India Ramey Embodies A Phoenix Rising On ‘Baptized By The Blaze’

When life hands you lemons, sometimes it’s better to just burn them and start anew rather than make lemonade. That’s exactly what India Ramey does on Baptized By The Blaze, the singer’s empowering fifth album that sees her shedding the trauma that had haunted her since seeing her father abuse her mother as a child.

For years Ramey tried coping by working as a domestic violence prosecutor, but turned to music when that career fell apart in 2009 with her first album, Junkyard Angel, already in hand. Despite all the pain her father inflicted, she says her first musical memories were with him.

“He’d play Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s Wanted! The Outlaws on repeat,” Ramey tells BGS. “Through that I became obsessed with Jessi Colter. I’d get my mom’s curling iron and sing her songs while standing on our living room ottoman. I always say that my dad was such a bad guy. He never gave me anything except for my love of country music.”

But as Ramey’s own career in music materialized, a 12-year dependence on the daily tranquilizer Klonopin began to rear its head. Taken to quell the panic disorder that’s lingered since first witnessing her abusive father’s actions, Ramey sought to gradually come off the drug during the pandemic before its severe withdrawal symptoms landed her in rehab. There, through stubbornness and self-determination, she was able to reclaim the power over her dependence and the trauma that caused it, vowing to never go back. Baptized By The Blaze is her journey to become a better version of herself.

“I went through a lot of stuff — a metamorphosis if you will,” says Ramey. “It was really hard and really scary, but I got so much personal empowerment out of it. Since then, I’ve been motivated to pass that on to bring folks strength and remind them that the tragedies they’ve faced give you superpowers to handle anything else life throws at you.”

Helping Ramey realize those superpowers was her therapist, a conversation with whom inspired the song “The Mountain.” According to Ramey, it occurred about a year into their sessions after something had left her in a puddle of shame and defeat. She explained how our anxiety attacks are similar to avalanches in that we don’t know the tools needed to combat them until going through it. But every time there is an avalanche you’ll have more tools and awareness to recover because you are the source, you are the mountain.

“It was the most empowering thing anyone had ever said to me in a moment where I was so vulnerable,” admits Ramey. “It left me feeling so powerful and wanted. This song is my way of spreading that beautiful message she gave to me.”

Another metaphor central to the album comes on its title track, on which Ramey compares her journey of redemption to a phoenix rising from the ashes. It was written while she “was thinking about that moment where I decided to burn it all down, to burn all of those defense mechanisms that I’d put in place to avoid confronting my trauma.” Despite its personal and well-meaning message, the song didn’t always resonate with everyone on her team though, with one person even calling the song over-dramatized. This led Ramey to shelve it for a couple years until producer Luke Wooten chose to include it on the new record.

“As artists, we’re always second guessing ourselves, so to have somebody on my own team tell me I should leave the idea behind really hurt,” Ramey confides. “Because of that, I struggled with self doubt for a long time about going all in on it, but in the end I went with my gut and I’m glad I did.”

Another example of being misunderstood and defying the expectations of others comes on “Piece Of My Mind,” a soft but stern ballad about an industry type who found out about her past working in law and said if he’d known he would just assume all her albums were vanity projects. On it, Ramey’s signature sass shines through as she urges the person to tell them their story: “Just a snapshot is all you see, you don’t know shit about me.” Before going on to describe how “I’ve fought wars and still they haunt me” and likening each day to being Halloween.

“It pissed me off, because that judgment he had was denying me my authentic story,” exclaims Ramey. “He was denying me the suffering that my family and I had gone through because of a job, so this song is me telling people exactly who I am, which is a lot more than any article or bio can capture.”

While most of the album is derived directly from Ramey’s own personal experiences, two songs that veer from that path are “Silverado” and “Down For The Count.” Both are stories about badass women living life on their own terms unburdened by the judgment and shame often delivered through patriarchal transgressions. “Silverado” details a one night stand at the motel El Dorado and “Down For The Count” highlights a streak of promiscuity to get over a past lover (“I put ten men between you and me”).

