Ryan Davis from Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band, which released their latest album New Threats from the Soul in July.Justin Murphy/Supplied
When Ryan Davis first played in Toronto in October, 2024, you could barely see his face. On the brink of turning 40, and about two decades into a DIY career, he opened for 26-year-old breakout star MJ Lenderman with his hood up, hat low and sunglasses on, only his amber guitar catching the light.
The room at Lee’s Palace was still filling up with concertgoers but already buzzing for Lenderman, on one of the last tours where his band still hauled and packed their own gear.
Davis played five songs, most pushing toward 10 minutes, and by the time he reached his closer, Flashes of Orange, he had the room’s attention.
A little over a year later, he’s in Charlestown, Ind., sitting alone in a quiet park in a grey hoodie, claiming one last still afternoon before touring kicks back into gear. “When I’m not on the road, I’m living a pretty quiet life,” he says. “Being out in front of people every night isn’t easy for me.” That tension shows up in his songs: He balances humour with heartbreak, absurdity with tragedy, unhurried philosophizing that rewards a patient ear. It’s the kind of storytelling that has found itself suddenly in step with the cultural moment.
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For more than a decade he led State Champion, an indie Americana band with a country-punk sound and a cult following. In his current era, fronting the eponymous Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, his writing has grown sharper, funnier and more resonant.
Growing up in Kentucky, Davis absorbed country music through osmosis in his early writing days. The deliberate draw toward its forms came later, through influences like John Prine, Townes Van Zandt and Gary Stewart. He leaned into writing inside the genre’s walls and sometimes past them. “I’ve always liked to sort of set my limitations within the boundaries of folk and country and then kind of just push out of that from there,” he says.
Davis’s writing feels casual but it’s the product of ruthless editing. “The genesis of the images and of the language is the easy part,” he says. “It’s just sort of things I pick up off the ground.”
He writes rolling notes – rhymes, lines, couplets, roadside sightings, town fragments – and builds songs by pulling from the piles. “I don’t really sit down and write a song from scratch,” he says. Instead, Davis comes to understand what the song is about in real-time, as he writes it, “and as the song is writing itself.”
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New Threats from the Soul, his latest album, unfurls seven songs across 57 minutes. The longest track, Mutilation Springs, runs 11:49. “Oh, the Spanish moss,” it begins. “It weeps in mourning of not only personal but also planetary loss / Not just for the bloodshed but, by God, for what the Bloody Marys cost.”
Davis’s lyrics-first approach has inspired fellow writers and musicians, including Lenderman, a fan since State Champion. At the 2024 Toronto show, Lenderman called Davis his hero while wearing his band’s shirt.
Asked what kept him pushing through the lean years, Davis says it’s a question that’s been on his mind lately. He “never anticipated the life-altering nature of the release” of New Threats from the Soul, which has allowed him to make music full-time, no longer clocking into restaurant or manual labour jobs between tours.
“There’s some sort of true delusion or engine inside of me that feels like it was built to only do this and that anything else is a compromise,” he says. “I really kind of put all my chips on the table for these last couple records. And I did that knowing that even if it was a bust, and I only sold 150 copies, that it was worth it.”
That shift is now visible at his shows, with crowds spanning generations in rooms bigger than the ones he once stepped into unseen. He returns to Toronto on Dec. 11 to play The Garrison, now headlining and ready to stand fully in the spotlight.