Q&A: Blake Ruby Composes a Love Letter in New Album ‘She’
RELIGIOUS IMAGERY AND STRAIGHTFORWARD LYRICS ARE JUXTAPOSED — throughout Blake Ruby’s newest album, She. Ruby, an alumnus of Belmont University, credits the community he found in Nashville for his success so far. The friendships he gained at the university, he says, have blossomed into lifelong relationships and musical partnerships.
According to Ruby, growing up in a Christian church setting allowed him to explore his love of music in a supportive environment. There, he learned new instruments, improved his live performance skills, and discovered his interest in religious imagery and metaphors.
Read on below to meet Ruby and hear how his upbringing and community led to this album.
LUNA: The album is gorgeous. You’re a beautiful storyteller. And I really enjoy how optimistic it is about love. The album really does read like a love letter, and I love that.
RUBY: Thanks! It’s funny because it wasn't even really the goal, but it just kind of ended up being a good way to collect all the songs together. I was like, “Oh, these are actually all like love songs. Let's put it in an album.”
LUNA: Listening to She, one of the first things I noticed was all the religious references, especially in songs such as “Solomon” and “Heaven.” Why do you choose religious characters as storytelling devices in your songs?
RUBY: My grandparents had a church back in Maryland, where I grew up. That's kind of where I first got into music, playing on the music team. The first, I guess, positive-reinforcement space that I had in music was the church and growing up being around that environment. Biblical imagery has always been really interesting to me. There [are] some other artists I feel like I've been inspired by. Kendrick Lamar uses a lot of that reference in his music, and I feel like it's such a timeless way to tell stories and to take things a little deeper than [the] surface level. And I think that's a big reason why I've always loved the Bible. I also just love reading the Bible. I think it's so cool. But yeah, I think that's where it’s mostly drawn from. A lot of the stories I heard growing up were Bible stories and stuff. So I think it's always been a part of how I have learned to tell stories and interpret stories.
LUNA: Going along with the religious references, do you feel you can be more honest in songwriting through analogies, rather than saying things outright?
RUBY: Definitely, definitely. I feel like I love songs that feel super personal to the artist but also have the chance to be broad and kind of conceptual at the same time. And I feel like Biblical references, too, are so universal. Like, most people have heard them. And then going to the next line … talking about the color of bedsheets or something like that… That is so cool to me — the juxtaposition between something that's so big and beyond me, and then stuff that's so uniquely specific to who I am.
LUNA: Apart from the lyrics, some of the piano and music itself reminds me of what you might hear in church. It’s clear that religion has influenced your music lyrically. What about stylistically?
RUBY: Totally. Absolutely, yeah. I grew up playing, like, every weekend. I started on drums. It was my first instrument. And then slowly they were like, “Hey, we need a bass player.” Then I started playing bass. And then they were like, “We need piano.” You know, I would do [offer] music where I would sing a solo and play piano with it. It was a very natural way … to have such supportive feedback, in terms of audience and participation. The people in church are very supportive of you trying to pursue your gifts and talents. I think it was a really positive way to grow up learning about music. But yeah, I definitely think stylistically, too.
Growing up, the only stuff that my family listened to in the car was pop radio and the Christian radio station. [It was] all of my musical upbringing until high school, when I started actually finding music on my own and with my friends. So yeah, pretty much a huge influence. I would say, though, I feel like I have fallen in love with more gospel music, specifically Black-centered music since I got to college. Before that it was mostly just contemporary Christian music, CCM. The stuff that you hear coming out of a lot of the Nashville circles, still, so I think I fell in love with jazz and harmony and runs and big powerful moments vocally. A lot of that stuff kind of stems from like gospel music and I feel like I'm just dipping my toes into it, but that's definitely been a big influence, especially with the Biblical references.
LUNA: “Solomon” and “Woman” seem to blend together musically. Is there a thematic thread that ties them together too?
RUBY: Yeah, originally that song [“Woman”] was “Solomon.” It was just written as “Solomon,” and that's when we started producing it that way. I was like, “This is a song I like. Let's try to pursue this.” And my producer, and collaborator, Chris Donlin, I was talking to him about it. I was like, “Hey, do you think we should do like a beat switch at the end? Or some sort of outro that just rides out in a different kind of theme?” And he was like, “Yeah, I can try something.” He sent me a file of just an idea of using my vocals … the main vocal chop through the back end of it. I was like, “Oh my gosh, that could be a whole other song.”
So then I sat down and I wrote what is now “Woman.” We kind of produced those two songs together. They're all kind of in the same session, so they definitely tie a lot thematically too because “Solomon” is more of an anecdote. Both of those songs are talking about lust, and “Solomon” is sort of my attempt to have a story of David telling Solomon about David and Bathsheba when he committed adultery in the Bible, and how it ruined the whole kingdom and led to a bunch of wars and stuff — just because of this one act with this woman. It was a cool way for me to kind of talk about my struggle with lust. And then “Woman” was more of the flip side of the coin: appreciating a woman so much that you would never fall into those temptations or those [rigs] or whatever. Like, I care so much about this person that I would never let these things keep me from treating her properly. It's probably the most intimate part of the album.
Photo courtesy of Sean Bryan
LUNA: Is there any other intentionality in the order of songs that aids in the story you’re trying to tell with this album?
RUBY: Yeah, it kind of came together naturally. When I started putting the songs together, I started to realize the theme of these are a lot of love songs. This is kind of … where my life was. I was recently married, I was living in a new place, and [I] was processing a lot of things like that. I think I was just unpacking a lot of relationship stuff, and so naturally a lot of the songs kind of have that love theme. And then the tracklist sort of came from me feeling like, “Okay, this is the right emotion to follow this song.” It wasn't really like I'm starting here and ending it here. It was kind of like, “Okay, where do all these puzzle puzzle pieces fit in together?” And I'm super interested, once everybody hears the album, what they discovered in the themes.
