Serena Ryder (born December 8, 1982) is a Canadian musician. Born in Toronto, she grew up in Millbrook, Ontario. Ryder first gained national recognition with her ballad "Weak in the Knees" in 2007. An accomplished songwriter and musician, she also possesses a three-octave vocal range and is considered a mezzo-soprano. Her timbre has been described as slightly nasal with a raspy lower register.\n', '

Serena Lauren Ryder is the daughter of Barbara Ryder and Glen Sorzano. Her father, a Trinidadian musician who immigrated to Canada in the early sixties, was a founding member of the West Indian band the Tradewinds led by the Guyanese Dave Martins. Sorzano was a talented musician, songwriter, and vocalist who appears on three of the early Tradewinds records: Jump Up With The Tradewinds (1967), The Caribbean Tradewinds (1967), and Caribbean Souvenir (1968) Ryder was raised by Barbara and her second husband, Andrew McKibbon, just outside Peterborough, in Millbrook, Ontario, and grew up listening to old records by the Beatles and Leonard Cohen from her parents\' collection. She grew up the only child in her family. At age eight, Ryder sang at Royal Canadian Legion halls and motor hotels. Having received a guitar from her stepfather, she began playing the instrument at the age of thirteen. Songwriting efforts followed. At fifteen, she was playing classic and folk tunes with her piano teacher in coffeehouses and legion halls.\n', '

Ryder stated, "I\'d been writing a lot since I was maybe eleven years old. I wasn\'t doing diary entries; I needed to express something a little deeper than that, which I couldn\'t express in conversation. And I\'d been singing since I was a little kid, doing cover songs at gigs. But when I got my guitar, a whole other world opened up to me. I realized I could put the poetry I was writing to song and bring two very separate things together."\n', '

Return to Serena Ryder Autograph Profile