Still in her early 20’s, Ruby Waters is a successful songwriter, seasoned live performer, and certainly eager to resume her live concerts like everyone else on either side of the stage. Earlier this year, shew played a three night stand online, for the series “Dinner and a Show” in Toronto.
Waters, born to a Slovakian father and Metis mother was raised in Shelburne, Ontario. Since joining her mother on stage at the age of 4, music was always at around by the time she started busking as a teenager.
Like her parents, who met as touring musicians, Waters got the urge to travel, and moved west, until an acid trip in B.C. inspired her to resettle in Toronto. Here, she “released” a couple of songs in 2015 on the Youtube channel Toronto Acoustic Sessions. As an aside, there is an Adele cover in what must be one of Waters’ earliest videos, from 2011 on her YT channel.
After recording enough of her own songs to become frustrated with what she called her “e.p. cemetery,” she started to release some of them. “Sweet Sublime” was Waters’ 2018 debut, followed by “Supernatural” and “Last Cigarette” in 2019.
Waters’ songs, whether on her own or with a band, have a spare quality in their arrangements which keep the lyrics front and centre. Still, her music sounds more polished than folk songs, but as a consummate singer-songwriter, they aren’t really poppy, either. She records with Sam Willow, her producer and close friend.
With her e.p. “Almost Naked” out, and touring heavily, 2019 was a busy year. She opened for Serena Ryder’s Ontario shows, and toured with Classified. She can be heard on his song “10 Years” but she is not in the video. After another tour, this time with City and Colour, Ruby Waters headlined at a packed Horseshoe Tavern in her adopted home town in November 2019.
With touring shelved in 2020, Waters released her follow up e.p. “If It Comes Down to It” on October 16th. The single “Rabbit Hole” is about drugs and depression, but as she told CBC, “all the worst days bring the best songs.” In another interview, Waters discussed her song-writing approach saying “it always starts with a line that comes out of nowhere and I try to build on that.” While some songs have unhappy backstories, recording them once they’re written comes easy enough. Most of her last e.p. was recorded at her “old house” which Waters shared with a bunch of musicians. The single “Quantum Physics” drew almost two million streams in the months following its release, and her songs continue to gather momentum online.