That's honestly one of my favorite parts of releasing music is having other people be like, “Hey, I can't believe you wrote this song about this.” And I'm like, “Well, actually, that's not what I was gonna do at all.” But I'm really glad that you were able to find that in the music, you know. That's happened a bunch. So yeah, I definitely think there was a general purpose of emotional connection, but I didn't have planned in my head.
LUNA: The cover art is really stunning. Can you tell me about that and how it relates to the album?
RUBY: The person on the cover is my wife, and she's also pregnant with our first baby in that picture. And you can't really see, which is kind of cool because if you know, you know. It's not like a clear thing, which I love, but that's how it turned out. My great friends Chase Denton and Sarah Corbett Woods did the creative design behind that with a company called Working Holiday that I work with all the time with visual stuff. They're amazing. I knew I wanted it to be kind of like Renaissance and like a painting and very stark. I knew I was coming to Nashville and they were like, “Well, what if you just got an extra flight and brought Kayla?” And I was like, “Should we just shoot Kayla as the picture?” It kind of encapsulates a lot of what the music's about in terms of me personally. They're like, “Let's do it.” So we bought her ticket last-minute.
I was like, “Are you sure? Because it's gonna be everywhere.” And they did such a great job of taking care of her and making sure that she was really confident and excited about the final result. I love when art captures a moment in time. And I feel like I'll never forget that. This exact feeling of this timeframe of my life with that album art. They knocked it out of the park. When she sent me the first edit, I was like, “Don't change anything. That's the album art.” So yeah, I'm so glad you asked about that. Because I've been dying to talk about it.
LUNA: Yeah, it's beautiful. And it's such a gorgeous timestamp of your life personally at the time when you were putting this together. That's really meaningful.
I love asking about people's creative communities growing up, and you kind of touched on this while talking about church. Did you grow up with a very creative community around you? What was your local music scene like?
RUBY: Yeah, of course. The church, it was part of my life. Whereas when I got to high school, I was really involved in sports growing up. That's what I did all the time. That's where most of my friends were. And we would run around to tournaments and games the entire year. And then towards the back end of high school, I started making a few important decisions, like, “Oh, am I going to pursue this sport thing? Or am I going to keep my commitment to this music thing that I have going on?” And there were a couple moments [when] I realized that the music community was way more supportive and encouraging. I realized the longevity of it, too. Sports, for most people, end after high school or college, whereas music is something that you can do your whole life.
And yeah, I joined a band very organically with these guys that I was friends with in my town in Westminster, Maryland. We just signed up for a battle of the bands before we even had rehearsed together. So [the band] was called Red Couch. [It was] me, Ben Chase, Tyler Dragger — who goes by The Dune Flowers now — Grant Slater, Colin Hopkins. They became my best friends real fast. And all the girlfriends were friends with each other. Like, my wife was my high school sweetheart, so we were dating that whole time. It was basically just my coming-of-age period. It was just me staying up really late smoking and drinking with my friends. It was the first time I was really rebelling, I guess. And the music was a huge part of that. There was this huge boom of people starting garage bands and playing backyard shows and festivals and we got really involved in the Baltimore and DC music scene. I owe most of who I am as an artist to those friends. Just trying whatever we wanted, recording whatever we wanted, and just living together, but music was a result of all that. And so that's kind of how I pursue my creative community now. I want it to be an outpour of life and music and to be wrapped in all that instead of [being] so transactional. I want it to be a community, always. That's what I'm most excited about.
LUNA: I love that. I also have to say that Red Couch is such a good band name.
RUBY: I owe most of that to Ben. Ben Chase was kind of the mastermind behind Red Couch.
LUNA: Who were some of your biggest collaborators on She?
RUBY: Chris Donlin co-produced everything with me. He's touched pretty much every single one of my projects I’ve put out at this point. He's my best friend, and I trust him a lot as a human and as a creative. I wrote “Lemongrass” in LA with my friend Logan Downs, who goes by Kooj. He’s the best dude. He's been one of the biggest encouragers of my early career. He mixed my first couple projects. He's a couple years older than me, so we met through Belmont. He's always been in my corner. It's really cool to get to make music with him every now and then still, and he's a lot of fun. And then I have some string players on the record. So Patrick Monnius, he did the whole intro in the beginning, all the violin and viola. I kind of had arranged a melody line that I wanted and the general chord structure, and he just put in all the stacks and arranged it in a really beautiful way. I've worked with him and Torri Weidinger, who played cello directly on one of the songs, and then we sampled her cello. She's an amazing artist too. She's got her own project out. That's super killer. She's like one of the most amazing musicians I know and is so creative with the cello. She's somebody who can just make all the crazy orchestral stuff. She can play anything she wants, but then also adds all these crazy textures that you can throw around the song. So she's super badass.
Then I mixed the whole thing myself. My buddy Chris Roussell played drums. He's one of my best friends. Honestly, all these people that I'm talking about are great friends, which is just so cool. I feel like the community that I found in Nashville is like that. I almost consider all these people more friends than musical collaborators. I value them more as people than as instrumentalists. Quinn Reedy played bass on the song. Quinn is a ridiculous musician and is a jack of all trades. He's played in my live band for years. And Edsel Holden mastered it. He's the craziest dude I've ever met. He's hilarious. All people in Nashville or Belmont. It was cool coming from a school that was so big in terms of community and collaboration.
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