In 2023, Americana/roots singer-songwriter Michael Rudd started hearing original songs in his sleep. The experience kicked the former Valley local back into music after three decades away from the craft. Now, he’s got a new album on the way.
Rudd’s album, “Ways of the World,” will be released on Friday, Feb. 27 on all major streaming platforms.
The 10-track album reckons with a search for meaning and a struggle to make sense of both personal challenges and the actions of others. Rudd, who grew up in New Jersey, began writing the songs on the album shortly after receiving a cancer diagnosis a few years ago.
The album’s first song, “The Water,” embodies “everything I’m trying to do with the whole project,” Rudd said.
“It’s the story of one person who is facing all sorts of challenges throughout his life, and I’m trying to tell the whole life in five verses and a repeated chorus, of course,” he said. “But a lot of the people I write about are seeking something — something spiritual, seeking redemption, forgiveness, love — because a lot of the people I know are like that. And, look, I’m like that too. I don’t know a lot of people who are settled, who are completely content in the world, because how can you be if the world is chaotic as it is? But there are a few lucky people that are.”
The album’s closing song, “The Train is Coming,” is similarly personal. “I started writing this song, and I was really surprised by the words that were coming out and the tone. Sometimes, you have to work really hard at finding where the song is. In this case, it came out pretty naturally,” he said.
Written almost immediately after Rudd’s diagnosis, the gospel-inspired track explores the idea of seeking acceptance in the face of death. “The idea of dying, but of seeking some kind of acceptance in what will happen, and, in a way, saying goodbye.” It isn’t a fully autobiographical tune, but “The emotions are mine, but they’re all him,” Rudd said, speaking of the song’s narrator. “He says contradictory things about dying, but there’s an attempt at being joyful.”
Rudd may live in Albuquerque, New Mexico today, but his history with the Valley spans decades. A 1985 University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate, he and his wife called Northampton home in the mid-1990s — a formative era for the family that included the birth of their son.
“There were creative, interesting people all over the place. Not to say there aren’t in New Jersey, but it was a good percentage of the people in Northampton,” he said. “You couldn’t walk a block without finding somebody interesting.”
He then went back to New Mexico for a time, and he played in a rockabilly and blues band. “We were a working band,” he said. “On those days, we would play four sets a night, starting at 9 and working our way to last call.”
The group toured around Albuquerque and other cities in New Mexico, released a CD and eventually got to open for blues musician Charlie Musselwhite.
“But once we stopped playing, I pretty much put my guitar down and didn’t write any songs at all for more than 30 years,” Rudd said.
Over the next few years, Rudd worked as a teacher with jobs at various schools and colleges in New Jersey and Massachusetts, including Palmer High School, Westfield State University, Springfield Technical Community College and Baystate Academy Charter Public School. Rudd also coached the Amherst High School boys’ soccer team from 2012 to 2019, during which his team won three championships and he won several “Best Coach” awards as well.
“We loved it there,” Rudd said of his time in western Mass. “We loved the serenity. We loved the beauty. We loved the safety of the area. The community itself was welcoming to us.”
Rudd returned to New Mexico in 2020 and worked as an administrator at another charter school before becoming the principal of Haak’u Community Academy, a K-8 school on the Acoma Pueblo.
In 2023, not long after he retired — and more than 30 years after he’d last touched a guitar or written music — Rudd started to experience a strange phenomenon: he heard songs all the time. They weren’t always fully-formed songs; sometimes they were just fragments of music or lyrics, but they often shook him out of his sleep.
“I’d wake up, and verses would come out — I don’t know why — and then it became kind of my life, and songs started popping up everywhere,” he said. He made a regular habit of keeping his phone around to make sure he could record the music into voice notes as necessary.
While not every “sleep-written” track made the cut, Rudd found that even the unrecorded songs served as a vital map for navigating a complicated life. This creative surge provided the ultimate incentive to dust off his guitar and relearn the instrument — finally “catching up” to the melodies in his head.
Just a few months later, he was back in the studio, recording his first album, “Long Way from Paradise,” which came out in late March 2024. His second album, “Going to the Mountain,” came out almost exactly a year later.
“Since then, the music keeps coming,” he said. “The songs keep coming.”
While his latest project is just hitting shelves, Rudd shows no signs of slowing down. His fourth album, “Midnight at Dawn,” is already recorded and mastered for a September release, and a fifth, currently untitled project is slated for next year.
In the meantime, Rudd wants people to enjoy “Ways of the World” and take away a sense that having to confront challenges in search of a greater purpose is “what it means to be alive.”
“Many of us are moving from one challenge to the next with no let-up, and at some point, we’re just asking for help, or we’re asking for something more. We want to see something more or find something more,” he said. “I don’t have any answers for anybody, but all of us, no matter what our politics are, do share some challenges, but also common desires, common needs for love, for understanding, for acceptance, or some sort of connection to something larger, whether you’re religious or not, so I’m hoping that listeners will find themselves in these songs.”
For more information about Michael Rudd or to listen to his music, visit michaelrudd.com.