Ry Cavanaugh has produced, co-produced, performed, and written songs for nine albums by Boston’s Session Americana, the band that he co-founded and continues to manage. A moveable feast, as much a collective and as a band, Session American tours across the United States and Europe with a revolving cast of top-shelf players, centered on a stable core. But organizing, producing, and championing other artists - nurturing all kinds of collaborative work within the Boston scene - has always been the center of Ry Cavanaugh’s artistic life. From producing projects like One Night in Cambridge - an album of emerging artists including Faith Soloway, and Mary Gauthier - to his years with the cult favorite Vinal Avenue String Band (with Kris Delmhorst and Sean Staples), to his seventeen years at the helm of Session Americana, he has always worked in company, contributing songs and connecting players.

Ry Cavanaugh was 22 when his father - a country and honky-tonk singer in the late 1970’s - died of heart failure. In 2019, having reached the age at which his father died, Ry carved out time in the midst of recording and touring with his band Session Americana to cut his first solo album in 20 years. The result, Time For This, is the realization of a long-ripening desire to recover and document the songs his father had written four decades prior. A singular departure for an artist who has made his career within the fabric of community, Time For This shifts the focus squarely on his own voice, offering up stark and intimate renditions of the songs that framed his childhood: resurrected, re-worked, and recorded knee-to-knee with Duke Levine, with Jennifer Kimball adding exceptionally delicate harmonies.