About a year after Better Days hit the local shelves (and my parents’ CD player on repeat), the phone rang.
On the other end was Pedro Carlo — a kind of local music Yoda, minus the lightsaber but with the same knack for cryptic wisdom. Pedro had the final say in the lineup for Splashy Fen, South Africa’s legendary music festival tucked away in the Drakensberg mountains. Every singer-songwriter within a 500km radius dreamed of playing there. I’d been one of them ever since I first strummed a G chord and thought, “Hmm… that sounded intentional.”
Pedro didn’t mince words. “Ryan, you’re on the lineup.”
Cue fireworks. Cue imaginary confetti. Cue me pretending to be chill while fist-pumping the air like a caffeinated lunatic.
But then came the catch. There’s always a catch.
I had this grand vision. Not just me and a guitar — I wanted a full band. The songs had lived in my head for years, with harmonies, grooves, and moments that just couldn’t come alive with a solo act. I was determined to bring them to life on that stage.
Pedro, however, wasn’t sold.
“It’s not the band I want. It’s you. People are buying tickets because they want to hear you.”
I tried reasoning. I negotiated like a man trying to convince his wife that a 75-inch TV is “an investment in family bonding”.
“Pedro, I promise, I know better musicians than me. They’ll elevate the whole thing. You won’t regret it.”
He sighed — the kind of sigh only a festival organiser, whose inbox is a ticking bomb of artist requests and logistics nightmares, can produce.
“Fine,” he said. “But you need to come up with a name that includes Ryan Calder in it. Some random new band no one’s heard of? That’s not why people come to this festival. So you can call it Ryan Calder and the Misfits, or Ryan Calder Band…”
It wasn’t exactly a eureka moment. It was more of a “well, that’ll do” moment. But it stuck. Because in essence, it was true — it wasn’t about erasing the singer-songwriter roots, it was about expanding them. Taking these stories and songs and adding layers, textures, a heartbeat.
Splashy Fen rolled around, and when we all arrived, there it was in print:
Saturday at 2pm – The Ryan Calder Band.
To anyone else, it might have been just a line in a festival program. To me, it was a seismic shift. A landmark moment where, for the first time, this thing that had lived in late-night conversations and scribbled notebooks had an official time slot and a hillside stage.
The stage was bigger than anything else I’d played. It had rained constantly, and the Drakensberg mountains were wet and it was cold. But as we plugged in and sound checked, it felt enormous.
We played to a hillside crowd of young and old, smiling strangers — folks who had no idea who I was but were vibing anyway because that’s the kind of festival Splashy is. And something happened on that stage. Something clicked for me.
That moment was never about “making it big”. It wasn’t about record deals or sold-out arenas. It was about the raw, undeniable joy of seeing a dream take shape — in real life, with real people, in the realest of hoodies.
To this day, I’m amazed they all said yes. What Rudi, Berto, Jon, and Tamlyn saw in me and my silly little songs, I’ll never fully understand. But they showed up. They gave those songs life. They made them sound better than I ever could. More talented, more capable, and far more generous with their time and belief.
I still feel the hum of those days — the optimism, the exhaustion, and the echo of songs that hadn’t been written yet but were already waiting.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that “better days” aren’t a chapter of life; they’re a state of mind. They evolve, stretch across borders, and sometimes reappear in a different country, with a new set of songs — but always with the same heartbeat.
