ALBUM PREMIERE: Michael Rudd Crafts Wisened Americana Tunes on New LP ‘Going to the Mountain’

In August of 2023, Michael Rudd started hearing songs in his sleep, songs he’d never heard before, lines of lyrics, disparate melodies, full-blown tunes that were so loud and clear that they would wake him up in the middle of the night. Within a week or two, he started hearing them at all hours of the day and night.

Thirty-five years before that summer, Rudd put a bag of clothes, a manual typewriter, a few notebooks, and a guitar in his two-door Datsun, and left New Jersey for New Mexico, two points of a triangle (Western Massachusetts was the third) that he drifted between with his family for a very long time.

In the beginning, the long road west, and then Albuquerque itself, gave him what he needed, and after a while he joined a newly formed band as their lead singer even though he wasn’t much of a guitarist and hadn’t sung publicly since his bar mitzvah. Feeling the music, however, wasn’t a problem – he fell in love with the punkabilly from southern California that they covered, not to mention all the variations on the blues that he was discovering, and he started writing songs that tried to fit the sound that suddenly meant so much to him. After three years of steady gigs in the Albuquerque blues and rockabilly scene and opening for touring artists like Charlie Musselwhite, they put out a CD with several of his songs, and a few months later they were done. Then, after picking up his guitar a few more times, he more or less left it in its case for the next three decades.

For many years, Rudd had been hearing music in the air – symphonies, chamber pieces, Latin-tinged tunes, vocals in Spanish, other forms that he can’t recall. This phenomenon would come and go, and by the summer of 2023, it hadn’t happened for so long that he’d almost forgotten about it until songs started coming to him in his sleep in that first month after leaving the school at Acoma.

Within a few days, melodies, pieces of songs, and lyrics started coming all of the time, and not wanting to forget what he was hearing, he quickly got in the habit of carrying his phone at all times so that he could sing or hum or recite what he was listening to into the voice memo.

Rudd writes and sings about people looking for meaning, searching for understanding about who they are and how they arrived at this moment in time, and seeking some kind of transcendence or even a small truth as they navigate the moments of their days. The songs then, are about desperation and joy, mortality and love, mental illness and loneliness, forgiveness and redemption.

Going to the Mountain (due out March 28th), Rudd’s second solo studio album, follows his debut album, Long Way from Paradise (2024). Both were recorded at Frogville Studios in Santa Fe, New Mexico and released under his label, Invisible Road Records.

Today Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of Going to the Mountain. Across its ten tracks, Rudd draws from his life experience to craft wisened Americana, folk, and roots rock. There are moments of lively rocking and more quiet and poignant slices of life, showcasing Rudd’s versatility as a songwriter. While many of the songs carry on the same vibe and approach to songwriting as those on his first album, Going to the Mountain offers a wider musical experience, with Rudd returning to his musical roots with a more electric and edgier sound. Going to the Mountain features Brant Leeper on piano and Hammond organ (John Mayall, Buddy Guy), Mark Clark on drums (Ottmar Liebert, John Popper), Pat Malone on guitar (Eric Johnson, Lonnie Mack), Asher Barreras on electric and upright bass and cello, and Jen Bixby on backing vocals.

Listen to the album and read our conversation with Michael Rudd below…

This collection of songs really works very well together. How did you decide what songs to include?

Mostly by how they felt when I sang them just before going into the studio. If I felt them, if something about the song moved me in some way and was an honest approach lyrically to whatever the song was focused on, then I kept it in. I’ve written a lot of songs that are too insular and sometimes way too sad to inflict on a listener, and the weeks and months leading up to the sessions were no exception. So I try to keep those to myself, since they’re often about moments in time and no longer express how I or the person or people I’m writing about feel. Everything has to ring true at a lot of levels, and if it doesn’t, I’ve learned that it doesn’t do anyone any good.

Did you write all of these songs around the same time? What was the writing process like for this collection?

Most of these songs were written last spring and summer. A typical example of the writing process was my experience with “Going to the Mountain.” That came to me as I was driving 70 mph through the Sonoran Desert to meet my daughter in San Diego, and then it came to me again as I was driving back to Albuquerque along the same stretch of southern Arizona. I started humming into my phone, and, as I hummed over a stretch of many miles, words started coming, the only words that made sense to me, and those turned out to be the chorus. But songs come when they come, and sometimes it’s a matter of looking back at a song or a piece of song you’ve discarded or you let go after something wasn’t working and try to find the original reason for trying to write it. When songs started coming in the summer of 2023, I’d write them down or record them as quickly as they came. That meant singing or humming them or reciting lyrics into the voice memo of my phone as I walked or drove or lay in my bed in the middle of the night. Sometimes they were more like rickety frames of songs than actual songs. So between the release of my first album and the first sessions of the new one, I revisited a couple of them. “The Far Side” is an example of this – it was one of the first songs that came to me after 30 years of nothing. When I listened to the old recording on my voice memo, there was still something there, so I rewrote it until it sounded the way I hoped it would sound.

