Ryan Yingst’s “Ordinary Means,” isn’t chasing anything grand. It’s a folk single built around the unglamorous parts of trying to make a living as a musician, and it earns its intimacy by staying exactly as small and honest as its subject matter requires. Check out our full review below!
Ordinary Means
The song grew out of late-night conversations with other musicians, the kind of griping that happens after a long night of work nobody outside the industry really sees. Four-hour cover sets, busking in subway stations, restaurant gigs where someone inevitably requests the same handful of familiar songs, these become the song’s actual imagery, small details that add up to a bigger point about how easily original work gets overlooked in favor of whatever’s already familiar. What keeps “Ordinary Means” from turning into a complaint is its tone. There’s no bitterness in it, just a genuine invitation to think differently about how artistic value actually gets measured, apart from popularity or funding or any of the usual metrics.
Yingst handled every part of the record himself, writing, arranging, recording, and mixing it out of his home studio in Philadelphia, with guitar and vocals captured together in a single take. Eoin Kelly’s harmonica gives the track an improvised, loose-limbed texture, and Yingst’s own layered harmonies warm up the chorus without over-polishing it. Michael Cumming at Treacle Mine Recording mastered the final version to tape, which suits the song’s unfussy character. You can hear traces of Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, and Gregory Alan Isakov in the songwriting’s restraint, though none of it reads as imitation.
What gives the song its sharpest edge is the comparison it invites without spelling out directly, the same idea behind the famous Joshua Bell subway experiment, where genuinely exceptional playing went almost entirely unnoticed simply because of where it happened. Yingst is working the same territory through song instead of a real-world stunt, making a case for paying attention to effort and craft that shows up in unglamorous, easy-to-walk-past places.
Final Thoughts
“Ordinary Means” is a quietly effective piece of songwriting, unpolished in exactly the right ways, and it makes its point about overlooked artistry without ever raising its voice to do it.
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