Michael Rudd

FYC: The Water (song) Ways of the World (album)

Ways of the World

Americana Album of the Year

More than 30 years after I stopped playing in a working 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 showing up in my sleep and then day and night in the summer of 2023. They haven’t stopped. Ways of the World is the third of five albums that have come from that experience, with Midnight at Dawn scheduled for release in September 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 September1960. That’s my mother in the middle arriving at the synagogue in Coatesville, PA where she would marry 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.