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Street Wise
Ruth Theodore evolved her phenomenal and unique songwriting and guitar playing as a busker. Elizabeth Kinder unfolds the tale.
L
istening to Ruth Theodore’s lat- est album Cactacus is like being grabbed by the hand and pulled down the rabbit hole with Alice and emerging into a wonderful and strange world of sparkling sound- scapes, catchy melodies and a driving beat. It’s full of surprising arrangements with unexpected twists and turns, and we’re whisked off round them at a breathless rate as if, like the White Rabbit, we’re late for an important date. Through the looking glass of the fantastical worlds she creates, with words that interweave nonsense rhyme with sweetly acute observation of the human condition, we see complex and unorthodox relationships, both political and personal, starkly revealed.
Since she started busking at the age of fourteen, Theodore has made choices that laugh in the face of social niceties. Not just in human discourse, where she’s straightfor- ward, funny and honest, but those such as a warm bed and electricity. Her ability to
eschew creature comforts that we might con- sider essential has given her a determined self-reliance, a free open-minded attitude to making things happen and an unconvention- al approach to both her life and music.
Cactacus is her fourth album. Robin Denselow reckons it’s her most accessible album to date. So too does Theodore who says “I think I’ve grown into a more open writer. I’ve realised that some of the more abstract and complicated music I’ve written pushes against inclusiveness.”
Her first albums, while more overtly
political than Cactacus, are also more intro- spective. She says Dear Lamp Love Moth (River Rat, 2013) is about being haunted by the past; about realising that seemingly small occurrences have such huge effects, and the longing to go back to try and change things.
The cricitally acclaimed Dear Lamp fol-
lowed 2010’s equally celebrated White Holes Of Mole Hills – “Songs so quirky and unex- pected that it’s impossible to imagine any- one else performing them, following none
of the more conventional styles of song-writ- ing… it actually works,” said The Guardian – and her 2007 debut, Worm Food.
Cactacus, Theodore says, “is more in the moment, it’s more lively instant reac- tions to things I’m seeing and people I’m involved with. It’s more ‘come with me, look at us, we’re all part of this.’ It’s more outward looking.”
Her new horizon inspired Theodore to bring in a producer in for the first time. Lis- tening to Ani DiFranco and Anaïs Mitchell, she heard how producer Todd Sickafoose created texture and depth and multi- layered soundscapes with a sense of space. She says “I heard how much he was doing, yet he never gets in the way.” It opened her eyes to new possibilities. “Todd is a double bass player. I’d stick to bass following and underpinning the guitar as the least intru- sive option. I was afraid of obstructing the message. My songs were quite stoppy-starty; I thought this was dramatic, but actually it distracted from what the songs were about.”
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