“It’s My Movie” by Bryn Ryan-Van Dyke

Like the bright sunlight that breaks through the overcast skies we see in the first few frames of the lyric video for “It’s My Movie,” singer Bryn Ryan-Van Dyke’s radiant lead vocal slashes through the darkness whilst depicting a rich desire to be her own director with her words in her latest release. There’s a lot of color in this new video, but none of it is quite as engrossing as the musical muscle that inspired it. “It’s My Movie” raises the bar not only for this superior pop songwriter but for her scene in general; Ryan-Van Dyke is playing like an old pro here, and her growth as an artist is on full display. I’m impressed so far, and not only by her moxie at the microphone.

The lyrical narrative in this song could be interpreted multiple ways because of the enigmatic means by which our leading lady unravels it to us, but in my initial listening sessions with both the video and the track by itself, I couldn’t help but feel a lot of pain behind the verses that Ryan-Van Dyke so artfully croons to us. I think that “It’s My Movie” was meant to be taken at face value – this is a diary entry, a lamentation of unfinished business if you will, and it’s about as real and exposed as its composer has ever been with us. There’s a startling lack of egotism here, which has become a bit of a hot commodity among the most exciting young singer/songwriters in the pop genre as of late. Hers is a personality-driven sound, but it has little to do with self-preservation.

I would have put more of a little more of an emphasis on the guitar parts that are scattered throughout this single. Next to the vocal track, they’re the most stunning element in the entire backdrop, and I think that they do more to shape the backbone of the chorus than anything else we hear does. It’s an excusable offense, and I think that Ryan-Van Dyke could go even further in spreading out the catharsis in future recordings for sure. She’s got all the right pieces to be a superstar, and now it’s just a matter of getting them as fine-tuned as possible.

This is a good standard moving forward, and likely a benchmark for what we can expect in her next release.

Even though I hadn’t heard much about Bryn Ryan-Van Dyke before “It’s My Movie,” the substance of this all-new single is simply too good for me to stay away from her work as time presses forward. Her strain of singer/songwriter pop isn’t derivative of her underground contemporaries, nor does it take a backseat to the output of her direct peers; from where I sit, she’s working with her own brand of melodicism that is still coming to fruition, but once her next record is released to the worldwide public, I think we’re going to know just how far she can go with this swaggering sound that is hers and hers alone.

Mindy McCall