Greta Ruth is an experimental folk singer songwriter based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Combining finger-style acoustic guitar and poetic vocals, Ruth forgoes conventional song structures in favour of something more intuitive and evocative, what she describes as “a meeting point of softness and dissonance, reflection and dynamic stillness.”
After a series of singles, Greta Ruth has just released her debut full-length album, The Fawn, on Minneapolis label Corrector Records. It’s an album that demonstrates her sensibilities perfectly. A patient and richly textured collection of songs that hum with a quiet dream-like energy, where each track is a composition of poetry and tone which slowly unfurls to reveal layers of depth and meaning. Often concise and fleeting, Ruth’s writing combines personal thoughts with opaque images to allude to a certain mysteriousness. As she sings on ‘At the Place’, “I’m sure of little in the dull light.”
There’s something mournful and morbid about many of the images Ruth paints, a funereal elegance that ties together death and life and love like a ribbon. From the stones and bones on ‘Oslo’, the wrapped legs on ‘In a White Gown’, or the torn silk on ‘Taut’, Greta Ruth finds beauty in dissonance. But perhaps the best example is ‘The Waves’. “My love I need a small death,” she sings, “face me sure and sweet / waves will come and change us, claim all our breath.”
Ruth says she wrote these songs as a means to “reflect on the idea that our greatest virtues can also be our greatest vices,” and this meditative atmosphere is perhaps the album’ key feature. There is a tranquillity woven throughout, the sense that each song is suspended in negative space, the dusky silence of an empty room or the inward caverns of the self. Ruth traverses these expanses with a kind of steadfast graciousness, unhurriedly disentangling the snaggle of knots that can trouble and complicate a life. “Through internal and spiritual work,” she says, “we have the opportunity to grow toward a place where we are no longer at war with ourselves.”
This combination of rumination and spiritualism is sometimes addressed directly, such as on the softly turbulent title track which feels thick with things left unsaid. “I go for walks to talk to God,” Ruth sings, before surrendering to her anxieties “worry, sick with worry / I can’t be worried anymore.” But the songs are not always disturbed by this unease. Hope flickers too, not unlike the glimmer of gold on the album’s artwork. Take ‘Full Hue’, which opens with the stark acknowledgment “happier, I want to be happier,” before using lunar metaphors to convey the wax and wane of selves and relationships. But what could end as a sad song shows a flicker of strength too, the realization that, perhaps, better things are possible (“if I was brighter, if I was kinder, if I was braver, maybe”). The sensation is most apparent on ‘Like You’, an otherwise austere folk song where hope reveals itself most fully, sparkling gently with a soft and quivering radiance.
I thought the dark would
hurry my heart
to an early grave
when the light came
what sweet wonder
that whole unbroken day
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The Fawn is out now on Corrector Records and you can get it from the Greta Ruth Bandcamp page. You can also choose from a variety of cool merch, including t-shirts, hand-made jewellery and a print of the image from the album cover.