The Unpredictable Mr. Ryan

By Henry Lipput

With his new album, Retro Metro (Think Like A Key Music), Scotland’s SUPER 8 -- aka Trip aka Paul Ryan -- continues to delight and surprise us, as he’s been doing for the last six years, and he keeps us guessing about what he has up his musical sleeve.

In 2018 he released his first album T-T-T-Technicolor Melodies and as someone at the time wrote for CoolDad Music the album: “has the charm of a home-made, one-man-in-a-studio production like Paul McCartney and Emitt Rhodes.” And that was that because we were used to waiting at least another year or two for a musician’s next album.

But SUPER 8 began his unpredictable ways as he released that same year not one but two albums of completely new material with each one (Turn Around Or… and HI/LO) being better than the one before. (I just want to point out that as far as I know – and you can let me know if I’m wrong – no one since The Beatles in 1964 and 1965 produced three albums in a year.)

Soon after this musical hat trick SUPER 8 began a collaboration with California-based power popper Lisa Mychols with the groovy single “Timebomb.” They never sat in the same room working on music and lyrics but instead traded files across multiple time zones, a practice which is something done by a lot of folks now but seemed to be very new at the time. Trip and Mychols also put out a self-titled album in 2020 and continue to work together as LMS8 – their latest single is the recent “Love Connection.”

SUPER 8’s Raindrops On Roses album contained a lot of covers which had already been on his albums but also included, as he surprised all of us, his version of a 1970’s Lennon demo that – at the time – The Twotles had yet to release. Legends – A Tribute to Astrud was another unpredictable album as SUPER 8’s tribute to his band of the 1990’s that toured the UK with these songs but never got into a studio to record them.

On the brand new album Retro Metro he does it again. He opens it with an instrumental theme song – when was the last time anyone did that? And at the end of 2023 a retro-60’s band The Plus 4 released a few tracks. But it wasn’t long before the cat was out of the hat and the word was that The Plus 4 was really SUPER 8. He’s own up to it and it’s not only now part of his canon but now the songs are on Retro Metro and everyone can hear how cool they are!

Back around the time T-T-T-Technicolor Melodies came out there were some early SUPER 8 videos on YouTube. One of them was for a lovely song about a female friend but it didn’t appear of this first album. It did, however, show up on Turn Around Or … and was one of my favorite tracks. So it was a big surprise to find “Mary Jane,” dusted off and performed anew, on Retro Metro – sort of like a full circle for the song.