Faith Evans Ruch

It used to be that a typical day for Faith Evans Ruch was full of heart beats, medical charts and newborn babies. In the summer of 2011, the registered nurse decided to give in to her muse, pick up a guitar and pour out her heart. Now, two years later, she’s released her debut album and is finding herself ever more at home in Memphis as she writes her page in this chapter of the city’s musical story.

It was at an early age that Faith was first charmed by the evocative nature of even the smallest lyrical line or chord. Though she dreamed of playing guitar, she only briefly took piano lessons and mostly confined her artistic expression to private poetry. Later, after moving to the secluded mountains of Montana, she sought out a songwriting class to help hone her skills further and seriously study great songwriters.

“Emmylou did it for me,” she says. “Rolling down the mountain listening to ‘Orphan Child’ or her duet with Linda Ronstadt on ‘The Sweetest Gift’ was pure inspiration. I just connected with that raw emotion. And John Prine’s ‘Angel from Montgomery’ captured me – just the power and simplicity of a guitar accompanying that gorgeous bit of poetry.”

It was that same emotional fire that led Faith to revisit her dream of playing guitar just one year into her nursing career. Determined to finally learn to create music to accompany her private lyrical vignettes, the burgeoning songstress played day and night until her fingers bled – “so I’d know I was working hard enough,” she says with a smile.

Soon thereafter, inspiration arrived in spades. Through relationships with friends in the local music scene, Faith took the opportunity to perform her newly penned break up farewell, “Your Soul.” The blue-eyed swing ballad lays Ruch bare in the aftermath of a relationship fading before her eyes. The autobiographical song neatly summarizes her tale: I learned guitar so I could play/the words my lips would never say.

Ruch learned to play plenty more over the next few months – she’d found her voice, emboldened by catharsis.

Armed with a newfound confidence and a fresh batch of songs, Faith booked time at Music+Arts Studio to record. With producer Kevin Houston (North MS Allstars, Lucero, Patty Griffin) at the helm and session players like Luther Dickinson (North MS Allstars, Black Crowes) and Rick Steff (John Prine, Cat Power, Lucero), the 11 song set glides gracefully across the hills and valleys of the South’s sonic spectrum. Heavily influenced by her classic country roots, songs like “Too Stupid to Cry” ring with a world-weary wisdom well beyond Ruch’s 25 years. The resulting album, 1835 Madison, is anything but a throwback. Lead single “PBR Song,” with its easy melody and lilting horn lines, recalls the best moments of Cat Power’s “The Greatest,” while “Your Soul” swings gently between its front porch rocking chair paced verses and free-wheeling leaf-in-the-wind chorus.

Much like Ruch’s wandering road to its release,1835 Madison is an album that comes as a pleasant surprise from a previously unknown place. Dubbed “too good to be a debut” by internationally published music critic Silver Michaels, 1835 Madison announces Faith Evans Ruch’s arrival on the musical map. If it is any prediction of her future, not knowing where the winding, dusty road will take her suits her just fine.