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| Foto: David Rosenfield |
Michael Rudd släppte i fredags albumet Midnight at Dawn. Det är ett vackert album som jag upplever som väldigt mänskligt och förstås också färgat av den cancerdiagnos som Michael drabbades av för några år sedan. Han ser både inåt och utåt - på sin egen kamp och flykt från labyrinten som stundtals tar plats i hans huvud, men också på andra människors kamp för att ständigt hitta hoppet och ljuset. Något att hålla fast vid.
Psykisk ohälsa är ett annat tema, men genomgående i låtarna finns en blick för människorna som befolkar dem. Michael ser verkligen karaktärerna han sjunger om. Midnight at Dawn är det fjärde i en serie av fem album som tog sin början 2024. Låtar som han kände måste ut, samtidigt som han inte visste hur mycket tid han hade kvar att leva.
Idag pratar jag med Michael om just det där med tid. Om att behöva kämpa med livet och samtidigt inte vara blind för det som lyser upp - det som ger en styrka.
- It interests me at many levels. From an autobiographical perspective, it’s when I often feel most haunted by thoughts or fears or regrets or memories that won’t let me go. Looking outward, it’s the window of time that we’re all most vulnerable, with no distractions or work or any other people around to deflect us from being mired in our own private world. It’s those private worlds I’m most drawn to as a songwriter and as a person.
In August 2023, you suddenly started hearing songs in your sleep - melodies, lyrics and even fully formed songs that you had never heard before. What did those first few weeks actually feel like, and did you ever wonder where the songs were coming from?
- It felt like I was suddenly a different person, and I had to catch up to a reality that was entirely new. At first, songs, or parts of songs, were coming in the middle of the night or early in the morning, and I just kept trying to make sense of what I was hearing. They were random melodies or full-blown lines with words attached, and I’d quickly sing them or hum them into my voice memo on my phone or sometimes play them on my guitar before they were lost. And then it started happening all of the time, no matter what I was doing, so it was like I was on call day and night. To this day, I don’t understand it. Why after more than 30 years did I have what turned out to be a couple of hundred songs in my head? Was it something neurological? I try not to think about it anymore and just keep my ears open because I know it can stop just as quickly as it started.
You spent around thirty years with your guitar mostly in its case before music returned to your life. Do you feel that those decades away from songwriting changed what you had to say when you finally came back to it?
- Absolutely. I have more than 30 years of experience to draw from since then, and an endless number of questions that I’m thinking about. The decades since have been turbulent, traumatic, confusing, and occasionally enlightening and sometimes even joyful when I was really lucky. And there’s always love been love no matter what. All of this all comes out in the songs - and more.
You describe yourself as a writer who eventually came to understand that identity can involve a lot of self-mythologizing. Has songwriting allowed you to discover something about yourself that prose and poetry never quite could?
- I latched onto writing prose and poetry because I was a voracious reader and could write a sentence, and I thought that was enough to be a writer. I was wrong. I rarely if ever wrote anything that was moving or true. But as someone who tries to navigate through the world with a mind that’s not always functional in a conventional way, it seemed like a natural fit. And I was wrong about that, too. And then music came back to me without me attaching myself to it, and I started feeling things I’d never felt while trying to write novels or poems. Suddenly, songwriting and singing felt like the most natural thing I’d ever done. I also appreciated and still appreciate the fact that there are limitations in writing a song - every word and every line matters. It forces you to come up with images and emotions that can be fully and deeply expressed in a handful of words and not the hundreds it would take when I was writing prose. Another way of thinking about it is that songwriting obligates me to rein in my mind and get to what’s important. I often get lost in all that useless wandering. Songwriting eliminates a lot of that clutter, and allows me to look outward, at least temporarily, to understand others, especially people I love, and to have a little more empathy.
Many of the characters in your songs live on the margins and struggle with loneliness, mental illness, mortality, forgiveness or redemption. What draws you toward these characters, and how much of yourself do you recognize in them?
- I wouldn’t say that I’m drawn to them. They just happen to represent the reality for many of the people I’ve known - and for me, in my own particular way. That said, I don’t set out with any intention but to try to follow where a song leads me both lyrically and musically. That it continues to move towards certain themes and characters is something that I can’t control and wouldn’t want to if I could.
