Ruthie Collins today releases her album Cold Comfort that is a stunning masterpiece. We got to interview Ruthie this week ahead of its release to dig into the stories behind the songs.
Hi Ruthie, so nice to talk to you.
Nice to talk to you too.
How are you holding up?
I’m doing alright, how about yourself?
Yeah not too bad! Have you been able to get in your creative flow in this weird time – I feel like it’s either creativity or boredom?
Yeah, I am definitely not on the boredom spectrum of this, I’m kind of looking forward to that point. I was just saying this yesterday, I don’t exactly know what’s taking up my hours but I don’t feel any less busy. I actually drove up to New York, my mom lives up here on a farm, so we’re very far from the city – it’s super rural.
Well it’s an exciting week this week with the release of your record. It’s absolutely stunning. I feel like this time is born for a record like this, one you can fall in love with start to finish.
Thank you so much, that’s so kind of you. You know it’s funny, all of a sudden Cold Comfort as a record has a whole different meaning, you know I hope these songs can be comforting to you and to anyone. If it helps anybody get through this, even if it’s just a distraction or entertainment, just anything. It’s wild, it’s completely different to how I intended it to be, but maybe that’s how it was meant to be. I was telling this crazy story on Instagram last night about how this strange shaman man told me that this record would be a gift to people who needed a service of my music. At the time, I was like ‘yeah, yeah.’ I mean that sounds a little pretentious to me. You know what I mean, it’s hard to see yourself in those kinds of terms, but all of a sudden here we are in this weird time and I’m like ‘ok, maybe?’ It’s so weird.
So crazy… There’s so many nostalgic references in the record, you can hear hints of ’70s country but also very modern elements too. Was that the kind of music you grew up listening to when you were a child?
You know it wasn’t. My parents, god bless them I love them so much but they didn’t do a good job at rock n’ roll history as such. My mom only really listened to classical and my dad – I remember listening to a bit of James Taylor with him, so I guess there’s a bit of singer-songwriter influence there – but that’s it. All I really had was pop-radio, that was it and I think that’s why my melodies tend to come out even more poppy than I would like them to, because that was really at my core. At school, I was around other kids who had that great rock n’ roll history and that’s when I started learning about people like Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. It’s really just been the last couple of years though when I discovered the Laurel Canyon thing as something I really relate to – Joni Mitchell and The Eagles. It’s almost like I know the songwriters that I love, those were their inspirations, and at this later time in my life I’m jumping back to my inspiration’s inspiration and finding out where it all came from, which is really cool.
What’s been your story then from church choir and hearing sounds you relate to to the music now?
The story of how I got to where I am is really just a slow burn, a lesson of ‘oh, maybe I can do that.’ If you grew up in Nashville, and you said I’ want to be a country music singer’, people would say ‘oh great! Take some lessons – I can hook you up with this songwriter,’ but I grew up in western New York. It’s very rural, people listen to country music but when you’re a singer here, people say ‘oh you’re going to be a music teacher.’ I knew I didn’t want to teach, I just didn’t have any interest in convincing people to do something they didn’t want to do. I saw my choral teachers battle with students who didn’t want to be there, and I just had no interest in that, so it was really just a slow burn. It was ‘oh, I’m kind of good at this, I guess I can go to college and see what happens…’ After college, I was like ‘no I really am interested in writing songs, and I’m probably not good enough to do that, but let’s take an adventure and let’s move to Nashville.’ Slowly, I got better and saw myself on some crazy reality show where I’m competing for a record deal. That was honestly the first moment in my entire life that the thought ‘maybe I’m good enough to have a record deal’ even crossed my mind. I just didn’t have the capacity to embrace it. I didn’t have any standards, I didn’t have anyone in my life who had those aspirations. It’s different when you’re from a small town. You have no context. I started writing with more people, and I just found myself in the record label ‘Curb.’ They had heard some of my songs I’d written and sang, and they said they wanted to sign me to a recording and publishing deal. They’ve been so supportive over the years, they’ve really let me grow and mature. They’ve been with me and supported me the whole way, particularly in this huge step away from everything I’ve done before.
This new album does feel like a big transition from the last record. Do you feel that this is the record you always wanted to put out?
