Email this page
Print this pageA Gig Worth the Wait
Ryan Spilken and his dream band, Ilijah, are together again.
By Chris DeRosier
Courtesy Ryan Spilken
Ryan Spilken: Serious hair, serious about music.
“First of all, I was back playing with my friends,” Spilken says. “Second, I still had a beard. Before the last show I got a haircut and my stylist accidentally cut off too much of the left side. I had to cut the rest of my beard off. The pictures from that night look terrible!” Spilken is kidding, he says, but the night of Ilijah’s last show in 2005 left an impression. At the time, drummer Arron “Trigger” Batson was weeks away from moving to Florida for school and Spilken was on the verge of moving to be with his dying father. One month into his stay in West Palm Beach, Florida, Spilken’s father passed away and his only reason for staying in the retirement community evaporated.
By the time he left Florida, however, Spilken had written a collection of songs that reflected his state of mind following his father’s death. They also gave a glimpse into his increasingly helpless and pessimistic political outlook entering Bush’s second term in office. Spilken called the solo project The North Decade and continued performing by that name and writing occasionally when he moved back to Springfield. With drummer Batson in Florida, Ilijah was on indefinite hiatus—“you can’t replace ‘Trigs,’” he says—so The North Decade became the vehicle for his songwriting.
However, The North Decade was never meant as a replacement for Ilijah, which Spilken says was and is his priority as a musician. Spilken played in other bands before but was a regular at Ilijah shows for almost a year before he was invited to join the group (“I loved that band before I joined that band,” he says.)
Spilken says the group sounded so good the first time he heard them that it drove him back into the practice space to keep improving. Spilken struck up a friendship with singer Mike Evans and began playing acoustic shows with him at the Abyss. A few months later, Spilken was invited to join Ilijah—for just long enough to play two shows.
Spilken was in Ilijah just two months before it began its hiatus. Now, finally, is his chance to play with the band he barely had a chance to call his own. What’s more, Spilken’s work with The North Decade helped him gain respect among his bandmates as a songwriter. His influence is all over the six new songs the band prepared when it reunited. Ilijah practiced those songs along with older material for almost six months before playing its comeback show June 7 at the Outland.
Getting ready was slow, deliberate work, a pace Spilken says will probably continue. He says Batson and bass player Chris Hutchinson both have families and careers, so it’s important that any chances taken with making Ilijah a success are tempered by the promise of earning money. While that gets off the ground, Spilken does graphic design work as well as side gigs playing guitar in the orchestra during Springfield Little Theatre productions—he was in Godspell earlier this month. It’s a chance to perform for a crowd again, Spilken says, and to stay sharp on his music-reading skills. In reality, though, he’s just biding his time. The next Ilijah show isn’t far away. Mention that and you might bring another smile to Spilken’s face, even if he does have to drink a warm beer.
Ilijah and Shinebriter
Friday, July 6$3, 9 p.m.
The Outland, 326 South Ave.
417-863-9779
