WITH LOVE

Description

When an artist of Mitch Ryder’s caliber looks back on his six-decade career and tells you his latest album is a must-have, you should take that statement seriously. As anyone who has followed the roots and branches of American music will confirm, Ryder is one of the faces carved on rock ’n’ roll’s Mount Rushmore, and the spiritual forefather of every working-class provocateur — from Bruce Springsteen to Ted Nugent — who ever cranked up his amp and shouted his truth. He is the rock ’n’ roll pioneer who was there at the flashpoint of the late ’50s. He is the hitmaker who blew up the charts in the mid-’60s with Detroit Wheels cuts like Jenny Take A Ride and his cover of Devil With A Blue Dress On. Among his countless claims to fame, Ryder was both the last man to play with Otis Redding (in 1967) and the first living white artist inducted into the R&B Hall Of Fame (in 2017). For many musicians of Ryder’s era and stature, age signals a creative slowdown and a reliance on hits. But as he enters his eighth decade, the Michigan-born singer-songwriter remains in constant motion, his history matched only by what is still to come. It’s an attitude embodied by the new studio album With Love, produced by Don Was, released in February 2025 on Ruf, and filled with hard-hitting, tender and personal songs that stand up to anything in his catalog. “Of the 21 studio albums I’ve recorded, this one is in the top two,” Ryder says, reflecting on a catalog that began with Take A Ride with The Detroit Wheels in 1966. “It’s one of the most honest albums I’ve ever done. Not that the others were lies, but I was able to access feelings that had been hidden until now.” Ryder’s exceptional musical talent was certainly a catalyst, but the real driving force behind With Love is undoubtedly Ryder’s ten new original songs: a collection of tunes as smart, satirical, soulful and ironic as any the veteran songwriter has ever assembled on an album. From the dizzying Latin-rock grooves of Oh What A Night and Pass It To The Right (an ode to common etiquette at a hedonistic party) to the playful soul of Sanguine and the Stonesy style of Wrong Hands, Ryder’s talent remains beyond question. “Everything on the album is autobiographical,” he explains of a tracklist that plays with the ghostly self-analysis of The Artist and the joyful yet morbid R&B of Just The Way It Is, exploring the inevitability of life and death. “One Monkey is about my drug addiction and how I overcame it. Fly is about my career and being happy with it, the trajectory and the work I’ve been able to produce.” More than half a century after Mitch Ryder first made waves on rock ’n’ roll’s radar, With Love proves that this lifelong visionary still has creative energy in the tank. “Practice makes perfect,” he smiles, speaking of a growing discography that is clearly the work of a man who still strives for something bigger. “I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it...”