Ruby Friedman Orchestra Returns with Evocative New Album Chimes After Midnight, From Label 51 Recordings
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Ruby Friedman Orchestra Returns with Evocative New Album Chimes After Midnight, From Label 51 Recordings
Groundbreaking Artist Ruby Friedman Debuts 10 New Studio Performances On Ruby Friedman Orchestra’s New Album, Chimes After Midnight,
Music Video for track “Music Row” Coming Soon
Watch a sneak peak of the music video for “Music Row.”
About “Music Row”
“Music Row was once the red light district of Nashville. During the Civil War, Union-held Nashville became the first city in the US to legalize sex work in order to stem the spread of diseases, but not before the failed solution of kidnapping the women and forcibly relocating them aboard a riverboat called The Idahoe.” – Ruby Friedman
For more info, go to: www.history.com/articles/civil-war-prostitution-nashville
“Music Row” Lyrics
Lonesome soldiers rode into town
Turned it into the devil’s playground
Just before they drove ol’ Dixie down
Fallen angels wearin’ heaven’s perfume
Freckle-faced farm girls with painted on rouge
Hungry with nothin’ to lose
Sweet tarts puttin’ on a show
‘Til they sent ’em upriver on The Idahoe
Spirits dropped to an all time low
So they brought ’em back home to Music Row
Whole city welcomed ‘em back
Scarlet ladies swore they’d been kidnapped
Soiled doves went on and on
All is fair in war
Right or wrong
Drinkin’ Jack Daniels in hoopty skirts
Dancin’ ‘round the Presbyterian church
Lordy, them ladies doin’ the rebel’s work
Carpetbaggers and generals
Belles that lost their beaus
Oh, them ghosts still roam.
“Music Row” Credits
Ruby Friedman: Vocals, whistles
Ben Landsverk: Viola, banjo, organ
Adam Zimmon: Guitars
Adriana Wagner: Trombone, trumpet
Cactus Moser: Drums, bass
Drums engineered by Cactus Moser, Franklin, TN
Early press for the collection has been glowing. LA Weekly called her “a real-deal soul stompstress…[and] a great actor and novelist combined, nuanced, deeply layered, complex as hell and funny, too.” Willamette Week said, ”Every song is like an enchanting, thrilling, dark, rousing mini-movie. It’s a knockout.” Americana UK gave the album a 9.0 rating, sayin “Chimes After Midnight sets rock and blues against orchestral strings, disturbing banjo riffs, opera, and jazz, and it all comes together to make poetic sense in Friedman’s capable hands with her crystal-clear vocals and laser-like precision in storytelling.”
Ruby wrote or co-wrote all the songs on the set. Three of these — ”Honeystomach (The Flight of Connie Converse),” “Flower Whore,” and “When the Hangman” — were penned with her co-producer, multi-instrumentalist Ben Landsverk. Other co-writers include Nashville-based musicians Adrienne Smith and Philip White (“Music Row”), California-based DJ/producer Kr3ature (“From the Storm”), and Nicholas Allan Johns, a member of Friedman’s Los Angeles band (“Four Day Muse”). Recorded over the course of two years in Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Rome, Athens, and Nashville, it was mixed and mastered by Steve Baughman in L.A.
Graham Yost (creator of the hit shows Slow Horses, Silo, and Justified) and his wife Connie are co-executive producers of Chimes After Midnight. (Yost used Ruby’s version of Darrell Scott’s “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” in the season five finale of Justified.)
On June 20, the RFO rolled out songs from Chimes After Midnight at Hollywood’s Hotel Cafe. Music Connection wrote of the show, “It’s been worth the wait. The album showcases Friedman’s alt-Americana beautifully….Musically, Friedman sets the listener on a path that feels familiar and comfortable, and then shakes that path like it’s an Etch-a-Sketch.” The RFO also supported the album’s release with sold-out dates in New York, Nashville, and Portland.
Ruby says of the record’s themes, “If there’s a thread on this album, there are a lot of tales about women — invisible women, or women made invisible who were trying to be seen and heard, or women kept in the dark, or exploited women. I’m giving voice to remarkable people who time will erase otherwise, ordinary men and women who changed history. Like chimes after midnight, theirs are the voices you would not hear — people in the dark.”
