Singer-songwriter Lara Ruggles will kick off her album release tour Wednesday, Feb. 12, at Barleycorn’s.
“Anchor Me” is a collection of songs that she issued in 2024 after a particularly long gestation period.
The tour is a joint effort between DTour, a network of independently owned venues, and Wichita’s own MidTopia, which seeks “equitable opportunities in the arts.”
Ruggles is quick to praise both organizations, saying, “Working with them has felt like actually having a team for the first time in my life as an artist.”
Independent venues are an important subject to Ruggles, who is based in Tucson, Arizona. She chairs the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility committee with the National Independent Venue Association.
She recently discussed the origins of “Anchor Me” and her involvement with the independent venue group with KMUW.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You put out the record “Anchor Me” last year, and it seems that there was a lot of change in the air surrounding it.
I released a record in 2015 that I would say is tonally similar to this one. [As I was finishing that up] I was writing a lot of the songs that I put on this record. Around that time, I moved down to Tucson and took a pivot. I started producing electronic music and learning how to loop my vocals and [worked on] producing a solo set that sounded a little bit fuller. I was writing things that were a little bit in a different direction.
I was performing as Sharkk Heartt for seven or eight years there and still am doing some of that music as well. [But the songs on “Anchor Me”] were ones that stuck in my head. I thought, “They’ve been in there, floating around, taking up space for long enough that I think I need to get them out and get them recorded and make a really simple, minimally produced folk album.” Just get it out. Not worry about perfection. Make it simple, do it fast.
So, I recorded these songs with a friend of mine [Steve Varney] in Colorado. He’s such a brilliant producer that once he started sending the songs back to me, I started to think, “Oh, I don’t think this is going to be quite as minimally produced as I thought. I think that this is starting to sound really beautiful. Let’s just take it all the way there!”
What happened next?
Steve went on tour, and he’d also had a new baby at the same time, so he said, “This is about as much as I can do with your record. I’m a little swamped now. Here it is. Do what you will with the rest.” I took it to my friend Steven Tracy, and we fleshed out the rest. My friend Tyler Sabbagg lives in Joshua Tree and is a really brilliant composer. He won an Emmy last year for some of his work. He’s composed for “Chef’s Table” and “Secrets of the Blue Zones.” He played drums on a couple of the songs and sent me the files. Then we worked with a few of my bandmates in Tucson to put it all together.
It's funny because I’ve been hearing from a lot of friends who have said, “This is such an evolution for you!” I feel like it’s just me going back to the past and saying, “This isn’t over yet! Here it is!”
There’s been this gap between records under your own name. Sometimes people see that, and they expect the artist to do a lot of explaining.
When I started performing as Sharkk Heartt, a big part of it was me taking on an experiment. Let’s see if having a band name cuts down on the misogyny I experience when I write booking emails. I’ll get messages that will read, “Oh, we’re not really looking for female solo singer-songwriters right now.” I’ve thought, “So, the gender matters? You are looking for solo singer-songwriters as long as they’re dudes?” I’ve had people say that in emails to me, and it’s so confusing. Just that someone wants to out themselves that way. [Laughs.]
Part of that was because it was a different sound and because it was a different approach and even because I was wounded enough by the constant rejection of the music industry I thought, “Maybe if it’s not my own name, it won’t feel so personal.” And that actually was true.
When I was making this album -- and it was clear that the sound was going to be in folk-Americana world -- it didn’t feel like it fit with the Sharkk Heartt name. When I started to wrestle with that decision of which name I should release it under, I checked [my stats] on Spotify, all my profiles that I hadn’t used in a while and realized that I still have a lot more followers and users under my own name.
I think some of that is that I’d had a song from my first EP that had been included on [a compilation] for this new generation, high definition Sony Walkman digital audio player. That song is a kind of a weird avant piano song, and it’s been listened to way more than anything else that I have out there, and I think that’s a big part of why I’ve got more listeners under my own name. So, I said, “Let’s just take it there.”
You’re kicking off your tour here in Wichita and this was booked with help from MidTopia and DTour. DTour is an organization that strives to give more oxygen to independent performers and independent venues. This is something that’s close to your heart because you worked at an independent venue.
Three months before COVID hit, I got a job at an independent venue in Tucson. It’s a venue that’s under a bigger nonprofit umbrella. I was production manager there. I loved that job, and it was the first time that I had had what felt like a “real adult job.” It was the first time I had been in a job where I felt like I wanted to be there for a long time. “This feels good. This feels like it works with my natural rhythm and natural sleep schedule and allows me space to be creative and is in the industry that I love. I want to hold onto this.”
And then COVID happened.
The venue had to shut down. We were looking at who knows how long [before we’d be open again]. I remember [that] on the first day, when we made the decision to close, my co-workers and I were walking down the street to the larger venue that’s only three blocks away. One of my coworkers said, “If this is really bad, we could be closed until fall.” I [thought], “That seems unimaginable.” Then we were closed an entire year longer than that.
So, I got really involved with the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) that was forming at that time. I was a group of focus who were recognizing that there was a need for a trade association for independent venues, that independent venues weren’t really communicating with each other and were kind of operating on their own in their individual cities. [There was also the realization that] there could be some shared knowledge and shared power there.
That was what was happening, but the element of that that I think got us all through was just the community, just getting on Zooms with all these other venue managers and promoters across the country and having this virtual room full of people who were all sharing the same experience and [who were] out of work for the moment and [who were] trying to figure out how to keep their teams and their businesses afloat. Just commiserating, weekly, with all of these folks and forming these lifelong friendships. That was a huge thing that got me through that time.
Then it was this incredibly energized, motivated group of people. Folks in the music industry are used to working hard all the time. When you don’t have your normal daily work to put that energy toward you can move mountains! [Laughs.]
So, it was this group of people coming together and advocating and talking to senators and House representatives and making the case for why independent venues are a really key part of the music industry ecosystem and why local economies were not going to recover without independent venues existing in those economies.
We worked on this successful effort together over the course of seven or eight months to get the Shuttered Operators Grant passed in Congress. It was a $16 billion federal relief fund specifically for independent venues.
