Charleston singer-songwriter Ryan Lill has released three singles this year. The first, “Dirty,” is an unabashed ode of lust that finds Lill crooning, “I’ll do anything you want me to,” more than a little suggestively. The second, “Adore Me,” is an irresistible kiss-off that centers around the line, “Keep my name out your mouth.” Both songs are shiny, catchy and refreshingly adult slices of electronic pop.
Lill’s newest single, “Ocean,” is the polar opposite of those songs. A majestic, dramatic piano-and-voice ballad, the song uses the ocean as a metaphor for fighting onward when you feel alone or ostracized.
“When they chase you like the tides are rolling in,” Lill sings as the song begins, “gotta keep your sails cast to the wind.”
Lill said that the song was written very intentionally.
“I’d kind of focused my career more on pop recently,” he said, “But this song just kind of came to me. I typically don’t watch TV, but I’d started watching Outer Banks, which is filmed here in town. And, I just thought to myself that some of the things happening on the show are indicative of how my life was. I didn’t know how to really fit in anywhere.”
Keeping that feeling in mind, Lill sat down at the piano to write.
“I feel like the ocean is beautiful, but it can kill you,” he said. “So I took some time and started writing about my experience of nobody wanting you in this town, but you know you’re meant for something different, so you gotta ride the wave; you got to keep your head above the undertow. And, that just formed into ‘Ocean.’ I feel like I knew exactly what I wanted to say when I sat down, and it feels good. It feels very authentic.”
The video is just as dramatic and stripped-down as the song, featuring a lost-looking Lill wandering along the shoreline, emoting to the roaring ocean. Quite a changeup from his previous clip for “Adore Me,” in which he played a female, 80s-style aerobics instructor and hammed it up for the cameras.
“Yeah, that video is definitely different than ‘Adore Me,’ which I had blast filming,” Lill said with a laugh. “I just wanted it to be a little more raw and just more focused on the lyrics and not focus on me trying to act something out or me making people laugh, like I try to always do. I just wanted to be more focused on this really pretty view of the ocean. I wanted it to be more about the music.”
Of course, while there wasn’t a lot of humor in front of the cameras, behind the scenes it was a different story. “It was weird filming in front of people who were walking on the beach,” he said. “It was a pretty crowded beach day, so trying to find shots where it looks like you’re alone on the beach is almost impossible. And, it’s odd because you’re singing to a backing track and people are just walking by you, like, ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’”
All three of the songs Lill has released this year have been markedly different from his previous, more acoustic-guitar work on the 2017 album, Burn This Bridge, and he says that he’s essentially trying to reinvent himself as a more honest musician and songwriter.
“I think that instead of having this idea of going into the studio to write something that is specifically radio friendly, or going into the studio to write something that reaches just one specific demographic—I’m starting to write music that I want to hear. I feel like, now, I’m starting to write for my own voice; there’s been this power shift in my life where I feel like I’m making what I wish somebody would have written that I could hear when I was growing up as a gay kid in South Carolina.”
And, what that kid wanted to hear was electronic pop and dark, dramatic ballads by the boatload.
“I grew up in a house where I was number six of seven kids,” Lill said. “And VH-1 was always on, so I was always listening to Madonna, Whitney Houston, Duran Duran and Depeche Mode. My mom and dad were huge ‘80s nuts, so all of our home videos are of me and my siblings roller skating down the hall to the top 40 hits of the ‘80s. So I feel like it’s been really cathartic coming full circle. I used to listen to these ‘80s piano ballads, and now I’ve kind of gone back to the roots of that.”
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