Somewhere in the writer credits of nearly every pop moment of the last decade and a half, there is a name most casual listeners have never had reason to learn. John Ryan did not front One Direction, does not appear on the Maroon 5 album cover, and was not the voice that turned Sabrina Carpenter into 2024's biggest new star. He wrote the chorus underneath all of it.
A Locker Full of CDs
Ryan grew up in Pittsford, outside Rochester, New York, the youngest of three, and by his own account wrote his first song in third grade. By eighth grade he had assembled a homemade album and was selling it out of his school locker. His closest early collaborator was a fellow Rochester kid named Teddy Geiger, who introduced him to Pro Tools when they were both 14. Ryan sent exactly one college application, to Berklee College of Music, where he studied contemporary writing and production and graduated in 2010. One week later he moved to Los Angeles.
Family Affair
The move worked because of a party. During his junior year, Ryan had met Damon Bunetta on a visit to Los Angeles, and through him the rest of the Bunetta family: Julian, a songwriter-producer, and their father Peter, a veteran drummer who had recorded with Smokey Robinson and The Temptations. The family was building a production company called Family Affair Productions, and Ryan became its first signed songwriter, trading studio access for a place to stay. "We had an influx of work, and we needed someone to help manage it," Julian Bunetta later said. "That's when we brought John on board... We did that for a year before formalizing anything."
The break came through Simon Cowell's Syco Music, which invited Bunetta to write for a British boy band that had just placed third on the X Factor. Bunetta brought in Ryan and Jamie Scott for a scheduled two-day session. In those two days, the trio wrote "C'mon, C'mon" and "She's Not Afraid" for One Direction's Take Me Home. "My first big cut with One Direction was 'C'mon, C'mon,'" Ryan has said. "I had three songs on their second album, and that was the start."
Twenty-Seven Songs, Four Albums
The start became a run. Ryan co-wrote or co-produced 27 songs across One Direction's next four albums, including "Best Song Ever," "Story of My Life," "You & I," "Steal My Girl," "Night Changes," "Drag Me Down" and "Perfect." "Story of My Life" has streamed nearly 2 billion times on Spotify.
He didn't need the spotlight. He needed the chorus to land, and it always did.
When the band went on hiatus in 2016, Ryan followed its members into their solo careers, co-writing and producing Niall Horan's "Slow Hands" and steering much of Flicker, and later returning for The Show in 2023. He also wrote Harry Styles's "Two Ghosts." With Maroon 5, Ryan built out Red Pill Blues, contributing "Bet My Heart," "Don't Wanna Know" featuring Kendrick Lamar, and "Cold," a track Apple Music's editorial team singled out as "all escalating handclaps and soul pop falsetto." That range, boy-band hook meets rock-band grit meets EDM sheen, became his signature.
The Grammy Chapter
Ryan's most commercially dominant stretch began with Dan Nigro's peers in the pop songwriting world watching a different name rise: his own, attached to Sabrina Carpenter. Starting with Emails I Can't Send in 2022 and its breakout deluxe single "Feather," Ryan became one of Carpenter's primary collaborators, co-writing and producing eight tracks on Short n' Sweet, including "Taste," "Bed Chem" and "Juno." "Taste" was co-produced with Ian Kirkpatrick. The album's Grammy recognition made Ryan, quietly, an award-winning producer for the first time in a career built almost entirely on other people's spotlight. He returned for Man's Best Friend in 2025, co-producing alongside Jack Antonoff and writing roughly two-thirds of the album, and discussed the "Feather" sessions in detail on a 2026 podcast appearance, including writing time spent with Amy Allen.
Writing for Himself
In between the boy-band choruses and the Grammy campaign, Ryan built a second, much quieter identity. Since 2019 he has released solo material as John the Blind, a name borrowed from the medieval king John of Bohemia, who reportedly rode into battle despite losing his sight, a metaphor Ryan has used for pushing forward regardless of obstacles. The project moved from Atlantic Records to independent release through Big Family Music, the company Ryan now co-owns with the Bunetta family. His third release under the name, the Indicator EP, arrived on February 6, 2026, his first new solo material in roughly five years. FAULT Magazine described it as a deliberate turn away from his "sleek, dance-friendly pop production" default toward "something more solitary and self-defined," written, produced and mixed entirely by Ryan alone.
That last detail is the whole career in miniature. For sixteen years, Ryan's job has been to disappear into other people's records so completely that the hook feels like it always existed. John the Blind is the one place he lets the credit stay attached to his own name, and even there, the instinct is the same: find the melody that falls out of the sky, then get out of its way.