Ruth Garbus Announces New Album Profound: Hear “I Think I’m Ready Now”

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"When I penetrated that man, I felt just like a dog/ Getting fucked is the season of the world, my life springs forth." That's an opening line! The Brattleboro, Vermont singer-songwriter Ruth Garbus used to be in the bands Feathers and Happy Birthday. Last year, she made a self-titled album with the avant-garde supergroup Earth Flower. Now, she's got a new solo album on the way, and that lyric is how she starts it off.

Later this spring, Garbus will follow 2023's Alive People with a new album called Profound. Garbus and her trio, guitarist Nick Bisceglia and keyboardist elie mcafee-hahn, recorded Profound directly to quarter-inch tape at the Brattleboro home studio of Kyle Thomas, otherwise known as King Tuff, the former Garbus bandmate who just released his own album MOO. Profound includes Garbus' versions of "Clair de Lune" and "Nocturne," two works from Gabriel Fauré, the French Romantic composer who Garbus has recently been studying. According to a press release, much of the album deals with "what it means to be a woman in her forties."

"I Think I'm Ready Now" is a sparse and striking piece of impressionistic jazz-folk. Here's what Garbus says about it:

“I Think I’m Ready Now” is a song about being a ripe fruit. I guess. I mean, I wrote it in the same way I write most of my songs, except I was cackling at my audacity a little more than usual. It has a tension, partly because it feels important to me — I don’t know exactly why. I think there is something about expressing myself in here in a certain way, like I almost need to do it too much and it makes me uptight. When me and elie and Nick have worked on it and performed it, I have had to really go through a process with it; I had to let go a lot and just chill the eff out. It was hard. That’s usually how it goes: when I think I need to be forceful, in how I’m singing and/or how I’m approaching the arrangement, it turns out I just need to really back off and that’s when the power comes.

Below, check out "I Think I'm Ready Now" and the Profound tracklist.

TRACKLIST:
01 "I Think I'm Ready Now"
02 "The Lost Soul"
03 "Clair De Lune"
04 "Nothing And Everything"
05 "500"
06 "Sunny Summer Guy"
07 "Tip Of The Hat To Fleur"
08 "Nocturne"
09 "All E-Lone"
10 "Tall Face"

Profound is out 6/12 on Ordinal.