“The women I wrote about in these songs are people I think any woman will resonate with, because they’re about women doing whatever the hell they want,” she asserts. “It’s about doing things that dudes do all the time without the same level of judgment and are unapologetic about it. They’re my way of giving the middle finger to the patriarchy.”

No matter the delivery, Baptized By The Blaze charts out a journey of empowerment and recovery that is sure to provide strength and an upbeat honky-tonk soundtrack to anyone with a listening ear. It’s also proof that Ramey’s best work isn’t behind her and that her renewed focus has her poised for a bright future, despite the scars that once plagued her past.

“The process of making this record has taught me just how strong and powerful that I am, which are both things I was never convinced of beforehand,” Ramey reflects. “My hope is that it does the same for listeners and helps guide them on their own journeys.”


Photo Credit: Stacie Huckeba

Allison Russell Gives a Voice to Queer Folks and Survivors on Solo Debut (Part 1 of 2)

Within the songs of her new album Outside Child, Allison Russell delves deeply into the extreme trauma she experienced in her youth spent in Montreal both as a mechanism for personal relief, but also in the hopes that it might reach people with similar experiences.

Although she is a member of multiple bands (including Birds of Chicago and Our Native Daughters) and is an accomplished speaker and poet, the release of Outside Child marks Russell’s first solo work as a recording artist. BGS caught up with our Artist of the Month, Allison Russell, from her home in Nashville.

BGS: This is a deeply personal record. What was your writing process like?

Allison Russell: The writing process was having to delve deeply into the most painful parts of my past and childhood and history. I experienced severe childhood abuse, sexual, physical, mental, and psychological. In many ways, I think the psychological is the toughest part to unpack and defang. I don’t know that I am ever going to be entirely free of that and the process of dealing with that. What was very beautiful about this to me is that I didn’t have to go on that fearsome journey alone. My partner J.T. [Nero] was with me every step of the way. He co-wrote many of the songs on this record with me. He scraped me up off the floor when I was in the depths of it.

I have tried at different times in my songwriting life to tackle some of that material and I did on various songs with my first baby band, Po Girl, but I didn’t have the same kind of support and stability at home that I have now. I didn’t have the same amount of distance in time from the events and trauma of my childhood. Time and distance, plus boundless unconditional love that I receive from my partner, were really healing to have that collaborative sense on these songs. It is tough. It is hard to contemplate pain and trauma. That is reflected in the macrocosm of what is happening in our world right now. We are dealing with it every day with each news story of violence towards communities of color. …

We have to go into the pain of it or it perpetuates. The cycles self-perpetuate if we don’t take a stand to stop them. That’s what I’m trying to do personally. Art builds empathy and connection and it helps stop cycles of abuse when we really listen to one another and see and hear one another. It is a lot more difficult to practice abuse and bigotry. I believe in harm reduction. I don’t think we are going to achieve nirvana in this lifetime, in this world, but I do believe strongly in harm reduction and that small things can create mighty ripples. That’s why telling our own stories in our own words under our own names is so important because it can provide a roadmap for somebody else going through similar experiences.

I wish my story was unique. It is not. One in three women, one in four men, one in two trans or non-binary folks have experienced stories very similar to mine.

In “Persephone,” you sing about a lover in your youth who was seemingly a refuge from the trauma you were living through. It feels like a really loving tribute to her. Is that a story you’ve always wanted to tell?

It has become more important to me as I get older to honor those friends of our youth and loved ones of our youth and lovers of our youth who helped shape us and in this case, she literally saved my life. And I wanted her to know that. I also wanted to acknowledge that I am a queer person who is now in a straight passing life and marriage. I fall in the middle of the spectrum of orientation. I’ve been in love with women and I’ve been in love with men and I’ve been in love with trans people and I’ve been in love with non-binary people. I wound up falling in love and committing to share a life with a man, my husband.

