In the fall of 1758, Thomas Decker established the first settlement in present day Monongalia County in West Virginia. About fourteen years later, Colonel Zackquill Morgan created a settlement in that county that would later be known as Morgantown, West Virginia. It’s an area rich in history and tradition. It’s no wonder then why “Take Me Home, County Roads,” has become a much-covered song and endearing anthem to West Virginia.
Fast forward to 2013 when singer-songwriter Sarah Rudy and drummer Whit Alexander formed rock band Hello June in an apartment in Morgantown. A decade later, Rudy revisited her West Virginia roots and past with the band’s latest album Artifacts, released last October via 31 Tigers Records. The band recorded the album in Nashville at Bell Tone Recording with producer Roger Alan Nichols.
On the album, Rudy reflects on artifacts from her past that have shaped her. For her, artifacts are the people, places and things that help shape and define one’s identity.
“The album was hard to name in general because I wrote these songs kind of from different pieces of my life,” says Rudy. “So, I tried to come up with something that made sense to kind of tie it all together. What I came up with was that these songs and the stories in them are actually artifacts of my life, so that tended to make the most sense to me.”
Over the course of 11 songs, she sings about death, birth, hope, and despair. For example, album single “Interstate” allowed her to express her long kept-in feelings about her father, who died over six years ago after a lengthy battle with addiction. On the track, Rudy zeroes in on a pure moment of laughter and enjoyment on a road trip with her dad. “And I don’t remember what it was that you last said to me,” she sings. “But I should have said I love you / I’m tied up to you – knotted forever / I should have said I love you, either way.” The song finds catharsis in understanding regret.
Artifacts is an album that stresses the importance of living life to the fullest and being connected to family and home.
Scummy Water Tower caught up with Rudy recently to find out how family and West Virginia have shaped her, how she has grown better at telling more vivid and fuller stories in her songs and what’s next for her in the year ahead.
The band’s latest album came out in October. What do you think of the response so far?
People have taken it in pretty warmly. It’s always a shock to put music out and sort of wait for a response or whatever. Always feels kind of silly in some ways. But I do feel like people are pretty warmly receiving it, so that feels pretty good.
How has your relationship with the songs grown since the album came out?
I think in general it has songs like “Interstate” that are more vulnerable pieces of myself that I’m sharing. Those in particular, I feel they’ve evolved in my head slightly because people at this point have very much told me that they relate to these songs and that these songs mean something to them in ways that are very deep. So, it goes from meaning something very personal to actually having that personal thing connect me to other people. And that feels like evolution.
What’s one of your favorite stories from touring of late?
Man. Honestly, things happen so fast. It feels like a whirlwind usually. I don’t know that I have a good answer for you. I’m sorry.
How did the band originally come together and form?
Our band is actually usually changing all [the time.] It’s not like a set membership really. My partner, Whit Alexander plays drums. He is the only one that’s been a firm member, and my songwriting has driven all of it. I’ve attempted to have a solid lineup, but it’s not happened for us in the history of Hello June. So, I’m constantly trying to find different people to go on different tours that we do or things like that. So, we’re just not the typical band.
What’s the story behind the band’s name?
Growing up, my grandfather played guitar. So, he taught me how to play guitar, and we played mostly old hymns and Johnny Cash, a bunch of his tunes, and I later became a big June Carter fan. So, it’s kind of a nod to her.
Who are some of your biggest musical inspirations?
Well, obviously the time I spent with my grandfather and all of that, learning those old standards and old hymns that we kind of put music to. That was sort of my first bit of influence. And then my mom and father were both Neil Young fans and they introduced me to him fairly young. And later on, I found a lot of empowerment in watching Alanis Morissette in her career kind of take off in the nineties. And then I think a big one for me as well has been both Big Thief and also Jen Wasner of Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes. I think those are probably my biggest influences.
The album takes a look at the dual nature of things with birth, death, hope, and despair. What about that do you find fascinating?
Yeah, for sure. Because I think for me there’s always kind of a sense of if there is something negative, there has to be something positive as well. So, I think that the outcome is really a reflection of that thought. You know what I mean? There’s never just something bad, there’s always something good that offsets it. And I think that anytime there’s a writing about despair, there also has to be then a counter thought about hope. And the album I think reflects that.
In the press material, you say “It’s not just about one thing so if this were just a breakup album, it would be a lot easier. But that’s not the way that life works.” Why was it important to be honest, to the complexity of life and not airbrush things?
I think it was important for me this time around to not airbrush things, because I feel like at the time that I wrote the last album, our self-titled album, the topics that I kind of covered at that point, I do feel like I hit them kind of vaguely. My lyrics especially were very vague, and I wanted it that way. I think I was feeling particularly vulnerable from that time. And I think with this one, with the amount of time that had passed between the self-titled and this one, it gives you a lot of time to think about what you’d like to do differently and kind of assess that state. So, I think for me, going into Artifacts, the writing of it, one thing that I really pushed myself to do was to tell stories in a more complex and full way, or at least complex and full to me. So that was a major goal of Artifacts.
