Daily Discovery: Faith Evans Ruch, “Sugar”

ARTIST: Faith Evans Ruch

SONG: “Sugar”

HOMETOWN: Memphis, Tennessee

CURRENT LOCATION: Memphis, Tennessee

AMBITIONS: I just want to play my music across the country and world. Travel, taking crazy adventures and meeting new people, with my guitar. This dream ends with me becoming a skilled, accomplished, multiple record releasing, guitarist and vocalist with a second home in Colorado.

TURN-OFFS: Sneaky/manipulative behavior, poor dental hygiene, beets, metal music, closed-mindedness, bad manners, hair gel, ;one mustaches (a ‘stache without a beard to accompany it), and eople talking loudly during concerts.

TURN-ONS: My hometown, skiing, live music, heartbreaking songs, Memphis music (yes, we consider it a genre), The Avett Brothers, North Mississippi Hill Country blues & slide guitar, outdoor adventures, barbecue, cats and vinyl records.

DREAM GIG: It may sound silly to say somewhere so close to home, but I really want to play the Levitt Shell here in Overton Park in midtown Memphis, TN. It has such a cool history and it’s my all-time favorite venue to see live music. I’ve had some of my best memories there. The Ryman in Nashville is a close second. The sound is immaculate in there and I bet it feels like you’re taking people to church when you’re up on that stage singing. There’s some power in that place.

FAVORITE LYRIC: 

“An Eskimo showed me a movie he’d recently taken of you
The poor man could hardly stop shivering
His lips and his fingers were blue
I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes
And I guess he just never got warm
But you stand there so nice in your blizzard of ice
Oh, please let me come into the storm”- One of Us Cannot Be Wrong (Leonard Cohen)

SONG I WISH I WROTE: “Paper Bag” by Fiona Apple

5 PEOPLE I’D MOST LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH: Etta James, Patsy Cline, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Patty Griffin, Janis Joplin

MY FAVORITE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: John Prine with Steve Earle at The Ryman in Nashville, TN a couple years ago. It was a few hours of pure songwriting perfection. Silent tears fell down my cheeks that night.

I WROTE THIS SONG BECAUSE…I had two goals: to start writing a more soul influenced album (where I was being drawn creatively since releasing my last album) and to write a “happy” love song (unlike any of the other love songs I’d written). It was about a year and a half ago and I came up with the chorus and got stuck. I couldn’t write a happy love song. About a year later, I fell in love and I finished the rest of the song in a matter of hours. I feel the majority of my songs so viscerally when I write them that I couldn’t write about something from so deep in the heart until I truly understood what that felt like. When I finished, I no longer felt jaded. The soulful horns build up in the intro, in my mind, represent me breaking free from heartbreak.