There is a strong sense of darkness in the themes of Midnight at Dawn, but you also talk about love and transcendence as ways forward. How important is it for you to leave a door open for hope, even in your darkest songs?
- It’s essential. And it’s also true to my experiences, and most likely the experiences of others. Even at your lowest point, there’s something there to lift you from the darkness - love, resilience, a revelation, God, other people, the sunrise, the smell of the desert. In Turn the Light Down Low, the last track on the album, the external world feels apocalyptic. But rather than the characters giving in to hopelessness and despair, they hold each other, knowing that the only response at the moment is unconditional love.
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| Foto: David Rosenfield |
The album is the fourth part of a five-album cycle that began in 2024 and will conclude in 2027. Did you know from the beginning that these songs would eventually become a larger story, or did the connections between the albums reveal themselves along the way?
- I didn’t know this would be a five-album project until we finished Going to the Mountain. What changed things was being diagnosed with Stage 4 Metastatic Prostate cancer. Songwriting grew more intense and became much more focused on themes that I’d dealt with in the first two albums but now with a much greater need to go deeper and come to some kind of understanding: mortality, isolation, mental illness, the weight of memories, the meaning of love, the desire for spiritual answers. This was combined with new ideas for melody and instrumentation that came out of that minute-by-minute process. I didn’t know how long I had to live, and I still had a lot of songs in my head. Ways of the World, my third album, was written while I was undergoing five days per week radiation treatment, and we went into the studio a few days after the last radiation session and five months after the second album was recorded.
- We were in the studio six months later to record Midnight at Dawn, and six months or so after that we recorded Palace of Flames, the fifth album. After all those decades of creative silence, I didn’t want to let go of what I’d suddenly been given before I had to.
Your musical influences range from Townes Van Zandt and John Hiatt to Van Morrison, Gillian Welch, JJ Cale and Nick Cave. What do you think these artists have in common that speaks to you - beyond simply being great songwriters?
- They each have a way of singing that matches the lyrics. That’s not easy. A great songwriter who’s also a singer needs to not only say something compelling and moving, but she also has to be able to express it through the tone and phrasing of her voice as if a listener doesn’t understand the language. Of this list - which is a short one - Townes Van Zandt and Gillian Welch stand out to me and are probably the most influential even though my songs are very different from theirs. Both write songs that carry the deepest meaning in only a few dozen words, and then they perform them with voices that hit me really hard. I believe everything that they sing. At another level, they both give permission to songwriters to write about really sad things, but in that way to tell the truth about what it means to be alive.
You spent several years as principal of a K–8 school at Acoma Pueblo, surrounded by a community with a very strong connection to cultural, traditional and spiritual identity. Did that experience change the way you think about identity, spirituality or your place in the world?
- Working at Acoma, which is about 65 miles to the west of Albuquerque in the middle of the desert, was my best couple of years in education. I felt gifted being a small part of a community that I’d known little about, and I was grateful for my time there. But every school I was ever part of revealed something to me about myself - sometimes things I didn’t want to see - and in that way probably brought me closer to what’s been happening the last three years.
You have described the songwriting process as something that initially happened almost involuntarily - songs arriving while you slept or suddenly appearing during the day. Has that process become more deliberate now, or do you still feel that the best songs have a way of finding you rather than the other way around?
- I work much harder now to lift a given song to a level that I want it. In other words, everything about it has to ring true to me, and I have to feel it when I sing it. Partly, this is because my bar keeps raising for what I want a song to do and to be. I also don’t want to write the same song twice, so my ears are more open than ever for new melodies and new chord sequences and how other instruments might enhance the song.
- I don’t really have a concrete answer. Sometimes a song that comes to you in what feels the most natural way turns out to be a song that falls short. That said, I love the feeling when songs write themselves.
You have gone from releasing your debut album in 2024 to completing four albums in just over two years, with a fifth already on the way. When you look at this incredibly productive period of your life, does it feel like you are finally catching up with all the years when the guitar was sitting in its case?
- To be honest, no. I had to be this age and live the life I’ve lived in order to write these songs. More than 30 years is a long time, but really, I had no choice. And it's been worth the wait.
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