Ryan Bissell Releases Debut Single 'Get Up Get Ready'
The Niagara-on-the-Lake alt-folk rocker's track is now streaming on Spotify and YouTube.
Ryan Bissell, an alt-folk rock artist from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, has released his debut single, 'Get Up Get Ready,' produced by Paul Gigliotti and issued through his own label. The track marks the first finished song from a musician who spent years playing guitar and writing fragments of melody without ever completing a full composition, a pattern that shifted after a stingray injury sustained during a 2023 vacation in Costa Rica left him with a wound that took six months to heal.
Bissell has played guitar and sung since childhood, but for years his songwriting amounted to little more than freestyled gibberish, catchy fragments of melody without any real structure behind them. Sitting down to shape those ideas into a finished song with a real story never held the same appeal as simply letting the ideas flow. That changed in February of 2023, after a freak accident on vacation in Costa Rica left him with a six inch, gaping wound from a stingray sting that refused to heal for six months.
Months of antibiotics wrecked his stomach and triggered a stretch of insomnia that took a serious toll on his mental health, leaving him wide awake most nights until sunrise. Music became his outlet. He challenged himself to finish just one song, simply to say he had done it. Then he finished another. And another. Some nights he woke with entire songs already formed in his head, sitting down to play them as though he had known them his whole life.
That surge of songwriting reignited a passion for music that had sat dormant for the better part of a decade, his guitar collecting dust under his bed. As his catalogue grew, Bissell began working with producer and musician Paul Gigliotti, best known as one half of the Canadian pop rock duo Wave, to bring the songs to life in the studio.
'Get Up Get Ready' channels that restless energy directly into its lyrics. 'Five more minutes 'til the van's here, how can you just stand there,' Bissell sings over a driving, tension filled arrangement, building toward a chorus that repeats like a mantra: 'Get up, come on get ready, for anything.' It's a song about the moment right before everything changes, delivered by an artist who knows that moment firsthand.
With 'Get Up Get Ready' now out in the world, Ryan Bissell is ready for listeners to hear the results of a catalogue built in the middle of the night, one song at a time. The single is available on Spotify and
. More information is available at www.ryanbissell.com.