1000% this is the record I always wanted to put out. When I first came to Nashville, I had a manager who set me up to have tea with Robbie Crowell. I was just a little baby and it was such a dream to sit down with such a legend. He told me that his path to success was that he had commercial success first. He went more poppy and that’s what gave him the platform to move into music he really wanted to sing and write music he really wanted to write for his long-game career. I knew that my long game was to be a Patty Griffin or to be an Emmylou Harris. For some reason, I listened to that and it became my truth because my melodies tend to come out a little poppy. I really liked the Nashville model of being able to connect with people when you’re a country singer, it’s a lot of time with fans, it’s a lot of time connecting. I really gravitated toward that, I’m really interested in that. When I signed to a major label, they were gravitating toward the more commercial music, so that’s kind of how that all happened. You get stuck in that wheel of ‘oh I just want to make everyone happy, I’m just so lucky to be doing this at all.’ They were great, but you get pushed a little at times. I’m proud of what I did but it was definitely trying to shoot for success at country radio.
So what changed between the two for you to make that transition?
Yeah I got stuck in that space of ‘what do we do because country music isn’t playing women,’ and that put a pretty big hole, whether intentional or not, they just weren’t releasing women. I was left to sit around and think about that, which wasn’t a good time because I kind of got bitter. That led to me really looking inward and realising that whatever happens with my career, I need to find a way to make me happy regardless. I need to not put all my eggs in one basket because I have no control over that. So, I kind of decided that I was going to do it for the joy and not do it for anyone else. That sounds very odd because these are very sad songs, but these are the songs that I resonated with. I had got to this place in my life where I had got a little older, my relationship got a little more serious. I found myself in really tough situations in relationships. I honestly could not sing things that I could not resonate with as my truth. I could not sing drinking songs about being with my buddies on a Friday night. There was a lot of stuff going on, where we didn’t feel as women in Nashville that we were allowed to sing our truth and our reality – better to keep it really simple and safe, party but not too party. It was kind of a lot of things that we were allowed to do and maybe you could get a shot then. I couldn’t do that. Shit got too real in my life and I wanted to sing about what I was really going through, because I felt that if I wasn’t my authentic self it wasn’t going to work anyway. I just decided to not be scared and put out the record I wanted to put out. I snuck into the studio to record it – almost got dropped for it – but they decided that they loved it and here we are. It’s been such a wild ride.
It feels like such a therapeutic album. There’s a lot of self-examination and there’s a lot of you making peace with painful things. That’s kind of a vulnerable thing to do, you’re baring your whole soul – not just the good parts – to your audience…
It is very scary. I am just the kind of person who really doesn’t do small talk. At this point in my life, I want to connect with people, I want to learn people’s real stories. It’s easier for me to do that actually now. It feels less fake and I just don’t really have time for that, I have no interest in it. If you come to a Ruthie Collins show, you’re going to leave knowing everything about me. My friends are like ‘oh my god, you will say anything.’ Sometimes I stick my foot in my mouth – I do that a lot. At the end of the day, that’s the price I’m willing to pay for people to feel like they know me. I want to know people and give them a safe space to be themselves too. That is the big story of this record, learning how to be so vulnerable and share your feelings so that you can move through them. It’s full of a lot of sadness and hardship emotionally, but the point of that is to get to the hope on the other side, not just to sit and dwell in the sadness, just to feel it so that you can move through it.
That seems to be the message in ‘Cold Comfort’ itself. What was the specific inspiration behind that song?
We just did a UK edit for you so we’re excited about that! So that song, when I was going through this relationship, we broke up a couple of times and we were doing the dance of ‘can we do this, can we let each other go.’ I was doing so much self-care, I was really diving into meditation and journalling and positive thinking and affirmations – anything – to get me through this. It was starting to work, I was starting to feel better and I almost felt guilty, because in my mind this relationship was everything to me. Even though I kind of knew it was destined for darkness and failure, because this wonderful man was just a tortured artist and his idea of who he was was all wrapped up in that. I like to fix people, people who I think have a lot of potential, so I’m the only one who can save them (laughs). It was really hard to let him go, because I was worried about his health and his sanity. I also felt like I could lose my purpose in life because if I’m not here to fix you then what am I doing? Once I learned that I was actually healing to become a better person, there was a lot of guilt and shame in that because I had to let go of this relationship being what I thought it was – maybe it wasn’t as meaningful as I thought it was…. Then I had to mourn all over again, which is just bizarre.
