Lara Ruggles – “Bend the Truth”
Americana Highways is hosting this premiere of Lara Ruggles’ song “Bend the Truth” from her forthcoming album Anchor Me. Anchor Me was produced by Steve Varney, Lara Ruggles, and Steven Lee Tracy; engineered by Steve Varney, Steven Lee Tracy, and Kevin Larkin; mixed by Steven Lee Tracy and Saint Cecilia Studios; and mastered by Frank Bair.
“Bend the Truth” is Lara Ruggles on vocals, background vocals, and electric guitar; Freddy Jay Walker on electric guitar; Kevin Larkin on piano; Patrick Morris on bass; and Pete Connolly (Birds and Arrows) on drums.
Sometimes reality and events are too painful to accept directly, and some say this is the entire human condition. For those realities, we have to”Bend the Truth” and lie to ourselves just to cope. Among those phenomena, mortality is the most formidable. Lara Ruggles addresses this gutting specter that accompanies us always with “I want to hold on to the good things … I want to bend the truth so I can hold on to you.” Her vocal delivery is as passionate as the music that gathers around the message.
I wrote this while I was sitting by the side of this beautiful estuary on the southern end of Hawai’i – I’m sitting there literally watching sea turtles swim by and what comes out is all my anxiety and fear of losing what I love. I’d seen a car accident a couple nights before that had really stuck with me, because the fact that there were firefighters searching through the brush on the side of the road late at night seemed to suggest they thought someone had been ejected from the car and might still be out there, and I was haunted by that thought. The disjointedness of the first verse, and the way it cuts from that scene to the line about my mom telling me the rapture would happen while I was gone, was intentional – just allowing a direct translation to the page of the way it feels to be in my brain when it wants to be distracted by something else, even if that’s disturbing too, because the thing at hand is too visceral and uncomfortable to hold. When I got to the end of the chorus, it was super emotional – I didn’t know those words were going to come out, and they hit me pretty hard. This song got things moving in me that needed to move, and it helped make my next steps clear, which is WHY I write songs – I don’t really know how to do that without them. – Lara Ruggles
Find her music here: https://show.co/Jne6ryC
