Greta Ruth On Making Her Latest Folk Album, And The Life That Shaped It

Art is, in many ways, a means of spiritual diagnosis. Like a dream-interpreter, we can look at an artist’s work and learn many things about them: if they are generally melancholic or joyful, if they’re hopeful, if their soul is in turmoil or at peace, if they believe in beauty or not, and oftentimes, if they believe in God. Art comes from the soul and carries with it the human experience and deepest inner workings of its creator.

I wrote all of the songs on Isle of Ferns between giving birth to my first and second sons. When I listen to the songs, the first thing that I notice is the way my marriage and our sweet boys have transformed the very nature of my art. While there are things about music that I did give up to focus most of my time on my family, the love I’ve experienced as a wife and mother has given me, and my music, so much more. 

Anyone can hear it, plain as day. My old songs were dark, intricate, and dissonant. My songs now, on the other hand, are lighter, simpler, more harmonious. The reason is incredibly simple: I’m happier now. Yes, I have many more moments of reaching what feels like the maximum of human frustration—of course, most moms do. But at the same time, my art and my life undeniably reveal my deep and abiding sense of newfound joy.

This isn’t all due to mortal love. As the love I found with my husband and our boys transformed me, it also pointed my heart to the source of all love. Inspired by the changes my loved ones made in me and aching to understand where that sort of sacrificial, unconditional love could come from, I returned to my ancestral faith, reading my Bible cover to cover for the first time in my life the year our first son was born. 

This is the love that seeped into my songs when, in stolen moments, I found myself writing music again. I’d love to tell you a little about each one. You can follow along with the lyrics and music on Bandcamp, or listen on Apple Music or Spotify.

“One Flesh”

Like the title suggests, this song is about the complete union of marriage and how it changes us as individuals. What I love most about this song is that my husband contributed as much to it as I did. I recorded the guitar and vocal parts and he created everything else you’re hearing around it. To me, this process perfectly mirrors the way the two of us have become one. 

The lyrics of “One Flesh” also begin to hint at the subtle religious themes that both consciously and subconsciously influenced the album. For this song, it was more after-the-fact that I noticed the spiritual elements. In particular, sometimes I hear “the gently risen sun” as “the gently risen Son” and I like that ambiguity. 

“The Back Room”

This song touches on some of the bittersweet aspects of motherhood, although I’m sure it can apply to other relationships as well. I wrote it while my parents were over at our house watching my first son, who was a little over one year old at the time, and I was struggling with my desire to have time to myself and with my fear of missing any special little moment with my baby. I think I was reminding myself of the importance of presence with the ones we love, that we show them we love them by always being there, even when we aren’t literally there with them at every second of the day. Our actions and presence speak a lot louder than our words, even though those are important, too.

“The Kiss”

I named “The Kiss” after my favorite painting by Gustav Klimt. For a while, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of “true love’s first kiss,” and what a kiss can and does mean for two people. I hadn’t even thought about this until writing this now, which goes to show the truly subconscious nature of art, but Klimt’s painting depicts two lovers embracing, with the man kissing the woman on the cheek. Likewise, my lyrics reference a moment early in my relationship with my husband where I only let him kiss my cheek. Due to past heartbreak, I was terrified of what a real kiss might mean or lead to.

The song opens with some biblical images that really captivated me when I read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. They come up a lot in the Old Testament, but Isaiah 51:8 is a great example: “For the moth will eat them up like a garment; the worm will devour them like wool. But my righteousness will last forever, my salvation through all generations” (NIV). I wanted to contrast the sort of love that hurts by fading and changing with the unconditional love I found both with my husband and with God.

“The Quickening”

I wrote “The Quickening” while pregnant with our first son. I was cherishing every “first” moment: the first time I felt him move inside me, imagining hearing him for the first time, and setting my own intentions for what his birth and childhood could be like. The weight of parental responsibility was hitting me, and I wanted to get things right.

It turns out you really can’t control everything that you hope to. I planned and prepared meticulously for a natural, medication free birth, but then a tornado put my body into fight or flight during labor and while stuck at 10cm and pushing for about twelve hours, I transferred to a hospital for a little help from western medicine. That early lesson helped me realize that as much as I might prepare, my little ones’ fates (as well as my own) are outside of my control.

“Orchid’s Fable”

When my first son was born, I felt this uncanny connection to him where I would be taking a bath or doing something else mundane and when I would close my eyes I would feel like I was moving just how I saw him move, like I was experiencing exactly what he was experiencing as a newborn. Mothers have a spiritual connection with their children that defies space and time, made physically manifest first through the anatomical realities of the womb, placenta, and umbilical cord, and later through the profound love between them.

This song points to that connection, and how love is bigger than our own personal failings, bigger than our own given life spans. It also points to the sacrifice mothers make as we relinquish the closest physical relationship we’ll ever know bit by bit as our babies grow up and need us less and less.

