Serena Ryder covers Canadian classics - Winnipeg Sun

Serena Ryder covers Canadian classics
By DAVID SCHMEICHEL -- Winnipeg Sun


She's only two albums into a wildly promising career but on her latest folk-rocker Serena Ryder is already taking things back to the beginning.
The result -- the recently released If Your Memory Serves You Well -- is a (mostly) all-covers disc that sees the 23-year-old Ryder tackling such Canadian-penned classics as The Band's This Wheel's on Fire, Leonard Cohen's Sisters of Mercy, and Paul Anka's It Doesn't Matter Anymore.
"It's where a lot of my beginnings came from -- my influences and why I write the way I do is because of these songwriters," says Ryder. "So this is about embracing those influences, instead of doing what a lot of people try to do, which is reinvent themselves into something they're not."
Often, when artists release albums comprised entirely of covers, critics wonder whether they're resting on their laurels or, worse, fresh out of ideas. That's not the case with Ryder, who says she used the exercise as an opportunity to kickstart her own creative process.
"Luckily, I haven't had anyone say that to me," she says. "For me, I think this record was to influence my songwriting and to embrace what came before us ... And, as a result, I've been writing more than ever. A lot of these songs spoke to me in a way that even my own songs don't, so I've been really influenced by listening to them."
Of course, If Your Memory Serves also includes three Ryder tunes, plus a recording of her first performance ever, at the ripe old age of seven. She's been writing songs ever since, but her career really took off in 2004, when eclectic cabaret-rocker Hawksley Workman heard her singing on CBC radio and then offered to produce her debut album Unlikely Emergency.
"That was a huge honour and a huge blessing, to have been taken under his wing like that," she says of Workman. "He's so inspiring."
Over the summer, Ryder joined local boys Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings for their cross-Canada tour together, wowing audiences with her bluesy pipes and picking up a new songwriting partner in the process.
"I'd watch their banter on stage, where they'd talk about how one of them would write half a song, then send it off to the other one, and they were always joking about being really good at writing half-songs," she explains. "I finally got up the nerve to tell (Bachman) that I had half a song, and he was like, 'Get in here, let's finish it off together.' "
Cummings, too, assumed a mentor-like role with Ryder, treating her to the spoils of his decades-spanning music collection.
"He travels with three or four 80-gig iPODs," she laughs. "He says he has to, because he needs all his music with him wherever he goes!"