Rumer beats her personal demons
Unable to cope with the strain, Rumer almost quit the music business. But now she has bounced back from despair
On the intro to Rumer’s new album, she sings the line ‘Is your love too dangerous? I don’t want a broken heart again.’ The first song proper, Dangerous, repeats the refrain. They may seem like fairly standard, even prosaic lovesong lyrics. However, the words are not addressed to an errant lover but rather to music itself, which she calls her calling, her vocation in life.
You see, after the huge success of Rumer’s debut, Seasons Of My Soul in 2010 and then 2012’s covers album Boys Don’t Cry, the pressures of the music business exposed the fragility of a woman still coming to terms with her mother’s death several years previously and other personal traumas. She suffered chronically from depression, anxiety attacks and stage fright.
‘I became mangled up making music the last time and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to go through that again,’ she says.
‘ Dangerous expresses how scared I was at going back to something that caused me such stress. It is physically and mentally very demanding for me, because I have to summon incredible spirit and will to do it.’
The singer spoke at length to me in a previous interview about how she discovered that her biological father was not her mother’s husband but a friend of the family in Islamabad, where she was born. She lost her mother in 2003.
Choosing the name Rumer after author Rumer Godson, initially she found salvation playing music.
The now 35-year-old singer went from playing tiny venues around Britain and Ireland, including the little-known Dublin Conservative Club, for a handful of people in the late noughties, to the White House before President Obama and the First Lady. (‘He was really fun, nice, and cool. I think him and Michelle are like angelic people.’)
With the amount of grief her profession has caused her, she thought that she might be in the wrong business.
‘That is exactly what my doctor said and anyone would say that,’ she says with the slightest of laughs. ‘But I have responsibilities to people and the thing is it is manageable if you allow yourself the time and space to organise yourself better. I now have people who support me and help me cope with all that this business asks, but honest to God, in the beginning it was like I was thrown in at the deep end and I couldn’t swim.
‘Everybody said, “Oh, she’ll be all right,” and I wasn’t and I nearly sank to the bottom. Now I have armbands and I’m all right.’
‘It’s easier to love someone than to be loved. I’m not used to feeling someone has my back’
Her saving grace came in the form of a loving relationship with Rob Shirakbari, Burt Bacharach’s former musical director, whom she got to know after recording with the legendary songwriter. After her second release, the covers album, Boys Don’t Cry, she moved with Rob to his home state of Arkansas.
‘Without him I don’t think I would be doing this interview because I don’t think the album would exist,’ she says. ‘I resisted the process of making this album but he was there for me and led me through it the whole way.
‘It’s easier to love someone than to let someone love you. I’m not used to feeling that someone has my back. When I used to come home, it would be to no one became my mum was dead and I had no boyfriend. It is such a difference to come home to someone who will make me a cup of tea and ask me how my day was.’ They are now engaged to be married next year but they went through their own personal tragedy, when she suffered a miscarriage during the making of the album.
She wrote the song Butterfly about her experience but originally had no intention of including it on the album.
‘The song is about two people who have the expectation of something wonderful coming in to their life but instead suffer a devastating loss,’ she says. ‘People who have gone through miscarriage know that feeling all too well. It was such a personal song that me and Rob just recorded it alone and it was put on the record without any discussion quite near the end of the process, so it didn’t really give people involved in the record a chance to comment on it.
‘I didn’t want to put the song on the album because it was so personal but then I thought if I did, people who have gone through miscarriage might take some comfort in it. I’m not sure if I will be able to perform it live; it’s not in the set at the moment.’
Rumer has the honeyed voice of a latter-day Karen Carpenter. And like Karen, Rumer makes catharsis sound remarkably sweet.
Rumer – Into Colour is out now on Atlantic Records.