Hailing from Northern California and based in Brooklyn, Ruby Landen is a singer-songwriter who cut her teeth while living in France. After starting to write her own material and graduating beyond impromptu shows in the Paris Metro, Landen’s history began to emerge in her music. Because, having started playing the Celtic fiddle at the age of four, Ruby Landen’s upbringing was one steeped in Americana and folk, and something of the timelessness of the genres rubbed off. Not to mention a reflective, ruminative air, where nostalgia and steely examination bind tight into one.
Ruby Landen’s latest single, ‘I Look Like My Mother’, displays the style perfectly. Supported by Hannah Reed (fiddle, vocals), Jerry Cronin (cello) and Liri Ronen (French horn), Landen crafts a sound rooted in the classic American style, all warmth and acoustic detail plus kind of melancholic fondness. Landen describes the track as one written in a “retrospective state,” the product of reflecting on her relationship with her father and other men. The result is a kind of duality, between specificity and diffuseness, the wide world and Landen herself. A myriad of experiences honed to a point by the common emotions that accompany them.
I look like my mother, we’re drawn with the same lines
and the burden that is hers, I see becoming mineI’m afraid to be my father, I’m afraid to let him win
he couldn’t give a home to
the kid I should’ve beencome and take from me
the things that I lack
I’m tired of this bag that
never hits backif I was better made,
would I know my name?
