Michael Rudd

Ways of the World

Americana Album

More than 30 years after I stopped playing in a blues & rockabilly band in Albuquerque, NM and put away my guitar for a different kind of life, songs - or really, parts of songs, lyrics, full-fledged melodies - started coming to me in my sleep and then day and night in the summer of 2023, and they haven’t stopped. Ways of the World is the third of five albums that’s come so far from that experience, with Midnight at Dawn arriving in Sept 2026 and Palace of Flames to follow in March 2027. It’s also the first album I wrote after a cancer diagnosis, which informed many of these songs, as well as those on the next two albums.

The cover, designed by Suzanne Sbarge, is a colorized version of a photo from 1960. That’s my mother in the middle just arriving at the synagogue in Coatesville, PA where she would be married to my father. Her mother is to her right and her sister sits on her left. The marriage lasted until my father’s passing 49 years later.