Ryder's Menagerie

Ryder's Menagerie is a rock band out of Queens, New York, and about 95 percent of what it does, it does itself.

SALTYmf found the band roughly a year and a half before this episode, partly through Southbound, a song that picked up Georgia and Alabama fans after the band was at a BKFC card in Philadelphia where Logan Tucker fought. James still brings up that the promoters never played the song the way they said they would, and points out the Philly crowd was busy cheering for the Eagles anyway. James and Max joined the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast for Salty's Live Music from James's studio, with the Ramones on the wall behind them.

James started on saxophone in public school music classes, and he will tell you those programs get cut first. Max came up on the same New York clubs around 2014 and 2015 and the two of them never once met. Everything the band records gets played live, full takes, no punch ins, and they keep the best one. The live album is built the same way. James takes the multitrack stems home and mixes them like he would mix a record, and he fixes nothing. No overdubs, no re recording. If there is a slight mistake on the tape it stays on the tape, because it is live. What a listener gets is close to what they would get standing in front of the stage.

Ten years in, James was the only one left. The lineup had come apart and he was rebuilding it outward from himself. Max had been through the same thing. His old band dissolved, and he spent the next several years on the Long Island cover band scene, where he got popular playing other people's songs while knowing his heart was in writing. He did not want to start over again. James found him through mutual friends online and neither of them can say how. They met up at Rose's Pizza in Huntington, jammed, and that was the audition. Both of them have day jobs. There is no money in this, venues have closed since COVID, and what the band hears most from people is that they are going to come out.

Which is what the live album is for. If people will not come to the shows, the band will send them the show. Live from the Dark is out February 13, cut from fall 2025 dates in Brooklyn, Long Island, Baltimore and a four city run in Canada with Chris Holmes. Max is worried about AI writing songs, and says it makes him prouder of what they are: real people playing real instruments and breaking a string. The next album is written and they are getting ready to record it.