Ace alt-country rocker Ruby Boots will play The Gordon Arms in Bedford on Friday (September 7).
At 14 years old, Ruby Boots—real name Bex Chilcott— left a conflicted home in Perth, Western Australia to do gruelling work on pearling boats, and she hasn’t stopped migrating since.
Her nomadic streak has taken her around the world, and eventually to Nashville, TN.
Don’t Talk About It charts this drifter’s odyssey, tattered passport in hand.
Behind her commanding and versatile voice, sharp guitar playing, and adept songwriting, Ruby Boots confidently manoeuvres past the whirlwinds life has tossed on her occasionally lost highway. It’s an album of hope, breakthrough, and handling the unknown challenges around the next bend.
The roads taken, the miles traveled and the voices heard during Ruby’s life’s trek resonate throughout Don’t Talk About It. Informed as much by the wide-open landscapes of her homeland as the intimate writing circles of Nashville, the album may range far and wide but always maintains a firm sense of place. Echoes of first wave UK power pop and jangly punk intersect with the every(wo)man indie and pop- inflected muscle of Best Coast. Classic rock touchstones from T. Rex to the girl group Wall of Sound to personal hero Tom Petty meld with a weary poet’s eye recalling Hope Sandoval.
On her Bloodshot Records debut, Ruby continues to map out a polished-yet-fearless, bare-knuckled self, previously hinted at on her last album, Solitude..
The most defining of tones come through in spirit, when on the a capella “I Am A Woman” Ruby reaches towering vocal peaks, shredding raw, putting it all out there.
Of the song Chilcott says, “‘I Am a Woman’ was conjured up amid recent events where men have spoken about, and treated women’s bodies, the way no man, or woman, should. This kind of treatment toward another human being makes every nerve in my body scream. These kinds of incidents are so ingrained in our culture and are swept under the carpet at every turn—it needs to change.
As tempting as it was to just write an angry tirade I wanted to respond with integrity, so I sat with my feelings and this song emerged as a celebration of women and womanhood, of our strength and our vulnerability, all we encompass and our inner beauty, countering ignorance and vulgarity with honesty and pride and without being exclusionary to any man or woman.
'My hope is that we come together on this long drawn out journey. The song is the backbone to the album for me.”
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