Ryan Cabrera told Us Weekly exclusively that he has a special song he can’t wait to play for his first child. But at the time, his little girl needed to be born first.
“I have a song in the works already for that,” Cabrera, 41, told Us in mid-November. The “On The Way Down” singer’s wife, Lexi Cabrera (a.k.a. WWE Superstar Alexa Bliss), was due in December, but their baby, Hendrix Rogue, arrived early on November 27.
During the interview before he and Lexi became proud parents, Ryan said that he would sing his song for his daughter early in the morning to Lexi’s belly, adding, “We even recorded a little demo of it, and we play it for her on the phone.”
“We play a couple different songs,” says Cabrera. “We always play [The Beatles’] ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ and she’ll just be chilling. And then we put it on this little tune — it’s almost like a little lullaby, kind of — and then it’s like, ‘Let’s go.’ So we don’t know if she really loves it or she’s going to come out and say, ‘Dad, never play that song again.’ But we think she loves it.”
Fatherhood has had a major impact on Cabrera. He took the Zoom call with Us from his daughter’s nursery, a room that could be mistaken for Turnstile’s GLOW ON album with its pastel pink walls decorated with white clouds. Off to the side is a white bookshelf lined with pink and white stuffed animals. Cabrera says that his unborn daughter already has “two rooms, two closets full of clothes” because he and his wife Lexi split their time between Los Angeles and Orlando. “She’s crushing it,” he adds with a smile.
As a husband and a soon-to-be-father, Cabrera has definitely changed. He tells Us that he had “already made a lot of adjustments” to his life as a musician. “Obviously, once the baby comes, it’ll be completely different. My mindset, even from a songwriting standpoint, has kind of changed,” he explained.
That change is him “more so just growing,” Cabrera told Us, adding, “I’m not one to say that I completely changed just because I had a child, but as mentally, [I’m] maybe finding more of a purpose in things? I think it’s kind of opened my head up in that sense.”
“But, at the end of the day, you write what you write,” he said, indicating that he won’t suddenly throw away his past work to write folk songs about being a dad. Cabrera points to his song, “Prescription of You,” which came out in October, as a true expression of his artistic self.
“It’s a really fun kind of cheeky song about sex,” he said of the pop-driven single. “It’s meant to be a sexy song of not being able to get enough of someone.”
“I’m always going to be who I am,” Cabrera explained, “and I think my wife will always be who she is. I know my parents are like, ‘Oh, so much is going to change.’ Well, yeah — as far as schedules and responsibilities and stuff like that, but as far as a personality? Or what I am writing about, other than certain songs that are about [my daughter], I’m going to go. ‘I got to censor myself now because what is she going to think in the future?’”
Cabrera noted that when you’re an artist, it’s imperative to “be yourself,” or your art won’t speak true. And while he won’t alter his work because he’s a dad now, Cabrera does recognize that a huge change is happening.
“The biggest change would be for me is that — oh my gosh, this gives me a purpose,” he said. “Before, it was like, ‘OK, my purpose is to write songs, and that makes people happy.’ That’s still very important to me, but now it’s like, no, this gives me a bigger purpose overall. And that’s pretty much the perspective that’s changed.”
Cabrera has seemingly commemorated this new chapter of his life by signing to Manic Kat Records and releasing “Prescription of You,” a song he describes as “very pop with glossy, stacked vocals.” However, he notes that the verses are minimal because the song is “just about setting up the mood.”
“That’s not what you’d expect from me in the past,” he explains. “The vocals — pretty much the entire song is just falsetto. And that’s something that I’d never done before.” Cabrera said that when he was writing the song’s melody, he didn’t sing the lyrics “full out” and was just messing around with the higher range of his voice. “And then, we’re like, ‘That’s actually kind of dope. What if I just sang the whole thing falsetto?’”
The decision to do the entire song with that vocal styling was twofold: not only did it sound “kind of dope,” it would show a different side to Cabrera. He told Us that while working on it, he wanted to surprise listeners, to make them go, “Wait, that’s Ryan Cabrera?”
“It sets up a mood,” he said. “If you did know my older stuff, [you’d be] just a bit surprised. And then, there’s a whole new generation audience that has no idea of any of my previous stuff that maybe, they’ll hear this and go, ‘Oh, this is kind of cool.’ And then maybe find some of the older stuff.”
As for new stuff, Cabrera is working on an EP set for 2024. “Every song [on it] is so different,” he said. Cabrera is happy with the new age of streaming, where “every song can be different” and he isn’t restricted to making projects that are uniform and limited to one sound. Instead, Cabrera is happy to experiment and is excited at how every new song on the upcoming EP differs from the last.
While Cabrera hasn’t abandoned the idea of doing a full album in the future, he says, “It’s just smarter for us to put out five songs at a time.” He also sees this upcoming EP as a bit of a concept release, involving “the pregame, the game, and the postgame, the relaxed period.”
“So there’s the stuff you’d want to listen to when you’re getting ready,” he says. “After that, there’s when you’re going out, and you’re actually partying, which is kind of ‘Prescription of You,’ and then when you get home and you’re trying to unwind. So something kind of for every different mood.”
Right now, Cabrera can workshop his new songs with his daughter — and his secret weapon, his wife. Bliss appeared on season 9 of The Masked Singer, performing as the Axolotl until she was unmasked midway through the competition. Lexi showed that along with going toe-to-toe with the fiercest Superstars in the WWE ring, she can also rock a mic.
“Oh, my gosh, I was so proud of her,” gushed Ryan over Lexi’s performance on the show. “One of her biggest fears was singing in public and obviously, that being the first thing to do just on television, I would be nervous too — even as someone’s done it for as long as I’ve done it. So for her to get out there and do what she did, it showed a lot about her.”
“And we’ve had so much fun just making little home acoustic videos,” he added. “And so that’s definitely something that I think for fun we would do in the future, just trying to make fun videos, collabs and stuff like that.”
