By Doug Miller
On winter days before his two sons were old enough to attend school, Annapolis-area musician Bryan Ewald would take them to the mall just to get them out of the house and moving around a bit. While pushing little Julian in his stroller, Ewald would encounter young mothers who thought it was just wonderful that this dad would take the day off for an outing with his kids.
Well, no, he hadn’t taken the day off, he would explain. He did this often, in fact, and actually works mostly at night. “So what do you do for a living?” they would ask. It was then that young Aiden would pipe up.
“My dad’s a rock star!”
Aiden, now 10, no longer harbors that illusion. But although Bryan Ewald doesn’t have any gold records or groupies, he really does make a living as a guitar player. Between playing gigs, touring, giving lessons and the occasional recording session, he’s actually making a living as a guitar player.
“It would be nice to have a little more free time and a little more financial security, but that doesn’t make me different from anybody else,” he says.
Ewald’s wife, Jessie, works as a finance officer for an orthodontia practice (she’s a talented singer too, Bryan insists, but shies away from performing). The family lives in a townhouse in Arnold.
A fixture in the Annapolis-area music scene
Ewald has established himself as a fixture in the Annapolis-area music scene. He plays in bands including (but not limited to) the Jarflys, Starbelly, Non-Fiction and Technicolor Motor Home, a Steely Dan tribute band whose name comes from a line in the song “Kid Charlemagne.”
Then there are the countless acoustic duos, including his gigs with local singer Meg Murray, with whom he has appeared at Heroes in Annapolis every Wednesday for the past 16 years.
“That’s the thing with Bryan. He’s versatile,” says Eric Scott, a singer-songwriter-bassist who has played with Ewald on numerous occasions. Scott notes that because each of them plays frequent gigs, their chops are such that they can readily perform together without rehearsal, even when they haven’t shared a stage in months. Each has an internal catalogue of sure-fire rock and soul numbers from Otis Redding to Hall & Oates.
While Ewald’s offbeat line of work keeps him away from home most nights—he estimates that he plays between 300 and 350 gigs a year and has three or four nights off in a given month—it has helped to keep him engaged as a parent. When the boys were little and at home during the day, he was there to take them on outings or nurse them through illness. Once Aiden reached school age, Ewald says, “I was the dad at every field trip and school function.”
With Jessie working days, “the challenge is finding time for us to be together,” he says.
“Yeah, sometimes that can create some tension, and we’ll say, ‘OK, it’s time for a date night,’ ” Jessie admits.
She had to fly solo with the kids for a couple of extended stretches over the past year while Ewald toured with local songwriter Rachael Yamagata (see below for video of Ewald performing with Yamagata). “I’m fortunate to have a lot of family in the area, and close friends” to call on in a pinch, she says.
Ewald’s first tour with Yamagata, for eight weeks back in the fall, was “a shock to the system,” Jessie recalls. “Our boys are close to Bryan, and they had a tough time. Sometimes they’d have a short fuse and I’d have to take that into consideration.”
When he left again in February, this time for a month-and-a-half tour in Asia and the West Coast, the boys handled it better. “This time they knew what to expect,” Jessie says. And they stayed in touch about every other day, Ewald adds, mostly with text messages.
The tour commitment meant Ewald was unable to see Aiden in a school musical, but the group had made its way back to the East Coast by then. Ewald was able to high tail it home from Washington, D.C., just in time to catch a dress rehearsal.
Yamagata was headed back out onto the road again soon after, but this time Ewald had to turn her down. “After being gone for a month and a half, I didn’t want to turn around and leave again.”
Neither did he want to miss another performance by his elder son. This time, Aiden was drumming and singing in a Led Zeppelin tribute at the School of Rock.
Teaching at the School of Rock
Ewald’s association with the chain of music school’s for youth goes beyond his role as parent. For a while, he ran its Baltimore campus and served as music director for its shop in Silver Spring. He enjoyed the work but found being away from home during the day problematic. He had no time with the kids.
“The only reason I left was that it interfered with family time,” he says. He still gives lessons at the Annapolis School of Rock, which opened last summer, and he plans to become more involved with the franchise as his sons get older. Julian, now 7, is in school like his big brother.
With regard to his sons’ musical educations, Ewald figures that will happen in its time. As with his younger students, he advocates exploration of whatever styles interest them and cautions against pushing them toward a certain instrument or demanding they adhere to a practice schedule.
“It’s important to expose kids to a lot of music, and a lot of different kinds. Have an instrument in the house,” Ewald advises parents who are eager for their children to be musical. “Electronic keyboards are great for little kids. Ukulele, toy drums, let them experience that.”
Aiden, who knew the lyrics to every Beatles song by the time he was in school and had his grandmother make him a Sgt. Pepper uniform for Halloween one year, can be found playing the drum set Bryan has set up in the basement .
Only recently have father and son begun to jam together. “He’s finally at a point where’s he’s comfortable doing that,” Ewald says.
Jessie endorses her husband’s laid-back approach. “Aiden will say ‘I’m going to practice my drums now,’ because it’s something he wants to do,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I want to push him a little on it, but I have to step back.”
Ewald is at ease giving his young children access to his large collection of amplifiers, guitars and other instruments, Jessie says. “They know they can’t go down there and have a free-for-all, but if they want to see how one sounds, he’s very comfortable letting them experience that.”
And Ewald betrays no angst about his son not making the guitar his first instrument.
“I’m always here,” Ewald says. “He’s got a built-in guitar teacher whenever he wants one.”
