If you\u2019ve been plugged into the Fort Worth music scene over the last decade, chances are you\u2019ve heard the name Ryker Hall. His devil-may-care attitude and songwriting instincts are anything but clich\u00e9. Hall\u2019s music \u2014 a self-described hybrid he calls \u201cTexas Emo\u201d \u2014 lands as an outlier in a city that proudly clings to Americana and Red Dirt musical styles. But fitting in has never been the goal. Hall is stubborn about originality, relentless about authenticity, and rarely filters himself when asked for his true opinion. That\u2019s how I found him one morning at a South Main coffee shop, right on time, black coffee in hand, ready to explain exactly how he became who he is.<\/p>\n
Hall didn\u2019t come to music through ambition so much as obsession. He was ten years old when he first felt drawn to it, watching a worship band at a church he attended. He decided he wanted to be on that side of the stage. The guitar that started everything was a battered Sigma his stepdad had bought for fifty bucks while stationed in Korea. A deal followed \u2014 stick with lessons for a year, and a new electric guitar was his. Hall kept his end of the deal, practicing for hours a day, becoming more proficient during a brief stint in homeschool.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Music has] been the thing that\u2019s been in my life for the longest, and I\u2019ve stuck with it, and I\u2019ve never let go,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
By 13, Hall was already playing in bands around Keller, learning songs in garages and bedrooms, chasing volume and connection wherever he could find it. His childhood was defined by movement \u2014 East Texas, the Florida panhandle, North Texas, back to Florida \u2014 the result of growing up in a military family. Music became the one constant thread, something portable enough to survive every relocation.<\/p>\n
After high school, Hall landed in Shreveport, where music took a backseat to radio \u2014 at least professionally. He worked on-air, wrote and produced commercials, engineered audio, and learned the mechanics behind sound. The experience gave him technical confidence and creative control, but little else. \u201cRadio really, though \u2014 it\u2019s a shitty industry,\u201d he says without hesitation. When the money dried up, radio disappeared. Music didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
By 2016, Hall was back in North Texas, stepping into Fort Worth\u2019s music ecosystem one open mic at a time. His first show came at Lola\u2019s, and from there he started meeting people, playing regularly, and developing a reputation not just as a songwriter, but as someone deeply invested in how scenes actually work. Open mics eventually lost their appeal. Songwriter nights didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
To Hall, songwriter nights are meant to be workshops, not showcases. They\u2019re places for unfinished ideas and bad verses, not recycled crowd-pleasers. \u201cThat\u2019s what songwriter nights are for, man \u2014 mingling and meeting people and growing together, not just showing off,\u201d he says. Growth, to Hall, happens in rooms where ego stays checked and songs are allowed to be incomplete.<\/p>\n
Since 2018, Hall has released three EPs and four singles, with more projects already in motion. His approach to recording mirrors his approach to songwriting \u2014 intentional and disciplined. He never walks into a studio without a plan. \u201cI never go into a studio blind,\u201d he says. \u201cIt costs you a lot of money that way, and it\u2019s just unprofessional.\u201d If he\u2019s there, it\u2019s to work. \u201cIf you\u2019re serious about it, you\u2019re going to go in there and knock it out and make a badass product and not just fool around.\u201d<\/p>\n
Texas Emo, as Hall defines it, isn\u2019t a branding exercise. It\u2019s descriptive. \u201cI\u2019m heavily influenced by all the emo stuff in the mid 2000s with a little bit of twang,\u201d he explains. \u201cSo I call it \u2018Texas Emo.\u2019\u201d His listening habits stretch far beyond that \u2014 Conor Oberst, Max Bemis, Patrick Stump, John Moreland, Turnpike Troubadours, The Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan \u2014 not as sounds to imitate, but as proof that having a clear point of view matters more than genre purity.<\/p>\n
Live, Hall splits his identity. Solo shows are acoustic and intimate, emotionally direct. With a full band, everything sharpens \u2014 electric guitars, louder dynamics, occasional pedal steel when logistics allow. Lately, his focus has shifted outward. Oklahoma. West Texas. San Antonio. Austin. More road. More rooms. More chances to be heard outside Fort Worth.<\/p>\n
Ask Hall what \u201cmaking it\u201d actually looks like, and he shrugs off the fantasy. For him, it\u2019s not fame or excess. \u201cHonestly, just having everything you need and not having to stress about \n<\/p>\n
\nmoney \u2014 that\u2019s making it,\u201d he says. Stability matters more than spectacle. That mindset extends into his personal life as well. Over the last several years, Hall has stripped away distractions, stepped away from harder substances, and built routines rooted in discipline. \u201cPatience is the hardest part,\u201d he admits. \u201cYou can\u2019t book a tour in a day. You can\u2019t make a thirteen-track album in a day. You have to take your time to make something of substance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rejection, he says, is unavoidable. The business is transactional, taste is subjective, and none of it is personal. \u201cIf you can\u2019t deal with rejection, then you shouldn\u2019t be a musician,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like getting a hundred tequila shots thrown in your face all the time.\u201d The only way forward is persistence \u2014 and self-advocacy. \u201cIf you\u2019re not advocating for you, no one\u2019s going to advocate for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
When pressed to define himself, Hall hesitates. He doesn\u2019t love the exercise. Eventually, he lands somewhere simple. \u201cI like to be good to people as much as I can, although I can be kind of an asshole sometimes,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cBut I just like to help my friends and see people win.\u201d Music, for Hall, remains the outlet \u2014 a way to perform, to purge, to stay honest. Or, as he puts it more plainly, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to look in the mirror and fix that person before you can do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019ve been plugged into the Fort Worth music scene over the last decade, chances are you\u2019ve heard…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":539597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5138],"tags":[5229,8067,12043,7371,7372,11878,14838,21272,238266,10763,5921,358,7453,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-539596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-artist","10":"tag-arts-and-culture","11":"tag-fort-worth","12":"tag-fortworth","13":"tag-live-music","14":"tag-local-music","15":"tag-musician","16":"tag-ryker-hall","17":"tag-stephen-montoya","18":"tag-style","19":"tag-texas","20":"tag-top-story","21":"tag-tx","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115950465314545090","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}