EMMA RUTH RUNDLE
A vocalist who can move an audience to stunned and shattered silence, Emma Ruth Rundle is finding a way to come to terms with the darkness of her past
The transformative singer-songwriter faces her personal horrors.
In music, just as in life in general, there are different kinds of heaviness. There’s the sort that hits you like a ton of bricks and breaks you with sheer force. And then there’s another kind of heaviness. A quieter kind. A kind that creeps up to you and softly puts its black veil over you, weighing heavy on your soul. If you’ve ever heard Emma Ruth Rundle’s hauntingly beautiful album Marked For Death or seen her play live, just her voice and her guitar cutting through the darkness, you’ll know how this second kind of heaviness works, how it sounds and feels. With her third solo record, Emma managed to invoke an immediacy and rawness you rarely find in the realm of singer/songwriter music. And with her current follow-up, On Dark Horses, she translates this feeling into a full-band setting.
The singer is an experienced bandmember, being part of the quasi-supergroup Red Sparowes (featuring members of Isis, Neurosis, The VSS) and post-rock band Marriages. But with both bands having had a halt in the last two years, Emma’s initial wish of expressing a folkier side of herself turned into the urge to play heavier music again.
“At one point I was toggling between doing a stripped-down acoustic record and a full-band album. As I was writing, it became clear that the songs were gonna be best served as a full band,” the Kentucky-based singer says. She’s found the perfect match for her endeavour in members of Wovenhand and Jaye Jayle, an Americana rock band she has shared the tour van and stage with for much of the Marked For Death touring cycle.
“I wanted to capture the chemistry that we had developed as a group of people having toured so much together,” Emma says about inviting the musicians to play on her new album, even though passing up some creative control to Jaye Jayle’s Evan Patterson, the first additional guitarist to ever play on one of her solo records, was hard at first. About half a year after recording it, Emma is happy with how On Dark Horses turned out, though. A more hopeful and colourful record than its predecessor, its full, guitar-driven sound not only brings back some of her post-rock influences but also a 90s alternative rock and grunge vibe. “I was able to write guitar parts that I’d never play live solo because I’d need the support of the other musicians to make sense of the parts,” she states.
As for genre borders: she simply doesn’t care. Born into a household with a jazz pianist dad and a harpsichord-playing mum, making music and having various musical interests was a natural part of Emma’s upbringing. From working in a folk music store to briefly studying music programming at CalArts, from quoting blues-rock musician Chris Whitley as well as doom metal act 40 Watt Sun as main influences, the LA-born musician doesn’t adhere to genre rules or categories. Benefitting from the love affair between post-rock and heavier music, she’s strongly connected to the metal scene, touring with bands such as Deafheaven and Alcest or playing the prestigious Roadburn Festival. Because even if she sounds different, there is a mutual understanding.
“In heavy music there’s this kind of cathartic thing that just works for me when I’m listening to it. I feel this relief,” Emma says in regard to her ties to the metal world – a statement that easily holds true for her own music as well.
What she shares with the likes of doom bands like Yob or Mizmor is the willingness to be brutally honest and vulnerable in her songs, to look into her inner abyss and let others have a glimpse as well. Although it’s sometimes hard to navigate between being open and respecting her own boundaries when it comes to her personal life, the singer can’t imagine working any other way.
“The safest thing for me to do as an artist is just be myself and speak about my own experiences because it’s hard to fuck that up,” she explains. “I’m the authority on my feelings and it’s easy for me to create art about that without having to adhere to a genre standard or a subject that I might not fully understand.” So she sings about her addictions, about growing up with a parent having drug issues, about things that are hard to face.
English psychoanalyst DW Winnicott once said that artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide – a statement Emma can fully subscribe to.
“But the desire to play music and make art is stronger than desire to hide,” she objects. “I don’t think it’s like that for everyone, that’s why some people get discovered long after they have died. I didn’t want to be stopped by my insecurities or my fears. I still grapple with it, but in my 20s, I just had to get over it.”
Alas, making music is a double-edged sword. While writing songs is a crucial outlet and way of coping with her struggles, a substitute for therapy, as Emma says, it also holds her hostage to those dark subject matters. After recording Marked For Death she felt changed, recovering after putting her negative emotions and thoughts into music. But then she had to play those songs night after night…
“I felt like I went right back into the depths of the content of the album and got pulled back into the emotional framework of it,” she recalls. Combining those strenuous performances with the arduous nature of being on the road makes it hard to leave unhealthy coping mechanisms like drinking behind. “It’s very difficult, I have not figured it out yet. I don’t think that I can be a touring musician for the rest of my life,” Emma says in regard to becoming a healthier person.
For now, the singer tries to stop herself becoming totally unhinged on tour. That’s why, after a period of intense solo shows, she’s glad to have a band she can rely on while playing On Dark Horses.
“Part of the reason I made the instrumentation more of a focus was so that during the live performance I could feel some relief and empowerment, and enjoy just playing the riffs, she explains, trying to establish some distance to the lyrics and stories of her previous album. Fittingly, the theme of overcoming obstacles and hard times is omnipresent on Emma’s new record – starting with the title.
“‘Dark horse’ is used to describe somebody that’s not likely to win a race, an unlikely candidate, somebody that doesn’t have the odds in their favour but comes out ahead in the end,” she elaborates. “The song Darkhorse is about growing up with traumatic situations but coming out on top and not falling victim to the negative past.”
As to whether she feels she has in fact overcome her negative past, Emma is mildly optimistic: “Some days I feel yes, some days I think no… but ultimately yes,” she ponders. “There are still dark themes that I’m working through and dealing with. So we’re not out of the woods. But there are several things that I feel I’ve moved past. I’ve channelled it and it’s gone out into a compartment somewhere in space and time that I can feel good about.”
“THERE ARE STILL DARK THEMES THAT I’M WORKING THROUGH” EMMA RUTH RUNDLE FINDS TURNING THE CORNER IS AN ONGOING PROCESS