Ryan McMahon

Ryan McMahon (born 19 October 1979) is a Canadian singer-songwriter from Ladysmith, British Columbia. He records and performs as a solo artist and also as a member of the folk/rock band Lion Bear Fox.

As a solo artist, McMahon won a record three Vancouver Island Music Awards for Album of the Year, Male Artist of the Year and Male Vocalist of the Year in 2012.

Recording McMahon released the album Better Days Gone By in 2006. His next effort, featuring songs written over the span of a decade, was Weeks, Months, Years, which was released in 2008. "It's a CD about time. It's a CD about growing into being a man and finding out what kind of fella I want to be", McMahon said while on tour celebrating the album's release. In 2011, McMahon released All Good Stories, an acoustic album recorded at Richard Leighton's home studio in Lantzville, British Columbia. "All Good Stories is exactly that: a collection of stripped-down material that I needed to record in a very organic environment", McMahon has said.

McMahon released a new album titled Put Me Back Together in April 2015. McMahon, who has released five full-length albums in 15 years, says the record is a reflection of his time living on Vancouver Island. It includes a song that pays tribute to his hometown of Ladysmith.

Lion Bear Fox

The band formed after McMahon and two Vancouver-based singer-songwriters, Cory Woodward and Christopher Arruda, went on tour together as solo artists. The three men — who have three decades of experience between them — were friends before the tour, and they had intended to support one another's acts as separate artists. As the tour went on, they began to appear on stage with one another during live shows.

The band, which was a Top 20 Finalist in The Peak 102.7 FM's British Columbia-wide Peak Performance Project, released its debut EP, We'd Be Good Men, 8 October 2013.

"It’s made me a better person, being around them," says McMahon. "They are really, really smart and driven people. We each bring something different to the table. I have been able to glean some things from them that I wouldn’t have been able to learn on my own all this time.”

The song – and accompanying video – is a tribute to other children fighting cancer, some of whom McNeil met in chemotherapy wards and hospital hallways during her treatments, and McMahon helped McNeil arrange and record the song.

McNeil died January 8, 2011, at the age of 20 while battling cancer for the fourth time, and she continues to inspire McMahon.

In 2013, McMahon and his band, the lion the bear the fox, joined forces with the Vancouver, British Columbia-based charity Music Heals and created the Bandwagon Project initiative to raise money to bring a mobile recording studio used by music therapists called the Bandwagon to Vancouver Island. Bandwagon is the world's first mobile recording studio designed specifically for use by music therapists, and it contains microphones, instruments, a computer, recording software and more to aid therapists to work with patients.

Discography Better Days Gone By (2006) Weeks, Months, Years (2008) All Good Stories (2011) We'd Be Good Men (Lion Bear Fox) (2013) Put Me Back Together (2015) Song Shelter Recordings (2017) Lion Bear Fox (Lion Bear Fox) (2017) In Line For a Smile (2019) Cutting Room Floor: Demos, Rarities & Things I Tried (2020) Pandemos (2021) Live Now (2023)