In August of 2023,  Michael Rudd started hearing songs in his sleep, songs he’d never heard before, lines of lyrics, disparate melodies, full-blown tunes that were so loud and clear that they would wake him up in the middle of the night.   Within a week or two, he started hearing them at all hours of the day and night.

Thirty-five years before that summer, Rudd put a bag of clothes, a manual typewriter, a few notebooks, and a guitar in his two-door Datsun, and left New Jersey for New Mexico, two points of a triangle (Western Massachusetts was the third) that he drifted between with his family for a very long time.  

When he was still a boy, he quickly became a voracious reader, partly as an escape from loneliness but in equal part trying to make sense of his mind, which to him, didn’t seem to work in the same way as others. 

“Those years of learning to accept how my mind worked really didn’t end in childhood or even through most of my adulthood,” Rudd admits.  “It probably wasn’t until music came back to me that a full acceptance actually happened.  But reading about characters who were disconnected from the world in their own way was where it began.” 

It seemed fitting, then, that he would self-identify as a writer, a decision that decades later at least allowed him the understanding - through personal experience and unequivocal failure - that who we are or think we are may be just a matter of self-mythologizing and choice, and who we really are lies hidden from us until we’re ready to accept the reality of what’s there.  

Writing meant getting day jobs at too many places to name, and then better jobs when his family started to grow and writing before and after work.  It also meant several novels, a few dozen stories, and a series of poems that were never quite good enough or honest enough to move anyone.  But that was later.

In the beginning, the long road west and then Albuquerque itself gave him what he needed, and after a while he joined a newly-formed band as their lead singer even though he wasn’t much of a guitarist and hadn’t sung publicly since his bar mitzvah.  Feeling the music, however, wasn’t a problem - he fell in love with the punkabilly from southern California that they covered, not to mention all the variations on the blues that he was discovering, and he started writing songs that tried to fit the sound that suddenly meant so much to him.  After three years of steady gigs in the Albuquerque blues and rockabilly scene and opening for touring artists like Charlie Musselwhite, they put out a CD with several of his songs, and a few months later they were done.  Then, after picking up his guitar a few more times, he more or less left it in its case for the next thirty years.  

In the intervening years, Rudd became a teacher, starting at a Albuquerque high school and moving on to public and charter schools and colleges in Massachusetts and New Jersey, until fate brought him back to New Mexico, where he spent the last two years of that part of his life as Principal of a K-8 school at Acoma Pueblo.  

A 60-mile drive west from Albuquerque through a desert of mesas and arroyos and mountains, the school was one of the cornerstones of a community that’s lived on the same ancestral land for more than a thousand years.  Being around people so committed to maintaining their cultural, traditional, and spiritual identities was a perfect way to segue into something else, a constant if subconscious reminder that you just need to peel back a few layers to reveal a fuller version of yourself and a connection to something much larger.

For many years, Rudd had been hearing music in the air - symphonies, chamber pieces, latin-tinged tunes, vocals in Spanish, other forms that he can’t recall.  This phenomenon would come and go, and by the summer of 2023, it hadn’t happened for so long that he’d almost forgotten about it until songs started coming to him in his sleep in that first month after leaving the school at Acoma.

Within a few days, melodies, pieces of songs, lyrics started coming all of the time, and not wanting to forget what he was hearing, he quickly got in the habit of carrying his phone with him everywhere so that he could sing or hum or recite what he was listening to into the voice memo.

In quieter moments, he would pick up his acoustic guitar, listen to the recordings, add or create lyrics and verses, change the melody when the initial sound didn’t move him, figure out chord progressions, and sing.  While the process has shifted - now, songs rarely show up in his sleep - melodies and lyrics continue to come.  Over a year later, the number of recordings approach a thousand, leading to the writing of about a hundred songs.

Rudd writes and sings about people looking for meaning, searching for understanding about who they are and how they arrived at this moment in time, and seeking some kind of transcendence or even a small truth as they navigate the moments of their days. The songs, then, are about desperation and joy, mortality and love, mental illness and loneliness, forgiveness and redemption.

“One reviewer of my first album wrote that my songs are about people living on the margins.  I agree to a point,” Rudd says.  “I think we all live on the margins to a certain extent, revealing what we want to reveal to others but keeping so much of the confusion and chaos of being alive inside.  The songs on my new album, just like my first, focus on that inner, more secretive world we often choose to keep to ourselves.  Not just the suffering and the desperation and the feelings of isolation, but also that other side of being human - love, beauty, joy.” 

Going to the Mountain, Rudd’s second solo studio album, follows his debut album, Long Way from Paradise (2024).  Both were recorded at Frogville Studios in Santa Fe, New Mexico and released under his label, Invisible Road Records.

“The title of the album comes from one of the singles,” Rudd says.  “It’s the only title I ever considered.  The song Going to the Mountain takes the perspective of a person who’s always seeking something else, something that he can’t name and that he knows he can never find, but something that he still feels compelled to search for, which he will for the rest of his life.  The other songs on the album are about people like him, always moving toward a point just past the horizon.”

Going to the Mountain features Brant Leeper on piano and Hammond organ (John Mayall, Buddy Guy), Mark Clark on drums (Ottmar Liebert, John Popper), Pat Malone on guitar (Eric Johnson, Lonnie Mack), Asher Barreras on electric and upright bass and cello, and Jen Bixby on backing vocals.

“I’ve been gifted to be in the studio with incredible musicians and friends,” Rudd says.  “It’s been two albums now with them, and there will be another one in the fall.  The process is always a true collaboration.  Every note they play is all about bringing out the essence of each song.  I can’t imagine playing and creating with anyone else.”

While many of the songs carry on the same vibe and approach to songwriting as those on his first album, Going to the Mountain offers a wider musical experience, with Rudd returning to his musical roots with a more electric and edgier sound.  But the people he wrote about in Long Way from Paradise are still there, still looking for answers and sometimes finding them.