Deric Ruttan

It's almost December, but it's an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon in middle Tennessee. Birds chatter in a nearby tree, the sun is low in the sky, and steam is rising from Deric Ruttan's coffee cup.

The singer is sitting on a church pew on his back porch. "This pew came out of a hundred-year old church in Georgia. I love old things, things that have a sense of history about them. You can just imagine the sermons this old pew witnessed." As he talks, his dog, a beagle named Sam (short for Samantha), hops up on the pew beside him. He pats her head. We are a few miles outside Nashville, Tennessee, where Ruttan, and his wife and five step-children, have made their home for over a decade.

While he relishes time spent on his back porch, Ruttan is quick to point out he doesn't get to do it often. He points to a pile of not-yet-split firewood. "Look," he smiles, "clearly I've been busy. That wood's been heaped up there for a month. I haven't had time to split it!"

Busy is right. The Canadian-born singer/songwriter took some heat from fans when four-and-a-half years passed between the release of his debut, critically acclaimed album Deric Ruttan, and its follow-up, First Time In A Long Time. Determined not to repeat history, Ruttan was back in the studio a mere 16 months after First Time In A Long Time's release, working on new music. The resulting disc, Sunshine, is due to hit store shelves on January 12, 2010.

Deric Ruttan was raised just outside Bracebridge, Ontario, on land where his great-grandfather made moonshine in the 1930's. Taking his cues from musical heroes like Steve Earle, he moved to Nashville and spent seven years 'in the trenches' in the country music capitol of the world, struggling to make a name for himself. Eventually he signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and soon after inked a recording contract with Disney's Lyric Street Records. When the album was released in Canada, the CD yielded 5 Top Ten singles, (including the hits, "When You Come Around", "Shine", and "Take The Wheel"), and earned him a "Best Album" nomination at the 2004 Canadian Country Music Awards. "Male Vocalist" and "Rising Star" nominations followed, as did the Grand Ol' Opry appearances, and a high-profile national tour. In 2004 he was named "Best New Solo Country Artist" at the Canadian Radio Music Awards. Stateside though, Ruttan's artist success was about to be eclipsed by his success as a songwriter.

In 2003, just as his first single "When You Come Around" was released, he celebrated his first #1 as a songwriter when friend and collaborator Dierks Bentley took the Ruttan/Bentley/Brett Beavers co-write "What Was I Thinkin'" to the top of the charts in the US. The song helped set Bentley on the path to country stardom. (To date, Bentley has recorded six Ruttan co-writes, including the 2005 chart-topper "Lot Of Leavin' Left To Do".) In 2004 Ruttan's "My Way", recorded by Aaron Pritchett, was the most-played Canadian country song of that year. Capitol Nashville's Eric Church had an American Billboard hit with his and Ruttan's "Guys Like Me" in 2007, and cuts on other acts followed (over two dozen to-date), on artists like Gary Allan, Paul Brandt, Doc Walker, Jason Blaine, and The Higgins. In September of 2007, Ruttan was awarded his first Canadian Country Music Award (CCMA) for Songwriter Of The Year (along with co-writers Aaron Pritchett and Mitch Merrett), for "Hold My Beer", recorded by Pritchett. With his songwriting cache increasing, Ruttan struggled to balance his artist and songwriting careers.

"It wasn't just that writing songs for other artists was taking time away from me writing my next record", says Ruttan. "It was that suddenly I was known as a guy who'd written radio hits for other acts – the bar had been raised for me, creatively, because of that. I felt the next record I made needed to be really, really good."

It proved worth the wait. The aptly titled First Time In A Long Time yielded four hit radio singles at Canadian country radio, the title track, the raucous "Lovin' You Is Killin' Me", the Eagles-esque "California Plates" (co-written with members of Manitoba country band Doc Walker), and "Good Time", a duet with Ruttan's friend and collaborator Dierks Bentley. (The video for "Good Time" reached #1 on CMT Canada's video countdown). At the Canadian Country Music Awards that September, Ruttan earned a total of four nominations – "Male Artist", "Songwriter", "Record Producer", and "Best Album," and closed the show performing alongside The Guess Who/Bachman Turner Overdrive guitar legend Randy Bachman. By the following year, "First Time In A Long Time" had garnered so much radio airplay that it earned Ruttan and co-writer Jimmy Rankin a SOCAN Country Music Award at the 2009 SOCAN Awards in Toronto.

