Name: Amber Rubarth
Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, actress
Current release: Amber Rubarth's Cover Crop is out via Make My Day.
Recommendations: The woman who created the artwork for Cover Crop is Mirella Salame, she’s a naturalist artist so deeply connected to the earth and uses earth pigments to create her works, I am very inspired by her.
The last book I just finished and loved was James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room - it’s simple but the writing and weaving between inner thoughts and outside world was just so beautiful.

If you enjoyed this Amber Rubarth interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

Before a song really emerges in its form I often see it visually, like a scene that the lyrics then will come to describe.

I also feel a rush of ecstatic energy as I’m writing … like my body is taken over by another force that I give myself away to.

What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?

Music has always been an exploration for me to listen and learn and process things I don’t understand - outside in the world, inside my own being, and wherever those meet.

I actually feel quite like the process is very similar to when I started … maybe I have more tools now but it’s always a bit of excavating a mysterious force.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music meant to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

I didn’t listen to much music growing up, we didn’t have it around the house and didn’t have TV either so a few experiences were extremely potent during that time. I played piano as a very private thing, usually when nobody was around as a way of calming and connecting with my inner world. That was probably the biggest space of connection for me.

Then when I turned 16 and started driving I discovered “The Oldies” station on the radio and immediately fell in love with Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, all the old Muscle Shoals recordings, an entire world of music I really wasn’t familiar with. Still now, soul music and Chopin are what I listen to most at home.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shaped your perspective on music?

Piano and writing are my first loves - being able to process something is always so special with music because art is always one step ahead of us and we can learn so much from it.

I started playing guitar at 21 after realizing it was easier to carry around to open mic nights than a keyboard, ha! And now guitar fascinates me, I love playing with open tunings and have recently been playing baritone a lot at home, also accordion lately.

I don’t have music theory knowledge, am all self-taught, so it’s a lot of fun playing around with new instruments and seeing where they take me.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

Always what motivates me to create is trying to understand something I don’t have a full grasp on. Being in relation with the mystery.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I agree there’s something you can’t quite explain with just the chords or lyrics that is more potent - a feeling, or impression.

My sound moves quite a bit depending on the project - this latest album Cover Crop is very organic, minimalist, unfolding, quiet. I recorded it at home alone in my living room - played, produced, mixed, engineered everything myself. And so it feels like that, a space of exploration and appreciation of songs during the pandemic when everything was still around me.

Other projects I’ve done, both solo and collaborative, have had different energies and dynamics. It all feels like an expression of being, it’s fluid.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

Oh I absolutely resonate with that. I kept the window open as I was recording Cover Crop, so you hear the trickling flow of the stream outside, birdsongs, the wind, one evening a huge mama black bear walked right by my window outside no more than 10 feet away as I was in the middle of a take!

Although I was alone recording this album I felt very much in connection with these sounds of nature moving by.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

I enjoy the dynamics of it all, it’s really how they all work together for me.

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriads ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

I love songs that tell stories that unfold. They don’t necessarily have to have a verse / chorus structure but it’s what I tend toward with lyrics.

I also love writing instrumental music on the piano and have done some scoring for films and also writing for musicals - it really depends on the project what works best. But I tend to do it all by feel and try not to get to attached to defining the structure before it tells you what it wants.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

Cover Crop is a lyrical concept album of 15 reinterpreted cover songs woven into a narrative about the disconnection and remembrance of our interconnectivity with nature. It’s acoustic, sparse, and I recorded it alone at home in the woods. I love weaving albums together so they tell a story - the album as a whole art form I truly love.

This one unfolds in a way almost like a novel or film - beginning with a sudden stark awareness of the disconnect of nature, how it’s expressing itself in the world, feeling trapped and unknown where to go. Then a moment of seduction, following into what we believe we should be doing or creating.

Following that road down until there’s a sense of dissatisfaction, something feels off but we don’t know what it is. And we begin to retreat, or dissociate even, until an unexpected moment of sacred recognition lands on us and opens our eyes to a new possibility. From here, something new is inspired - a new infusion of direction and energy moving toward alignment.

This is how I see this album and I loved creating it with this storyline in mind. I don’t know if it’ll come across to everyone who hears the songs but the backstory always infuses me with joy in the creation.

Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

I love weaving scientific observations and ideas into the lyrical explorations. I also made some field recordings and wove those in both in urban areas (Paris) and the natural world.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

It’s all entangled completely, everything is everything.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I don’t drink coffee but I do make matcha tea often, and yes - I love creating rituals around the mundane. I’m quite a junkie for that in fact.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

Absolutely yes, it’s similar to your question about Paul Simon, the feeling! I love when songs do that - there’s a song I covered on my Cover Crop album actually called "Idé Werewere Ni'ta Oshún Idé Werewere (Song for Oshún)" that does that to me.  

Now I know what the lyrics are about (they’re in Yoruban) but before I had any idea the song touched me so deeply, I was listening to it every day for a long while.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

My wish is that we can use music to connect with each other and nature and the important issues around us, or as Roger Ebert called films, “machines of empathy.”

Music has such a power to connect and really reach beyond other forms of communication and feeling, and we’re at such an important time for bridging and listening and understanding each other and the natural world.