Artist Profile: Palo Sopraño
Palo Sopraño, the artistic alias of Pacific Northwest indie artist Ryan Pickard, has been exploring the limits of his sound and improvisational abilities for over a decade now, and, with each successive song he releases, he takes another step into the jangly, psychedelic world he has created.
Growing up in a musical family, Pickard was surrounded by talented instrumentalists. His mother is a pianist, his dad a guitarist, and his older brother a drummer, and, when Pickard was as young as 10 or 11, he decided on his own to pick up guitar and bass, inspired by the rock bands that he admired throughout his childhood.
His first band, Moon Room, was a four-piece outfit in which he shared songwriting duties with his friend Andrew, and, through their various musical ventures, Pickard was able to gain a greater confidence in his own abilities.
Yet, like many artists who were drawn toward working with the resources at their disposal, his first encounters with Mac DeMarco, the famed indie artist and multi-instrumentalist, helped him realize the possibilities of what he could create on his own.
“Once the band was around the point of breaking up, I feel like I saw [Mac DeMarco] and I thought ‘This dude is so free in what he does’. He just kind of like fearlessly did everything: recording everything himself and just being really set on what he was doing… [It inspired me that] he had a way to carry yourself in the world just by going out and having the confidence to be yourself and put yourself out there.”
After Moon Room dissolved, Pickard set out with a distinct and concrete intention: he was going to make music entirely on his own, not beholden to the restrictions of anyone but himself.
With little knowledge of techniques related to producing and recording, he leaned into his inexperience, curating a sound around the imperfections in his own recordings.
“I leaned into the griminess of it… I had a Gibson SG, a nice guitar, but I wanted it to sound weird. My friend had this sh*tty Squier, and I was just on the bridge pickup, with all the grimy reverb and stuff of garage band, just like blowing it out. And I was like, ‘This is awesome’.”
His first two albums released on streaming, Flower Girl and Mood Ring, most closely reflect the true rawness of the early developments in his sound; tracks like “Everybody Loves You” and “Whipped Cream” are profound in their simultaneous heavy reverberation and light-hearted, DIY materialization.
After the release of Mood Ring, he leaned even further into his unique creative workflow. As a songwriter, he works primarily improvisationally, writing and laying down the chords, lyrics, and other instrumentations mostly in singular sessions. As a result, his songs, especially when placed in an album format, would at times sound sonically disjointed: a byproduct of his distinct approach to writing and recording. Therefore, Pickard made the decision to start working on singles, releasing upwards of 25 in the intermittent years between his second and third studio albums.
“It felt really freeing to not have someone being like, ‘Oh, that sounds so different than this song’... Even if no one was saying that, it just gave me the permission to know that it's just a single, so it doesn't have to be any certain way or fall in line with any certain genre or anything, just because it's its own song.”
Now, having released Past Life City Boy and having another album planned for the near future, Pickard has returned, somewhat, to his original, project-oriented leanings In addition, the project has expanded to a full band for live shows, one that, with many rotating members, has opened for Peach Pit in the past. Yet, the creative freedom of his workflow remains, and his releases, as he continues down the path he has laid for himself, are certain to be special.