That complexity around relationships continues into ‘Bad Woman’ and ‘Cheater’ but then you also have tracks where you’ve looked for external inspiration in ‘Joshua Tree’ to Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. Do you find it’s an equal mix of both looking externally and inwardly for inspiration?
Yeah, mostly internal for sure but every once in a while I will be inspired by a friend or a family member. I think with that song’s story it just hit me so hard because I’m such an Emmylou fan. I don’t even know what I was doing – I think I was Pinterest-ing looks for stage – and I somehow came across this article on Emmylou. I don’t even know if I could find it for you today. It’s online so who even knows it it’s true but I read this article where she was saying that she was about to tell Gram that she had been in love with him for the whole time. He discovered her singing in Baltimore, he just wandered into a club and found her singing and then took her on the road. Her whole career, in a way, was due to him. She said in the article that she was about to admit it all that she was totally in love with him – I think they were in other relationships and never admitted it to each other and then they were both single. She decided to tell him how she felt and thought about calling him on the phone, but decided that she was going to see him on the road in a couple of weeks to tell him to his face. Then he died and she never got the chance to tell him. I think my heart just dropped for her. I think being such a fan of hers and relating to her and her story, it felt like it happened to me. I had just been through this relationship with this guy that was really struggling with addiction and had a similar experience. Thank god, he lived and he survived and he’s ok – I didn’t have to go through what Emmylou went through – but I think it resonated with me so much and broke my heart wide open. I wrote it as if I was her. It’s so strange too, really creepy when you listen to the lyrics – I wrote it at the end of the song as if I was travelling back to Joshua Tree to almost have a weird seance to bring Gram Parsons back. I don’t do that (laughs). I don’t know where this came from, but it’s really changed my life, personally, career, I have a hundred thousand strange stories I can tell you about that song that are just weird and wild.
Another one that I feel like you must have a few weird stories about is ‘Bad Woman.’ Just the title itself is so topical and I feel like people can read themselves into the track as a whole, but how did you see that song when you wrote it?
Sure, well I was singing about this person – kind of in a similar situation as Emmylou – who I had never told I had feelings for. He then left town and I felt like my chance was gone, but he was in a relationship with someone else so I was never going to make the move. It wasn’t appropriate and it made me feel kind of stuck, like maybe I’d missed out on this great relationship with this person because we always missed each other. We were never single at the same time and just stayed friends. I thought ‘God, what would I do if I didn’t feel so morally obligated to do the right thing.’ So many of us with our cultural conditioning, we’re taught to be a good person and behave – which is a good thing. This was kind of my exercise, if only for 3 or 4 minutes, to say what would that look like. Just for a second, I’m going ‘to hell with everyone else, I want you’ and what would that be like? Would everyone be happier in the long-run? Are we just chickening out of making big life moves because we think it’s not the right thing morally to do? It was interesting. Then the chorus, I can’t even let myself go there for a whole song – I can do it for a verse and then I have to go back to that chorus – where I go ‘but I’m not going to be that person and I’m never going to have to be that person.’ It was just putting that hat on for a second.
I guess the plans for the record’s release have been a little bit warped but what is the plan for the coming months?
So this Friday we’re going to do a live stream of the whole record top to bottom. Honestly, that was supposed to be a wonderful full band release show in Nashville, to the Opry and all these things. Now, I’m going to be in my mom’s living room by myself which is totally ok. It’s disappointing, but it felt so selfish to be disappointed over a record when there are people going through crazy, terrible suffering, but then we’re all going through trauma whether it’s big or small. It’s good to recognise I’m disappointed, this is not what I had planned for but here we are and this is obviously the way it was meant to be.
Final Few
Someone is making a biographical film of your life – what’s the opening track? This is so random but a beautiful Appalachian folk song playing down the middle, I don’t know why – something gorgeous and heart-wrenching that makes it feel like an adventure.
Wine or whiskey? Wine because I never get tired of a good dry red wine.
Would you rather give up songwriting or performing? Performing instantly came to my mind but that would break my heart because I would lose that connection with people.
Complete the sentence…
Music is… love.
Country music is… connection.
Ruthie Collins is… thankful.
