Country music is full of people pretending to be cowboys. People wishing they were cowboys. People reorienting their lives or pasts to make the fantasy real. As though within the menial work and long days lies some authenticity lost within contemporary existence. Some American spirit they want to wear like a shawl. But songwriter Riddy Arman is different. After growing up in rural Ohio, she moved to central Virginia to become an actual ranch hand, only turning to music amid the isolation of horsemanship and barn work.
But the funny thing is, Riddy Arman ends up the inverse of the pretenders. A cowboy proving there is more to country music. The seclusion and landscape might have triggered the turn to folk, but the work itself is almost incidental. For songwriting and performing exist beyond the archetypes and myths of America, serve purposes more fundamentally personal. “Singing is my meditation, and I learned that in the imagery of Virginia,” Arman explains. “It sets the stage for healing.”
Take ‘Spirits, Angels, or Lies’, the first taste of her forthcoming self-titled debut on La Honda Records and Thirty Tigers. The song tells the story of her father’s final days, when Johnny Cash visited aboard a freight train to convince him to join his journey. Mr Arman politely declined and told his wife of the strange incident. “Mom turned on the TV and to her surprise,” Arman sings, “breaking news this morning, Johnny Cash has died / he passed away in Nashville, sometime in the night.”
Something in the song’s details puncture the romantic individualism of the cowboy image, not only dragging it into a world of modern medicine and celebrity visitations, but a sense of lineage and family too.
The nurses told my mom
don’t be surprised
funny things happen before someone dies
You can call it spirits, angels or lies
but we’ll never know what someone
sees with their own eyes
As the album draws nearer to its release on the 10th September, Riddy Arman has unveiled the first official single, ‘Too Late to Write a Love Song’. Though rooted in the heartsick country tradition, the track rejects the gratifying wallow of lost love, instead choosing to use the circumstances to fire a newfound sense of purpose. “I’m not one to dwell on what didn’t happen,” Arman says. “Been there and done that. Recording this song I knew I wasn’t alone or sad, and that’s where the choir comes in with triumph. Heartbreak can be freeing. It’s an energy, a powerup.”
Riddy Arman is out on the 10th September via La Honda Records/Thirty Tigers and you can pre-order it now.