RICH RUTH

Surviving carjackings, tornadoes and Trump, RICH RUTH is the sonic pathfinder blasting cosmic jazz-rock into the future. Holed up in his Nashville studio, he reveals how heavy sounds help restore his psychic wounds. “I realised it’s OK to be extreme with your music,” he tells Michael Bonner

In flow: others say Ruth makes music that “always aspires to something higher”

Photo by RYAN HARTLEY

WHEN he was 21, Michael Ruth travelled overseas for the first time, leaving the American Midwest to visit Cambodia as part of a college overseas study programme. The experience had a lasting impact not just on Ruth, but the music he makes.

“A classmate and I went to this rural village near the Vietnam border, about 10 hours away from Phnom Penh,” he begins, sitting in his East Nashville home studio. “They told us we were going to be teaching computers to these students, but when we got to the village there was no school, no electricity, no running water. The villagers were animist – they believed in spirits, in the animals and all living things. While we were there, they spent a week building this shrine out of bamboo, then the whole village stayed up all night, drinking rice whisky, while the elders were dancing around, playing drums, wearing their traditional clothes. Then at dawn the next morning, a guy with a machete hacked up a water buffalo. They processed the meat and then they ate it. After that, I needed to seek out similar experiences – to be uncomfortable and out of my element – to find out what I can learn from them. It’s about crossing a barrier within yourself and finding some sort of enlightenment You can achieve it with psychedelics or spiritual practise, but I’m chasing it with my music.”

Performing under the sort-of alias Rich Ruth (Rich is both his middle name and his mother’s maiden name), Michael Ruth’s recent work articulates these transcendent emotional states, offering respite from traumatic times. His 2019 debut album Calming Signals was partly recorded after a carjacking. 2022 follow-up I Survived, It’s Over followed the back-to-back dramas of lockdown and a localised tornado strike. His latest album, Water Still Flows, meanwhile, was written during a transient two years spent on the road, cranking out crunchy Southern rock as touring guitarist for SG Goodman. The title for Water Still Flows comes from the work of eight-century Tang dynasty poet Li Bai: “Life moves on, there’s always a constant stream of energy, whether that’s your happiness or anxiety,” Ruth explains. “Sometimes I worry that as I get older, I’m going to lose these creative sparks, but ‘water still flows’ is a mantra: it always comes come back. I’ll always keep looking and I’ll always find it again.”

Just as his quest is ongoing, so Ruth’s music is always changing – from the immersive ambient passages of Calming Signals through the celestial jam-rock of I Survived, It’s Over into the expansive Water Still Flows, which brings drone metal heaviosity to his Fourth World meditations. Working alone at first, devising electronic loops and guitar drones, Ruth gradually assembled an eclectic cast of collaborators to add pedal steel, sax and harp to his latest psychedelic raptures.

“It’s collaborative in a sense to where there are no rules to his music and it can be as wide as the horizon, but Mikey is steering the ship,” says pedal steel upstart Spencer Cullum, who like Ruth is an incomer to Music City. “I honestly think he is creating a new path in Nashville to how music can be played here.”

Along with fellow travellers like Cullum, Luke Schneider and William Tyler, Ruth is among an adventurous group of Nashville-based insurgents who are developing an experimental agenda far away from the city’s industry stronghold at Music Row or the chintzy clamour of the tourist honky-tonks.