Interview: Water Still Flows With Rich Ruth
Interview by Lindsey V. Britt / Photos by Ryan Hartley
A leading light in the Nashville ambient/experimental scene, after the success of his first two albums, Rich Ruth is releasing his third album Water Still Flows out June 21st, the album combines different elements from spiritual jazz to doom and drone-metal, while being recorded in Ruth’s home studio and made with his friends.
What inspired you to get started in music?
I think just since I was a little kid it just always spoke to me in a very visceral way, I have early memories of hearing The Beatles, Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And then started playing piano and then guitar. It’s just kind of has always been the main thing in my life that’s made sense to me.
Your third album WATER STILL FLOWS comes out June 21st, how would you say this one is different from your first two?
It’s a lot heavier, it kinda explores a lot of doom and drone-metal elements mixed with spiritual jazz, and ambient stuff, a lot of mixed instrumentations like pedal steel, harp, and saxophone. Things I’ve been doing in the past but it’s just a more fleshed-out, more intense version of a lot of the things I've been working at. I think it just encompasses all the different sides of my musical influences and ambitions.
What’s your favorite song off this album and why?
I would say probably “Aspiring To The Sky”, I think it just was one of the songs where all of the elements really clicked together, and my friends that played on it Sammy and Reuben played saxophone and drums just really elevated it to a pretty intense and like emotional territory. It feels sort of like the pinnacle of the album and sort of encapsulates all the different elements that are happening on the whole record.
I heard you recorded the album in your home studio, what was that like?
It was great! All my records I’ve pretty much done on my own, engineered them, and produced them myself at home. But this was a little different because during the pandemic I built a studio in my backyard. We have a pretty small house in east Nashville and when my wife was working from home, everything was just very tight, so I spent about a year building the studio and kind of outfitting it, it’s still pretty small but like it’s a very separate dedicated workspace which it just like allowed me to really get in a new zone and focus on it. And I was on tour a lot playing with S.G. Goodman, and then touring with this stuff as well. And so it allowed me when I was home to be able to kind of isolate myself and just focus on being creative and getting ideas out that had been brewing while on the road. It’s nice, it’s kind of my preferred way to work because it leaves money out of the equation, and I can just take my time and really dive into the compositions and the recording and the experimentation of everything.
You just finished touring with All Them Witches, what was the experience like?
Those guys are old friends of mine, we used to play divey little shows together with my old band and those guys in Nashville like twelve, thirteen years ago. I toured with them for about six weeks in Europe in 2022 but I was playing solo just cause it was logistically a lot more feasible to do that. So it was really cool to take the full band out, and play a lot of new material. And it’s cool since a lot of this new music is veering into heavier tones and territory, opening for a band that’s kind on the heavier side, it felt like their fanbase was very open and receptive to what we were doing. I really like all those guys as musicians and friends, and getting to play with them for a couple of weeks was really special, their audience is a really dedicated cool group of people, it went really well.
And you’re about to tour with Mikaela Davis, how excited are you for those shows?
I’m super excited! She played on the record a bunch, she’s a good friend of mine. We got to know each other the last year and a half or so when I toured with Circles Around The Sun and she was around for some of those shows and would sit in with us on harp. She is just a really transcendent amazing musician and a very nice person. It’s always more fun to tour with your friends and people you know and trust and can collaborate with, I’m looking forward to hanging out with those guys and getting to see them play every night.
You’ve also got shows in August, do you like being out on the road so much back-to-back?
I love being out on the road, I mean it can get to a point where it’s exhausting and can feel a little chaotic but up until the All Them Witches tour I had about five or six months off the road, a lot of it was finishing the record and stuff. It just feels good to get back out there, and I’ve been touring so much as like a sideman, so getting to tour and play my music with the people that I get to choose who’s with me, they’re all good friends of mine and really inspiring musicians, I wanna keep doing it as much as I can.
Is there a city you want to tour that you haven’t yet?
That’s a good question, I’ve checked a lot of the boxes. I’d like to get out west more, I’ve played in L.A. and outside of Portland for Pickathon festival, but I haven’t done like a run out there. I’d love to play Seattle, Portland, and more spots in California and Austin.
What’s the jazz scene like in Nashville compared to other cities like New Orleans?
It’s definitely not as prevalent here, Nashville has a very rich, amazing, musical culture and palette for good musicians. I think just because it’s one of the main places where working musicians live, there’s always going to be interesting stuff happening kind of behind the scenes a little more. As far as jazz I’m not super entrenched in that world as you might think, I’m more in with the experimental, avant-garde folks, which definitely intersects with jazz a lot. There’s one main jazz club here that holds it down, and I have a lot of friends that do a lot of improv sets and free jazz leaning things, so there’s a healthy environment for it, it’s definitely not a jazz-focused city, obviously country and all the studios that are here attracts a very broad range of musicians, and I think sometimes it extends to jazz, sometimes it extends to ambient music or indie rock or whatever. There are always enough amazing players here that there will always be cool jazz-adjacent things happening, but it’s definitely not the same as New York or New Orleans.
The Avant-garde world isn’t talked about much. How would you describe that scene to people who aren’t familiar with it?
I think it’s in a cool place right now, there’s a lot of exciting artists out there from all over the place. Just in Nashville alone it’s felt like over the past couple of years there’s been a very supportive music scene of people doing more just kind of outsider stuff, more ambient, more jazz, more psychedelic leaning. I think coming out of the pandemic a lot of people were freed up, a lot of musicians weren’t on tour. And so I think it allowed a lot of people to dive more into abstract ideas and create new things, in their house studios, or in their bedrooms, or whatever. I think the palette has grown a lot, and I think that’s one positive side of the streaming world is that people are just exposed to a much broader sense of music. It’s been cool to see how different realms of jazz have begun to intersect with ambient music, or with various experimental things, and there’s a lot of really incredible people working in those worlds.
I know you’ve mentioned that Ira Kaplan was one of your heroes who you got to meet. What about him inspires you?
I think the overall consistency and passion of what he and the rest of Yo La Tengo have been able to capture for as long as I’ve been alive, coming up on four decades of just being a dedicated band that writes really good songs, improvises a lot live, plays different sets every night. I think he just has a very dedicated passion to creativity that I admire a lot, it’s cool seeing someone who’s close to seventy years old now, and I’ve seen Yo La Tengo maybe twelve times and it’s like every time it’s inspiring and amazing and different from all the other times I’ve seen them. That’s kind of like the goal is to make music that’s not compromising, maybe it’s not commercial but they have a very beloved fanbase. It’s just a really cool thing to have gotten to witness now, I’ve been a fan for ten years, it’s cool, they don’t stop.
How many instruments do you play?
Really guitar is kind of my main thing, and then I mess around with synthesizers and keyboards a lot, that’s kind of the main thing. I’m not a very proficient keyboard player, but I’ve been very drawn to synthesizers, and the sort of abstract nature of what you can discover with them without necessarily having a ton of theory knowledge, or knowledge of piano technique. I found ways to experiment with a lot of different things, but primarily guitar is how I best express myself as a musician,
Lastly, do you have a recommendation? It can be anything, book, movie, an artist to check out, a place, anything you want.
My biggest recommendation to anybody is to travel more. Just get outside of your comfort zone and go to other countries, feel small, go eat food that you don’t necessarily know how to order, and just be humbled.
Make sure to check out Water Still Flows on June 21st along with the rest of Ruth’s awesome discography and catch him out on the road this summer.
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