Blending the free-wheeling sensibility of a musician with a deep respect for authenticity, Ruby has created her own brand of futurist Americana, a sound mirroring the complexity of the 20th century, with echoes of country, blues, gospel, swing, and rock and hints of jazz and even opera and Broadway in the mix, delivered through vocals of rare power and dynamism.
“Music Row,” inspired by Nashville’s Civil War history, memorializes the sex workers of the former red light district, where the city’s recording center presently stands. “Nashville was the first city to legalize prostitution so that it could be regulated, for the benefit of the local military,” Ruby says. “The girls who had sexually transmitted diseases were later sent on a riverboat, the Idahoe, into Union-held territory in Louisville. And then they came back to what we now call Music Row.” The track has been picking up airplay on Nashville’s WMOT.
“The Book Woman’s Daughter” is a fact-based song that was commissioned, like its precursor “The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek,” by writer and RFO fan Kim Michele Richardson for the video trailers for her like-titled New York Times fiction bestsellers. Ruby explains,”Kim’s books are about the Pack Horse Librarians, women who brought books into remote and sometimes hazardous parts of the Appalachians on horseback.”
The emotionally charged tracks include the virtuosically sung “From the Storm,” which Ruby describes as “a dystopian love song”; “Flower Whore,” a melding of observation and autobiography about “opium, flowers, money, and sex work”; “Four Day Muse,” a tender ballad of unfulfilled attraction; “Friday Night Depression,” about the struggle for sobriety; “When the Hangman,” a narrative triptych in which “women are sabotaged, done in from the inside”; and “Milky Way (Ode to Frank Black),” which confronts the indignities of the music business and voices gratitude for the integrity of courageous artists. The latter song has been garnering regular play on KCSN in L.A., Birmingham (AL) Mountain Radio, and other stations across the country.
Chimes After Midnight concludes with “The Mayor of North Hollywood Park,” a powerful requiem framed as a New Orleans street funeral for one of Friedman’s good friends, the scion of a prominent Los Angeles music family. “He was a person in my life, a hero, who succumbed to drug addiction and alcoholism and homelessness,” she says. “The end of the song is true. After the funeral, a bird came in an open door while I was writing the song and sat on a chair. He was looking at me, and he gave me that third verse.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Ruby studied history at UCLA before founding the Ruby Friedman Orchestra in 2009. She says, ”The concept was, ‘What would it sound like if a band from 200 years in the future wanted to do music from the 20th century?’ So that’s what it sounds like: It’s an orchestra from the future, doing the past.”
Chimes After Midnight is the successor to the RFO’s debut album, 2016’s Gem, praised by Magnet for its “quiet songs of devastation.” In the wake of that release, Ruby issued the single “Ain’t Got Your Money” (featured on the Disney+ series The Mighty Ducks), the Los Angeles radio hit “Un4Given”, and the Mitchell Froom-produced “Teardrop Trailer,” originally written for Wynonna Judd. In 2022, Ruby performed “Fire Down Below” on the trailer for the concluding season of the hit Netflix series Peaky Blinders.
From the first, the RFO generated a buzz with unforgettable live shows in Los Angeles, playing to packed venues that included the Hotel Café, House of Blues, The Troubadour, The Viper Room, and the Echoplex, and in downtown L.A.’s Pershing Square. She has appeared twice at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Ruby has opened shows for artists ranging from Beach Boy Brian Wilson to Oscar-winning actor/musician Jeff Bridges; made guest appearances with Grammy winners Scott Healy’s and Vince Giordano’s big bands and Jeff Goldblum’s jazz ensemble; and backed Donovan and Heart at concert appearances.
Listen to Chimes After Midnight
APPLE MUSIC | SPOTIFY
Ruby Friedman Orchestra
Chimes After Midnight
Track Listing
1) Honeystomach (The Flight of Connie Converse)
2) Music Row
3) From the Storm
4) Flower Whore
5) When the Hangman…
6) Milky Way (Ode to Frank Black)
7) Four Day Muse
8) The Book Woman’s Daughter
9) Friday Night Depression
10) The Mayor of North Hollywood Park
