Ryall has been writing song lyrics for a while now, and it’s something that she has done with Mark Edwards’ The Cloggz, the Julian Nicholas Band and her new band Anöna Trio. “It usually starts with the fact that I like a composition. I like singing wordlessly. I really enjoy it and I do a lot of that with Julian Nicholas’ Band and also with Anöna Trio. I really like how sometimes a lyric will present itself. A title quite often gets my imagination flowing.”

Anöna Trio have recently released their debut album, One January Morning, which has a mixture of tunes by the likes of Carla Bley, Wayne Shorter and Brad Mehldau, and two compositions by Julian Nicholas. Most of the songs feature words written  by Ryall, except for the opening track Food of Love, a piece by Julian Nicholas. “I have actually written words for Food of Love but I wrote words for it after we recorded it, so hopefully sometime I’ll be able to record those.”

Ryall’s lyric writing process involves approaching a song from different angles. “I don’t always start at the beginning, and I like to find different themes. I do search Google for a title. In fact Julian’s tune One January Morning I literally googled that title and found various things. One particular news report, an airplane collision that happened somewhere over South America. Quite a devastating thing that happened, literally the title of the piece was One January Morning. So there is some of that in that lyric, although it’s ostensibly about feeling a bit lost but having come through something and trying to make sense of where one’s been, where one is and where one is going. The phrase ‘When the sky ignites vermillion’ is actually a reference to that explosion, as well as talking about how the sun is coming up. Not that I’m trying to be too clever-clever, but I do like to have layers of different themes if I can.”

Despite her years of experience in writing lyrics, Ryall still doesn’t view herself as a lyricist. “I still
think of myself as making up words. Sometimes I find it hard to consider myself a lyricist when I think of
some of my heroes: people like Joni Mitchell, Donald Fagen, Leonard Cohen, Ira Gershwin. All amazing lyricists. Ira Gershwin was known as ‘The Jeweller’ because of his incredible capacity to fit words to mainly his brother’s compositions. He did write with other people, Fascinatin’ Rhythm being an example of that. The way he was able to stick to the melody, really trying to be true to the composition, and what the composer was trying to do. He liked it that way round, being able to fit his words so precisely and so cleverly, and with such wit and humour and pathos. Incredible.”

Ryall’s latest project, Anöna Trio, came out of her work with Mark Edwards’ The Cloggz and features Mark Edwards on piano and Julian Nicholas on saxophones. “The three of us definitely talked about having a similar taste. While we were doing Cloggz there were things that we wanted to do, that didn’t really fit the Cloggz thing necessarily.