Although the room was fluorescently lit, the lights seemed to dim once he cleared his throat. A hush came over the audience, and Ryan Dieringer introduced what he was about to sing to his SAT class. “How about some Lauryn Hill?” The girls automatically nodded their heads in unison — they didn’t care what came out of his mouth; they just wanted to hear it. With another throat-clearing, the show began. “You’re just too good to be true…” His voice was light as air, and as he continued, the crowd’s eyes widened in awe while his closed in concentration. “Can’t take my eyes off of you. You’d be like heaven to touch, I wanna hold you so much…” Whether Ryan knew it or not, his soft-spoken, melodic voice had officially put everyone under a trance — a trance that would soon be broken once he hit the chorus. “I need you baby! And if it’s quite alright, I need you baby, to warm a lonely night!” he bellowed out. His raspy acoustics bounced off every wall of the room and into the girls’ spines, who sat alert at the sudden change. In that moment, with his eyes shut tight, hands clenched and vocal chords pulsing through the veins of his neck, Ryan Dieringer’s two lives — SAT teacher by day, indie rocker by night — collided.
Having grown up in New Jersey and New York, Ryan’s musical journey began in the church choir he attended weekly as a child. Even though he had been singing his whole life, it never became a serious, personal thing until his sophomore year in high school. “By the time I was a senior, I had a band with my friends,” he says. “That’s when things started to get really fun, and I started to think that maybe music was for me.” The very band that was formed in his senior year has transformed into Ryan’s biggest passion. After a name change and several style transitions, the group, which includes drummer Sam McDougle and guitarist Daniel Maroti, is currently known as The Powder Kegs. “We started off playing folk and that was the first time I started to play fiddle music,” he recalls. However, The Powder Kegs weren’t playing traditional folk — they brought a punk rock feel to it, which was vital to their first performances, on the sidewalks of New York and beyond. “We started off being street performers, busking in the streets, and we did that for years. We’d play super fast because it attracted large crowds.”
That frenetic energy — along with the civil war imagery an actual powder keg conjures — inspired the name. On the street, more energy meant more money. “We would sing at the top of our lungs. This is the kind of stuff that you do to get money on the street but we also did it on stage. The Powder Kegs was the kind of energetic image that we wanted.”
Besides providing The Powder Kegs with his vocals and bass playing skills, Ryan is also the songwriter for the band. Surprisingly enough, he doesn’t typically write pen to paper, but rather thinks of things and manages to remember them later. “I write very much from the subconscious, so I’ll discover as I go, things that are on my mind,” he says. “You don’t have to solve big problems in your songs. You just have to express a feeling, a moment, so that’s a non-premeditated kind of experience.” Ryan believes it’s important that a song is a place of discovery for the artist, “not a place where they tell you something that they’ve already discovered, but that they join you in the process.” If you’re reading this in Canada, you may have already joined Ryan through this process with the band’s most popular song, “La Mariposa.” The single caught fire when it was aired on a Canadian commercial. Ryan had no idea “La Mariposa” would be the song to help them gain listeners. “The artists never know what’s really going to catch, but I knew I had written something that I was really proud of.”
Today, the indie rock group are on an “off season,” allowing Ryan to focus on other things. Double King, the side project he’s working on, is a full on rock ‘ n’ roll band. They’re made up of entirely different members except for Sam, who’s traded the drums for a bass in Double King. Alongside that, Ryan is learning more about producing records and has developed a little studio of his own. He’s working on producing Sam’s solo material, which will be the first record he will make.
Even though Ryan is busy outside of the band, the rest of the group is really supportive. “We don’t mind if you go off and do something else,” he says. In his other life, Ryan is an SAT tutor. As a Dartmouth graduate, he studied literature and school has always been a big part of his life. Education is a natural side job for him as a musician; he calls it “stimulating work.” “You meet awesome young people; it’s not like having to go to a restaurant, and run around all day on your feet. I come out of classes and tutoring sessions feeling sharper and more energized, so it’s a good side job for me.” Ryan claims that performing in front of a live audience is more nerve racking than performing in front of his students. However, he definitely had the jitters when he performed for the ladies at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria as a farewell gesture on his last day of teaching.
Whether he’s rocking out or preparing students, it’s clear that Ryan’s career is always growing. Keep your eyes peeled for his name; he may be playing in a venue — or teaching in a classroom — near you.
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