Meet Lara Ruggles

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lara Ruggles a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lara, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

This is a constant work-in-progress. I think that all artists and creatives have to have an almost-delusional belief in themselves and their work in order to keep making it and sharing it and taking big swings in a society under capitalism. I was just reading about an author who got 600 rejections before she published her first book, and most of us would give up LONG before we ever got to the first hundred. Imagine what it takes to keep on submitting this work you’ve made and believe in even after it’s been rejected FIVE HUNDRED TIMES. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t have moments of crushing self-doubt and imposter syndrome all along the way. We are human, and we have to remain vulnerable to keep creating. Every rejection hurts, and we have to allow ourselves to feel that in order to move beyond it. But the older I get, the more I learn to question my own inner monologue about what each one means. “Is this the truth? What is the data that actually supports this belief? What is the data that contradicts it?” And the more evidence I have to support the case I keep making for myself that my art matters and it’s important to keep making it. It’s harder to believe your art doesn’t matter when someone has tattooed your lyrics on their arm, for example. And the more I trust that my art is evolving and I am constantly becoming the artist I really want to be.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m a songwriter performing and releasing music under two names – my own (Folk/Americana kinda in the vein of Waxahatchee, Sharon Van Etten or Joy Oladokun) and Sharkk Heartt (electronic alt-pop slow-burns with a London Grammar-meets-Sylvan-Esso vibe). If you don’t know the artists I just named, this is your sign that it’s time to look them up.

I released my third album, titled Anchor Me, in November, and I’ve spent a lot of this year touring around the country to promote it. In February and March I went all over the midwest and came back home through Nashville, New Orleans and Austin, and I’m writing this from a friend’s house in Ojai where I have a day off before my next several West Coast shows with my band.

I’ve been playing music almost all my life, and it’s the thing that gets me up in the morning. I believe music has the power to heal, inviting the audience into a space of vulnerability and naming emotions and experiences that are difficult to put into words. I also believe music has the power to hold a vision of the future and catalyze social change, and I believe we have a responsibility as songwriters and artists to use it that way as much as we can. This is the purpose that animates me.

I’ve been lucky enough in my career to open a show for LeAnn Rimes, collaborate on songwriting with Andrea Gibson, spend a month in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park as an artist-in-residence, and have projects funded by Colorado Creative Industries, Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona, and Groundswell Capital. None of us creatives do this alone. I was talking to a friend the other day about how being an artist is 3 or more jobs – the job you do to pay your bills, the job you do to fund your next artistic project, and the job of being an artist itself (which is also many jobs – marketer, PR person, event booker, songwriter, tour manager, performer, graphic designer, video editor, and the list goes on). No artist is successful without the support of an entire community – fans, patrons, friends who open their homes on the road, industry folks who advocate for you, arts organizations who provide grants and opportunities for artists, bandmates who pitch in what they have to make the machine go, friends who are better at graphic design and social media than you are. My community is everything to me.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I am still very much learning how to show up in a way that shows everyone around me I’m serious about what I do, still fine-tuning my process and learning to delegate and ask for new kinds of help. I think asking for help is one of the MOST IMPORTANT SKILLS to develop as an artist, and just behind that, I think it really pays to do all the tedious work of getting organized early on in the journey and think of yourself as a business owner. Keeping track of income and expenses, keeping spreadsheets of contacts you meet along the way so you remember who to stay in touch with and call on in the future, making calendar reminders so you don’t forget to follow up with folks you meet and be a little annoying – all of these are things I wish I’d done a better job with early on so that I could spend less time starting from the ground up again whenever I go to book a tour or send out press releases. As just one small example – every time I research press outlets and their appropriate contacts in a new city, it takes me several hours. If I had kept a spreadsheet of those contacts the last time I traveled through that city, it might have taken an extra twenty minutes, but I could have saved myself several hours this time around. These things are not the fun parts, but they help make way for doing more of the fun parts in the future, and if I had known then what I know now, I would have bet on myself not giving up and still needing those resources in two or five or even ten more years.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I will be releasing four new singles later this year and I need to make two new music videos! As a songwriter, I really struggle with creating compelling visual content and I know I need help in this area. I’m really excited about these songs and I’m looking for a videographer and creative director to work with to bring some cool ideas (that I don’t have yet!) to life!

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Nicci Radhe
Celesteal Photography
Kevin Hainline
SirPenti Photography
Andrea Connolly

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