How did you come up with the album title, and what does it mean to you?

After writing the song “Going to the Mountain,” the same title was the only option for the album. Almost everyone I write about on this album and the previous album and the next album are people – me included – on an eternal search for meaning or redemption or understanding or love or something larger than themselves. In my mind, we’re all trying to go to the mountain.

What was the recording process like for the album? How did it come together and what was it like working on these songs in the studio?

The recording process was smooth and simple and collaborative and cathartic. I loved every moment of it. It helped that I worked with gifted musicians and good friends, most of whom also played on my first album. Ego was non-existent. Everyone played in service to the songs. We used the big room at Frogville Studios in Santa Fe, NM, which captures a really unique sound, full of life. It’s hard to imagine recording anywhere else, and we’ll be back there in March to record the next album. I’d like to mention everyone who played, because each of them were essential to the project: Pat Malone played electric and acoustic guitar, Mark Clark was on the drums, Asher Barreras played bass (upright and electric) and cello, Jen Bixby sang backing vocals, and Brant Leeper was on Hammond organ and piano.

You are a very talented lyricist and storyteller. Are there any lyrics that you really love in any of these songs? Why do they stand out to you?

I don’t really look at the songs that way. It’s more about if each lyric is expressing something honestly and gets to the heart of what I’m trying to say. I’m constantly rewriting songs, even in the studio, because the lyrics don’t do what I want them to do. For better or worse, each word and every line matters to me. Songs are so brief that you don’t want to waste space on words that don’t mean anything or are just some empty expression of who knows what.

But to try to answer your question a little more directly, there are moments when I’m singing each of these songs that move me the same way every time and bring me right back to when they first came to me. I’ll share a few examples.

In the last verse of “Going Away,” the voice or narrator sings, “This city is a fortress/For the fallen who still seek/Their fantasies of love/And their misbegotten dreams.” Even though this song is about someone I used to know, it speaks to me when I sing it because it’s a mindset that I – and many others I’ve known – adopted for long periods of time. It’s the opposite of “going to the mountain” – instead, you’re holding onto delusions about yourself and the world and the mountain you’re looking for is only in your imagination.

Another example: Every line in “It’s a Hard Road.” The song is probably the heaviest on the album. I kept it because it passed the feeling test. It’s about mental illness, but it’s also about something more common than that – feeling isolated, lost, and alone, but still trying to figure out how to connect with others, and in that sense, not losing hope.

And one more example: “Going to the Mountain.” “I’m going to the mountain/Gonna leave it all behind/I’m looking for something that I know I’ll never find.” It’s one of the more spiritual songs I’ve written, and I especially feel that when I sing these lines.

What sorts of things inspired you to tell the stories you tell in these songs?

I’m mostly trying to figure things out. Writing songs is a good vehicle for that. Any art form that forces you to compress your thoughts, to choose each word or image carefully, also forces you to get rid of your false ideas and your fake or superficial words. And songs go well beyond just the experience of the mind. In the process of writing them, they can let you both feel and understand at the same time. I think that’s my main inspiration. What melody captures that idea or feeling? How can each of the instruments bring that out? If someone could hear only the music and not the words, would they still feel what the songs are about?

When I was a high school teacher, as an in-class writing assignment, I would play a number of songs from other countries that weren’t represented by the students in the room and ask them to write lyrics as they listened to the song. So often, students expressed the same emotions and ideas that the singer expressed. How’s that possible? Because the music and the sound of the voice match the words. When you’ve done that, then you’ve captured something real.

What do you feel are the key themes for the album overall? How are these songs similar to or different from each other? And how do they fit together as a cohesive “whole”?

Musically, the songs all fit under the Americana umbrella somewhere, but there’s more variety in approach than my first album. You go where the songs lead, I suppose. I even played electric guitar on a few tracks, but that’s what they called for. No matter the approach, the songs all seem to be about people searching. The chorus of “Going to the Mountain” offers a pretty accurate summary of what each of these people are seeking. The pursuit is an individual one, but the desire is human and something we all share.