“Isle of Ferns”

Isle of Ferns is the name of the island park where my husband and I got married. It was 2020 and there were strict regulations even for outdoor weddings, so we only had our parents, three friends to document and witness, and an officiant present. This song is about the complete commitment of marriage—how it’s actually by solemnly vowing to another soul that you will never forsake them that you find true love, that you find “the one.” You choose one another, to the exclusion of all other possible lovers, and in exchange you get the most romantic, intimate relationship imaginable. 

The final lyrics dwell on a G.K Chesterton quote that struck me while listening to the audiobook version of Heretics: “The moment we care for anything deeply, the world—that is, all the other miscellaneous interests—become our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one’s self ‘unspotted from the world;’ but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the ‘world well lost.’” This idea is so romantic: I would gladly lose the entire world to be with you. It’s no wonder the love of husband and wife is our closest earthly parallel to God’s love for us.

“On Cotton Clouds”

I never set out to cosleep, but a few weeks into sleepless nights for both me and my baby, who stayed up grunting restlessly in his bassinet trying to get closer to me, I found myself snuggling him in bed. My nights went from a tear-streaked battlefield to one of the sweetest experiences of my entire life. Content to be near one another, my first boy and I slept peacefully together for the first six months of his life, when he finally got too squirmy to sleep well beside me.

This song captures the closeness we shared during that time, and the strong love I felt for every little thing about him. I knew this special time wouldn’t last forever, so I wanted to give myself over to it fully. In the recording, you can hear the sound of his baby swing, which we used a lot during this season. I think the sentiment in the lyrics applies to any other deep, intimate relationship, as well. 

“Blood Debt”

A lot of the time, we see love represented as something that makes us happy, something that pleases us, something that is comfortable and comforting. While that may be part of what love is, looking at love in a simplistic way like that forgets what love demands of us. Marriage might be the first relationship where we learn this lesson, where we ask ourselves daily what we can do to make someone else, rather than just ourselves, happy. The sacrificial nature of love goes even deeper when we have children and see that our unconditional love for them is almost defined by all of the things—money, sleep, time to do whatever we please, and so on—that we give up for their sake. This song reflects on this sort of love, and how it echoes the love that God has for us, which in turn is the sort of love He wants us to have for one another. It asks the question, what do we owe in return for the most perfect love? And the answer is, everything.

“A Tree and Its Fruit”

The only instrumental song on the album, I named “A Tree and Its Fruit” after a portion of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Fruit and fruitfulness are two of the symbols that permeate this album, metaphorically embodying the mirror image of literal and spiritual concepts I was exploring with these songs. The tree represents my husband and myself, made one in marriage. The fruit is our children, and also these songs, because he wrote all of the layered instrumental arrangements and mixed all of the songs, so they are in part the fruit of his creativity, energy, and effort, as well as mine. In a sense, this song is a prayer, a petition to be blessed to bear good fruit.

“Sea of Sound”

“Sea of Sound” is a love song I wrote to our second son in the early months of pregnancy. I didn’t yet know his sex, so I didn’t know what to call him, nor could I picture what he would look like. Even so, I already loved him. I eagerly awaited my prenatal appointments to be able to hear his tiny growing heart. I loved to picture his world inside of me, and the way that he would change my life forever in ways I could never begin to predict. I think that this is underemphasized in our art and our culture—the way that a mother loves and yearns for her child even when they’re as small as a grain of rice or an acorn or a blackberry. This song captures that unique and early love, celebrating the inherent value of the smallest human life.

“Fruška Gora”

I named this song for the mountain range that stretches through what’s now Serbia and Croatia that my maternal grandmother could see from her home as a child in then-Yugoslavia. As an elderly woman, legally blind and hard of hearing, she would look out her assisted living community’s window at the modest set of small Wisconsin hills and call it the “Fruška Gora.” She passed away this summer, so the song hits me in a new way.

“Fruška Gora” meditates on the idea of hearing God’s voice, which we can often miss because of its softness. At other times, the pain and fire, self-inflicted or otherwise, of our life speaks His truth quite loudly to us. This is possibly the most emotional song on the album for me. It’s about the legacy of faith and spiritual tradition that we can try to pass down to future generations, without ever knowing our ultimate success or failure. It’s about the inevitable loss of the elders who tie us to those beliefs and traditions. And it’s about my own struggle to hear and to heed God’s voice. 

Thank You For Listening

If any of these songs touch your heart, I am eternally grateful that they found you. If any of them move you, feel free to share them with someone else who you think might enjoy them. My hope is that now that they exist outside of my own soul, they can be a gift to everyone who hears them—that they can inspire us all to cherish the love in our lives, and to recognize the source of all love and to share that love with one another. Thank you, as always, for listening.