It sounds like another goal was to rethink your songwriting approach and tell stories that were more straightforward.
Not even straightforward, just more complete if I read the lyrics by themselves. Not that I think that the lyrics should ever just be read by themselves. I mean, you can if you want, but I think that obviously the lyrics, they sit with the music to create a weaving of the entire thing. But I think for me, a big goal was to have, when someone is just reading the lyrics, but it tells a bit more of the story than I was able to tell back when I wrote the self-titled.
What was the inspiration for your song “Interstate”? Why was it an important message to express?
I lost my father a few years back, and I just felt like there were things that were left unsaid, and it felt important to me to [express…There’s a good bit of grief there, and I don’t think I wrote it as a message to anyone else. I think I just wrote it as a response to grief and a response to feeling like I did leave some things unsaid, and so I definitely didn’t write it as a message to anyone else.
I really related to that one, I lost my dad over seven years ago.
Seems like around the same time actually.
Yeah.
Yeah. I’m sorry. It’s a kind of loss that you can’t really make up [for].
Yeah. It feels like there’ll be a part of me missing from now on.
Yeah, that’s exactly it.
Fortunately, I’ve had a good support system with my mom and the rest of my family.
Yeah, that’s always a very good thing. It teaches us that life is short and to appreciate what is there too, while we’re alive.
You wrote your song “Sometimes” while on your way to a session in Nashville. What inspired that song?
It came from my sister. She was just about to have a baby and I was just processing all of those feelings. I happened to be in the car when I wrote it. We were driving to Nashville to record, and actually after that trip we were going straight to the hospital for my sister to have her baby. So, it was very imminent at that point that she would be having Tucker. And I was just feeling a whole lot of things and I was feeling fear for him. I was feeling excitement for myself, just feeling a lot of different things as you do.
I like your cover of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” You took a different, more reflective approach to the song, more reflective than the typical version. What was it like covering the song?
I kind of had some hesitation about covering it in general because growing up in West Virginia, you just hear that song played in the most generic ways over and over. So, I had some hesitation with the thought of covering it, but I worked with my producer, Roger Allen Nichols. He had a baritone part that he had put together, and I could tell that he kind of got the amount of darkness that I would need in order to cover it. And I think had he not come to me with that baritone part, I probably wouldn’t have done it. It’s not even my favorite West Virginia song, but it does mean a lot to me, and I feel like it was a cool collaboration between me and Roger. And he originates from West Virginia as well. He is actually from the town that I’m from, which is crazy. We didn’t know this, or at least I didn’t know that going into it. So yeah, it means something extra special for that reason. I could tell he got it. It’s actually one of my favorite songs on the record.
It sounds like in recent years that you’ve grown more appreciative of your time growing up in West Virginia.
Yeah, definitely. Your hometown goes with you everywhere. I definitely always felt like an outsider growing up, so I never really felt like I gained roots. I’ve observed a lot of people gaining roots and putting more roots down, and I have not really had that experience. So, I left West Virginia. I’ve lived in Baltimore, and I’ve also lived in Philly. I think West Virginia is just a piece of me and it’s made me who I am.
What do you recall of the moment you became interested in music and performing?
I think my grandfather and my grandmother would play guitar and sing together. My grandmother would play lap steel and sing harmonies with my grandfather, and my grandfather would play acoustic guitar. I think the moment I realized that there was something magical in music, was sitting on their shag carpet in this room that they designated the music room, and we were kind of all sitting around and I was super shy, so I wasn’t really engaging much, and I definitely wasn’t playing guitar at that point. At that point I was very young, maybe 8 or 10. But, I remember at this point sitting in that room and being like, this is the best thing ever. I can’t imagine anything better than being able to experience multiple people throwing in their voices, voices being guitars and voices being actual voices, but in a shared way. That moment to me was magical, and that’s something that I seek. I love collaborating with different people and it’s definitely something that keeps me coming back to the idea of collaborating, the idea of working with different people and the idea of making music in general.
What are you most looking forward to in the year ahead?
I have some songs that I have been working on and I want to release songs. I don’t want to put any kind of pressure on a date or something, but I feel pretty compelled to fairly quickly put some sort of an EP or something like that together. And I’m not quite sure in what form though, but I feel pretty re-energized in terms of writing. The creation portion of this album took three years in Nashville, and this was all sort of during the Covid era where people were locked up and we’d take tests before we’d go down and everybody that was healthy, and not that we’re not doing similar things now, but it was much more extreme at that point. But that really slowed down the pace of things. It took a lot of patience to grow a lot of patience, and I’m excited to take some songs that mean something to me and put them together and put them out.
You can stream the album via her Hello June’s Bandcamp page.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
