Niagara-On-The-Lake Alt-Folk Rocker Ryan Bissell Releases Debut Single “Get Up Get Ready”
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario’s Ryan Bissell has released his debut single, “Get Up Get Ready,” a raw, urgent alt-rock track produced by Paul Gigliotti and marking the arrival of a songwriter who spent decades writing music before he ever finished a song. Released through this own label, the track kicks off a catalogue born out of one of the more unlikely origin stories in recent memory.
Bissell has played guitar and sung since childhood, but for years his songwriting amounted to little more than freestyled gibberish, catchy fragments of melody without any real structure behind them. Sitting down to shape those ideas into a finished song with a real story never held the same appeal as simply letting the ideas flow. That changed in February of 2023, after a freak accident on vacation in Costa Rica left him with a six inch, gaping wound from a stingray sting that refused to heal for six months.
Months of antibiotics wrecked his stomach and triggered a stretch of insomnia that took a serious toll on his mental health, leaving him wide awake most nights until sunrise. Music became his outlet. He challenged himself to finish just one song, simply to say he had done it. Then he finished another. And another. Some nights he woke with entire songs already formed in his head, sitting down to play them as though he had known them his whole life.
That surge of songwriting reignited a passion for music that had sat dormant for the better part of a decade, his guitar collecting dust under his bed. As his catalogue grew, Bissell began working with producer and musician Paul Gigliotti, best known as one half of the Canadian pop rock duo Wave, to bring the songs to life in the studio.
“Get Up Get Ready” channels that restless energy directly into its lyrics. “Five more minutes ‘til the van’s here, how can you just stand there,” Bissell sings over a driving, tension filled arrangement, building toward a chorus that repeats like a mantra: “Get up, come on get ready, for anything.” It’s a song about the moment right before everything changes, delivered by an artist who knows that moment firsthand.
With “Get Up Get Ready” now out in the world, Ryan Bissell is ready for listeners to hear the results of a catalogue built in the middle of the night, one song at a time.
Hi, Ryan! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Hey! Great to meet you too. Thanks for having me! Hello to everybody reading this. My name is Ryan Bissell. I’m from Niagara on the Lake, just chasing a dream a little bit later than usual. I try to write catchy songs that make people feel something.
You spent years writing melodies without ever finishing a song. What do you think was really holding you back all those years, and what finally changed after Costa Rica?
That’s a great question! And probably one that I should have tried answering a little earlier myself. I’ve played music all my life. I’ve always enjoyed it as a hobby. And for as far back as I can remember, I’ve always liked writing my own stuff, even if it was just bits and pieces of mostly nonsense.
That’s all it ever really was though. A hobby. Something I did for fun. The idea of sitting down, writing compelling lyrics, and turning those lyrics into a story was never as fun as just sitting down and singing. Even if what I was singing was mostly gibberish.
It was only me alone in my room after all. It didn’t matter if it didn’t make sense. I always loved the process of making noise. But never loved the process of trying to make sense of the noise.
I was completely content being a bedroom rockstar. Even if my songs might have different lyrics every time I play them, at least they’re mine. That was all I ever needed to feel content musically. At least that’s what I told myself.
It sounds cliche, but once I got injured, I really started to think about how short life was. It’s sad to say, but it took a near death experience to evaluate what was important to me. And I didn’t want to live with the regret of never trying to do something I love. Even if I flat on my face in the process.
So although it was horrific and excruciating, there’s no way I’d be sitting here doing this interview today, if that never happened.
The chorus of “Get Up Get Ready” feels like a rallying cry. Was it written for listeners, or was it something you were telling yourself during those months of insomnia and recovery?
Interestingly, I had the chorus written before I knew what the song was going to be about. I wrote the melody of the song, plus the first couple lines of the chorus, in about two minutes. I’ll never forget how euphoric it felt.
I had just tuned my guitar way down to B standard. There was another song I was tinkering with, and I was trying to find a key that matched my voice. I just kept lowering it and lowering it. I remember playing a simple chord progression of just G, E minor and C. There’s nothing overly fascinating about those chord shapes normally, but they sounded so rich and interesting in the baritone tuning, the melody for the verse came to me right away.
I remember sitting on my bed frantically looking around my room for my phone. I needed to record a voice note before I forgot it. I played around with the verse melody for a few bars, just to make sure it got stuck in my head. When it came to see where I could go for a chorus, the first thing that came out was “Get Up, Come on Get Ready, Get Ready Babe.” I knew right away that was going to be the chorus, even though I didn’t quite know what the rest of the song was going to be about yet.
I sat with it for about a week, and tried to figure out what kind of story the song was going to tell. I settled on a pretty relatable topic. Getting into a fight with your significant other, right before you’re about to go somewhere important, but coming together when it matters.
Although I didn’t explicitly write the chorus as a rallying cry, or as a way to try and inspire myself, I’m certain that those words of encouragement must have been simmering just beneath the surface for them to have flowed out so easily and naturally the way they did during that initial recording.
The title “Get Up Get Ready” suggests embracing the unknown. Now that you’re releasing your debut single, what feels more intimidating: the uncertainty you faced during your recovery, or putting your music out into the world?
Both have been terrifying for completely different reasons! Recovering from my accident was brutal, and took a long time. I had a lot of sleepless nights wondering if I’d be able to live a normal life again. Or worse. Thankfully, I eventually healed, and other than a gnarly scar, I am no worse for wear.
Putting my music out in the world was a different kind of fear. This song itself was a microcosm of that. Paul and I have had several songs finished for well over a year now. This was the first one we finished, and I think we both loved it from the get go. Yet, it still took fifteen more months to finally put it out.
I would always seem to come up with some justification as to why I needed to hold off. I needed more songs. I needed more recordings. I needed more content. What if people hate it? What if I sound terrible? What if I look terrible? What if people love it, what would you do then?
Looking back on it, it’s pretty obvious now, but I was being held back by an overwhelming fear of failure.
It’s easy to say in hindsight, but I guess I was just scared of trying to make something out of a hobby that I really enjoyed, not succeeding, and ultimately losing the passion that made me enjoy doing it in the first place.
I still am relatively terrified of that if I’m being completely honest. But I never want to wonder what could have been. So here I am, going for it.
If someone listening to your story is going through their own difficult season, whether it’s illness, insomnia, or simply feeling stuck, what do you hope they take away from the fact that your first finished songs came from such an unexpected chapter of your life?
To be completely honest, it’s hard, and a little uncomfortable, for me to sit here and feel worthy of even giving that sort of advice, or of being a motivational figure for somebody else. However, if someone were to read my story, and feel inspired by it, that’s about the biggest honor I could possibly think of, and I’d hope that they’d see it’s never too late to do something you truly enjoy. No matter how late. And no matter how terrifying it may feel.