‘Love Me Instead’ by Lara Ruggles | New Album, ‘Anchor Me’
Exclusive track premiere of ‘Love Me Instead’ by Lara Ruggles, taken from the upcoming album, ‘Anchor Me,’ slated for release on November 15, 2024.
Every relationship is a journey of self-discovery, and in ‘Anchor Me,’ Tucson’s Lara Ruggles reflects on the lessons learned through love found, nurtured, and lost. This album serves as a tender chronicle of her evolution—a meditation on falling in love, facing heartbreak, and finding the strength to salvage what matters most. Ruggles navigates her history with a grace born of patience and reflection.
‘Anchor Me’ marks a return to Ruggles’ heartfelt vulnerability, blending her intimate lyricism with a lush production style. Growing up in isolation on a cattle ranch near Tucson, she shaped her songwriting into a beacon of honesty. After immersing herself in the Colorado folk scene, Ruggles returned to Tucson in 2016 and explored electrifying pop with her project Sharkk Heartt. Yet, she soon gathered more personal songs that didn’t quite fit that sound.
In the opening track, ‘Love Me Instead,’ Ruggles lays bare her flaws as a lover, exploring the complexities of affection with a gentle touch. The song’s warm harmonies and poignant refrain—“Could you love me instead?”—become an anthem of empathy, inviting listeners to reflect on the realities of love. As Ruggles puts it, “Love often looks much different in practice than what we ask of it.”
“I wrote this song back in 2014, when my friend Megan Burtt and I were going head-to-head in a series of YouTube challenges we’d set for ourselves – mostly as a way to pass the time while we waited for things that were outside our control to happen in order to both be able to set release dates for our new albums. One of the challenges we’d set for ourselves was to write a song using each other’s “song starts” – just a line or a phrase or basic idea that we’d written down or recorded on a voice memo and then never managed to develop further. Megan sent me a voice memo that included the first line of this song, and when I started to play with it and build onto it, it became a meditation on the unfair things that we ask of love, and what it might look like for someone to actually love us instead of unquestioningly doing all the things we are asking of them. For a long time I thought I wasn’t going to do anything with this song, but I kept pulling it out of my back pocket and playing it whenever I had a longer set to fill, and once it had developed that sort of staying power I knew I needed to record it and get it out there. My friend Steve Varney (Kid Reverie) produced this one and sang the backup vocals, and then I took it to Steven Lee Tracy at Saint Cecilia Studios in Tucson and we added a few finishing touches (like working really hard to record an exact double of Steve’s harmonium solo on electric guitar, to give it a little more grit). And in a lovely bit of serendipity and universes aligning, Megan Burtt and I are once again releasing new albums in the same year – hers is called Witness and I highly recommend a listen.” Lara Ruggles
With ‘Anchor Me,’ Lara Ruggles invites us to explore the lessons of love and loss, reminding us that every relationship has the power to teach us about ourselves.
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