Over the course of touring the First Time In A Long Time album in 2008 and 2009, Ruttan and his band developed a reputation for putting on high-energy shows. How his songs translate to a live audience is important to Ruttan. "I've played more in the last year-and-a-half than I played in the three previous years combined. When writing and recording the new album, I tried to keep in mind the energy of our live show. To a degree that influenced song selection."

The energy and the intimacy of Ruttan's live performances come through on every track on Sunshine. As Ruttan wrote or co-wrote every song on the album, it's also a very personal body of work. "As a singer/songwriter, my albums usually end up being windows into where I am in my life when I write and record them. It's never an intentional thing – but that's what ends up happening."

The album's lead-off single, "Sing That Song Again", is a nostalgic look at youth, the friendships made early in life, and the role music plays in our lives and relationships.

"I wrote 'Sing That Song Again' with my friend Ben Hayslip. We wanted to write a song that spoke to the rural way we grew up, and the recklessness you feel when you're young. The song ended up using music as a metaphor for the lives we lived when we were younger – and the way we sometimes yearn to get back to that a little bit as we grow older. There's an energy to this song that I love."

There are "be proud of where you come from" songs, as on "Where The Train Don't Stop" -- an ode to the singer's hometown. "I wanted to keep the lyric as real as possible on that one," says Ruttan. "My grandfather's best friend's name was Alan Doley, and he really did die in World War II. And, the CNR (Canadian National Railway), train really did run through the middle of my hometown – but it didn't stop there, not in my lifetime."

Themes of optimism and hope are reoccurring motifs on Sunshine.

The lyrics paint vivid pictures of small town life in concise detail, framed within big, melodic choruses. Such is the case with "Up All Night", (co-written with Jimmy Rankin), a song about a Legion Hall dance in which a decidedly blue collar crowd cuts loose on a Friday night. With its anthemic chorus and rabble-rousing call-to-arms lyric, the song is destined to be a Ruttan live-show favourite. After hearing the song, you feel like you should go home, sober up, and wash the smoke out of your clothes

The album's title track, with it's prominent 12-String electric guitars and fiddles, was inspired by Ruttan's wife, a songwriter and soap maker. "She's the eternal optimist," smiles Ruttan. "I can be moody. I can get very dark. She sees the positive in everything and never fails to lift me up. That's where the line, They see the rain/You see the sunshine came from."

The theme of family is also a recurring one on Sunshine. The wish for his children's happiness as they make their way in the world led Ruttan and collaborator Brett Beavers, also a father, to write "One In A Million". "That's How I Wanna Go Out" tells the story of an old man who opts for spending his last days in the arms of the woman he loves, rather than medicated, in a hospital bed. 'Cause I came in this world in the arms of a woman who loved me, the old man tells his doctor, And that's how I wanna go out.

On the Springsteen-esque "We're All Alright", the album broaches a subject Ruttan's music has previously never addressed – politics. "I live in the United States, and earlier this year I was sitting watching a TV news network with my kids and I started getting angry. I mean, of course we're in an economic downturn but I'm sick of all the 'sky-is-falling' nonsense. It's sensationalist. It seems certain networks prey on people's fears and sow seeds of worry, but the fact is, country people have always found a way to survive. That thought inspired 'We're All Alright'."

Ruttan's band will get a chance to shine on "Just To Get To You", a haunting, whiskey-fueled dream-state that ends in a two-minute guitar/fiddle/pedal steel solo, the instruments trading fiery licks back and forth.

And while the album rocks, it has its poignant moments. In "I Still Think Of You", the stark confessional of a recovering alcoholic, the singer's triumph over whiskey is tempered by the regret he feels for past hurts he caused. The intimate vocal performance and bare bones production underscore the song's message.

Next month, Ruttan and his band will embark on a 23-city cross-Canada tour that will take them from British Columbia to PEI. "I love writing, recording, and producing records, but singing those songs for a live audience is the fourth critical step in the process. It completes the circle, and galvanizes the music."

"I'm a bit of a recluse when I'm home," he says, patting Sam's head, "so I'll miss being here, but there's nothing like traveling with your brothers, playing music for people." With the tour, Sunshine set for a January 12th release, and "Sing That Song Again" currently climbing the charts, Ruttan shows no sign of slowing down. He grins, "I may not get that wood split anytime soon..."