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Our lives are bookmarked with great songs. We remember the one we played for our high school sweetheart, we remember the one that played when we held hands at the roller rink, we remember the ones that gave us the soundtrack to our first road trip or retreat. Great songs—the ones that say things we didn’t even know we wanted to—are hard to come by, and Ryan Meyers writes great songs.

The Ryan Meyers Band call Mississippi home, but find themselves playing their music all over the country to bars, churches, and auditoriums full of people with one thing in common: they love great songs. In their travels, the band has found a home at many Catholic churches, thanks to their faith-based songwriting, passion, and advocacy for “the least of these,” those most marginalized by society. While the band speaks from an undeniably Catholic Christian worldview, people of all faith traditions (or none at all) find common ground in the themes of life and love, faith and doubt, struggle and freedom. “Jesus is about real life,” says Ryan in an interview with a local radio station. “The Gospel is about real life, so the Church and the art it produces should be about real life.”

The band believes that “real life” should be explored honestly in their music, and their latest release from GIA’s Disciple Records label, “Quiet Cities”, is a testament to that ideal. Songs like “Boy” and “Running Out of Faith” manage to straddle the line between autobiographical and universal, chronicling a seeker’s journey of growing up, and struggling with faith, both in himself and in the divine. “Days Like These” and “Hold On” explore relationships old and new, and “Life as a Carnival” takes an artistic look at life’s many distractions from truth and love. “Wherever Your Treasure Is,” the most overtly Christian lyric on the record, is a prayer born from Ryan’s experience of losing many of his material possessions and rediscovering what was truly important after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on his area in the fall of 2005. Through the lens of faith, the Ryan Meyers Band gives an honest representation of what it means to be truly human.

Ryan Meyers Band’s live performance has graduated from great to truly outstanding over the past five years of touring, and has garnered praise from not just church groups (which tend to be more forgiving) but from major players in the mainstream pop-rock scene. In a recent review, the band is said to “take their audience on a high-energy journey through the things they thought they’d long given up on… Meyers’ honesty on stage and the band’s feel and reaction to the audience had a room full of strangers resolving to one another as they left to give faith another chance, and to rekindle relationships they’d let die.”

Ryan Meyers Band is currently booking for the next season, and would love to make an appearance at your church or venue. Call (601) 434-1049 or e-mail booking@ryanmeyersband.com for more information.