Ruth-Anne: from writing hits for Britney to telling her own story
RuthAnne: "it really needed to be my story and, and my way of telling it"
Dropping in over Zoom from London, singer and songwriter Ruth-Anne Cunningham seems to be in good form on a busy couple of press days - abuzz with talk of singles from her upcoming follow-up to 2019 debut album ‘Matters of the Heart’, she talks at a clip that’s half-confessional, half-promotional.
An experienced songwriter, as well as a singer and performer in her own right, Cunningham penned her first pop hit at the tender age of 17, , picked up by US pop singer JoJo and netting her an ASCAP award for pop songwriting. It was a milestone on a lifelong journey in music.
“I started writing songs when I was seven. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I kind-of knew the structure of a song, I think, because I was in choir, I knew what a verse was and what a chorus was, so I just started writing myself, teaching myself the piano at 12, started producing, you know, terribly, when I was 15. I'd written about 600 songs by the time I was 16, none of them very good. But my parents listened to all of them, were just very encouraging, and I just kept writing.
“My dad entered one of the songs into the Jacobs Song Contest award, in my Leaving Cert year. It was a song that I'd written and produced, and we ended up winning, and through that, we met a manager who used to manage the boys from The Script before they were The Script - MyTown. He approached me, and was working with Mark and Danny out in LA, and developing them as writer-producers.
“My family got to know him and his family, and as soon as I finished my Leaving Cert, I was brought over as an artist, before I fell into songwriting for other people. When I met (writers) Billy Steinberg and Josh Alexander, and we co-wrote , like, my third day into my trip, when I was 17.”
From there, the credits and collabs slowly rolled in - eventually including Britney Spears’ , and One Direction’s - before going on to projects closer to home in Ireland, becoming one of Niall Horan’s regular solo collaborators.
It’s an abstract to many of us, pop music. Casual listeners mightn’t know, or care, for much of the artists they take in, past the polished production and a major-label system more focused on making stars; while those of us outside of the genre’s traditional target markets might well scratch our heads and wonder how someone gets involved in the pop game in the first place.
“I didn't meet JoJo, she actually MySpaced me after she recorded it. I was only 19 at the time, so I was excited that she'd messaged me like, 'I love your voice, I love the song, I can't wait to release it.' So, I was really excited about that, and I didn't actually meet her for another 10 years. That was an amazing meeting, because we were both like, 'thank you for changing my life'.
“As I started getting more songs out by other artists, that's when you start getting into the room with them. Niall is one of my favorite artists to work with, I worked on both his albums and, and we've always had a really good writing connection. I love working with John Legend as well, that was a bit of a surreal experience, because I was a massive fan of his growing up. A bit of a 'pinch me' moment.
"Working with Jennifer Hudson was amazing. And I just feel really fortunate to have gotten in the room with some really talented artists that I've got to work with. And I've just been around some amazing talent. I just feel very lucky to have had the opportunity, and to be in some of those rooms.”
Cunningham stepped into telling her own story with her debut LP, , in 2019, after spending most of her adult lifetime internalising and learning from her experiences.
Working with others in mind is a much different kettle of fish than songwriting to self-express, so circling back around to getting her own body of work up and running as an artist must have been another adjustment again.
“It just felt like the next step. As an artist and a songwriter. I'm quite multifaceted, and I don't just do one thing. I love to produce, I love to write, I love to sing. It just felt like... 'why not'? It's been amazing to put together the albums I write, all the melodies and lyrics, and I would just work with the producer and co-produce everything.
“A lot of it did come from me, and I think that's the way that it should be, because to really stand behind my own artist project, it really needed to be my story and, and my way of telling it. Getting to tour and support Hozier and support Alanis Morissette, and getting my song synced on Love Island and Grey's Anatomy - it's brought everything full-circle.”
While the Covid crisis has largely hamstrung artists’ chances of doing the usual things over the past 14 months, from gigging to things like radio appearances and in-studio recording, Ruth-Anne sought to make the most of the circumstances while slowly working away on her upcoming record, turning her attention to the conversation regarding gender balance in Irish music.
The Irish Women in Harmony project assembled the voices of dozens of Irish female singers, across genre and generation gaps, into a cover of The Cranberries’ enduring hit , and brought the issue into sharp focus by spotlighting female artists otherwise given short shrift by radio playlisters and programming directors.
“When I came back to Ireland, to work on my own music, I was starting to be on some lineups. The first thing I noticed was how few women there were on some of the festival lineups, and the second thing I noticed was when a lot of radio stations and TV stations were putting on events, there would be one female artist on the lineup.
“I was getting Tweeted about it, people would tweet me and they would tweet some of the other females saying 'why don't they have you on, why are you guys not being played?' So when the audience starts noticing, that means you have a big problem.
“So, I slid into the DMs of artists I didn’t know, or had only met for two seconds before, ‘hi, I’m Ruth-Anne, and I'm a singer-songwriter, I want to put together an all-Irish, all-female song cover, and I'm raising money for a charity in Ireland.
“I didn't really expect many ‘yeses’, but then the ‘yeses’ were coming back in droves, women were contacting others they knew, so the word started spreading. We ended up with 40 amazing Irish female artists on a song together, and then I started putting the vocal parts together, trying to use a bit of everybody’s contribution.”
We’re coming out of the Covid crisis and things are starting to move across the board, including for live music, albeit slowly, and with a cautious optimism.
While Ruth-Anne’s immediate focus lies with singles and a slow return to touring in a post-Brexit, post-pandemic environment, she, like many of us, has had time to think about what’s next for music in Ireland, and how it can ‘build back better’, to coin a phrase.
“Focus on homegrown talent instead of international artists, because what was amazing about Covid in a way, was international artists couldn't fly over to Ireland to do performances, so the TV slots and the radio play started being given to homegrown talent. And that's what we need more of, because, y'know, international acts have fans all over the world, they've massive numbers.
“I don't know what it is in the culture. But in England, they will push their own and they will champion their own, and it's reflected in the charts, because the charts are very British-dominated in Britain, in the UK. But in Ireland, we don't tend to put our own on a pedestal and champion our own until our own has made it in another territory, and then they come back to Ireland.
“You don't want to look back on these years and go ‘we’ve had not one single ‘breakout’ female artist from Ireland, globally’. I really think that we have females out right now that could be global stars, and I don't understand why sometimes they're not as pushed to the front. But I think we're getting there.”
- RuthAnne’s brand new single ‘Safe Place’ is out everywhere now.
