Ruby Friedman Orchestra

Returns with Evocative New Album

Chimes After Midnight,

Available Now on LP/CD/Digital Formats

From Label 51 Recordings

Groundbreaking Artist

Debuts 10 New Studio Performances

Including “From the Storm,” “Flower Whore,”

“Four Day Muse,” “Music Row”

And “Milky Way (Ode to Frank Black)”

LOS ANGELES – Singer/songwriter/composer/producer Ruby Friedman has returned with the long-awaited second album by her Ruby Friedman Orchestra, Chimes After Midnight, an electrifying collection of 10 new songs combining cinematic lyricism with uncanny melodies and Ruby’s unique brand of magical realism.

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. The band will be headlining at the Showdown Saloon in Portland on Sept. 26.

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.