releasing music under his own name, Pollie’s sanguine outlook was put to the supreme test. He got cancer.

In a way, Pollie’s forthcoming self-titled album (out May 17 via Anti- Records), was prescient. “I just wrote a record about mortality and whether or not I believe in anything,” he says, “and then I’m faced with the biggest challenge of my life.”

With the help of friends, Pollie finished the album as he went through chemotherapy last summer. “Mixing is where it all came together for me,” he says. “Because I was sick, it was this new challenge — ‘I have to finish this record. I have to get out of bed. I don’t feel too well, but I’m going to go down the street to the studio and I’m going to give my notes and overdub some piano.’ I finished the record while I was sick, and that was a big thing for me, being sick and being able to finish something. It made me feel strong.”

The music draws from classic ’70s pop and folk (Jackson Brown is one of his heroes), warm and earnest, with a sense of humor and a dose of twang. Here’s how he describes the second single “Get Better Soon”: “I wrote ’Get Better Soon’ after seeing Kris Kristofferson play solo at a mall. I remember thinking about his songs and feeling inspired to convey a sense of storytelling and honesty I find so accessible in his music. It’s a love song and a ‘Get Well Soon’ card all in one, and a plea for the girl I was seeing to wear her T-shirts tucked in.”

The video for first single “Aim Slow” is culled from boyhood home videos and footage taken from his chemotherapy.

Here’s to getting better soon.

||| Stream: “Get Better Soon”