One could assume that I’m straight, but I am not and especially in this time of increased polarization and bigotry, it is really important that people understand that nothing is black and white. Nothing is simple and you can’t assume that because I am married to a man and I have a child that I am a straight person. You can’t say homophobic things to me and have it pass. Part of me wanted to really acknowledge that publicly. I am grateful. I don’t get to be here singing today and having my child and my family if it wasn’t for that first love. She taught me how to love and that it was possible. She taught me about kindness and unconditional love. She taught me about acceptance, courage and bravery.

I’d love to know about your influences coming up in music.

Growing up, my mom was my first musical influence. She is a beautiful piano player. We had a really troubled relationship, but one of my first memories is crawling underneath her piano and just listening to her play and watching her feet on the pedals and hearing the resonance under the piano and feeling connected to her in that way, even though she didn’t know I was there. It was a feeling like the music she made was a truer expression of her than the often very hurtful words or violent things she did. That was my first sense of understanding the depth of music, that it goes beyond language.

My grandmother taught me lots of very violent, creepy lullabies from Scotland. She knew a lot of old murder ballads and child ballads and she sang me all of those songs. I loved them. That oral distillation of archetypal stories over generations and time, generally very matrilineal and passed down from mother to daughter, I connected deeply with those songs. That was my first sense of the hidden archive of the world.

My adoptive father was very repressive about what we were allowed to listen to. If it wasn’t Baroque or Classical or maybe Romantic, we would get in trouble for listening to modern music. One of the sort of transgressive things that my mom and I sometimes did was listen to Joni Mitchell or Stevie Wonder together. I have such distinct memories of holding the Ladies of the Canyon album and poring over it and reading the back and seeing Joni’s art. That was very formative music for me.

With Tracy Chapman, I was 9 the first time I heard her. I was on a trip with my uncle and I remember hearing “Behind the Wall” and just bawling because we were the family behind the wall. We were the family where there was violence and abuse and the police were constantly being called. To hear someone writing this and have this sense of recognition that this happens to other people and I’m not alone in the world and hearing her voice and her writing and poetry made me feel I wasn’t alone.

And when I left home at 15, my sonic world exploded. There were all these endless possibilities. I’m a huge Staples Singers fan. John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal (particularly Giant Step/De Old Folks at Home). And Mulatu Astatke, who I’ve been obsessively listening to over the pandemic. His music is expanding my understanding of melody and structure. It is ongoing. The influences never stop and I’m influenced by my brilliant peers as well.

Has your daughter listened to these songs with you? What do you want her to learn about you from the music?

She has listened to it. One of the hard things has been having to talk about abuse with my child. I think it is incredibly important. I think that by the time we start to do that in schools, it is often much too late for the children, including me. I’ll never forget in Grade 4, hearing the song, “My body’s nobody’s body but mine,” and for me that had not been my reality since I was 3. What I want her to know is that we are strong enough to live through hard things and come out the other side of it. I want her to know that she is strong enough, in whatever struggles she faces.

I want her to know that her stories are worth telling and her experiences are of value. She is an infinitely strong being and she is part of a whole long lineage of strong women. I want her to know that. And that she is loved so much and a huge part of why I strive to do anything or be any kind of good ancestor is because of her.

(Editor’s Note: Read part two of our Artist of the Month interview here.)


Photo credit: Marc Baptiste (top); Laura E. Partain (in story)

Jessica Lea Mayfield, ‘Sorry Is Gone’

The last thing that women need to do is say we’re sorry.

In the past week, in the wake of numerous “scandals” dripping out of Hollywood, this is a more relevant statement than ever. Don’t get me wrong: The allegations against Harvey Weinstein are scandalous, but it’s a loaded word. “Scandal” sounds dramatic, out of the norm, something suited for television. Truth is, the actions made by Weinstein weren’t scandalous at all — they were, quite devastatingly, something that women endure far, far too often. The real scandal is the cover up and a climate that lets men systemically abuse women, day after day, minute after minute. And a climate that somehow demands that women apologize for what is done to them, not the other way around.

Jessica Lea Mayfield, who endured abuse in her own marital relationship, says something that all women should chant on — “Sorry Is Gone.” And it’s just that: The sorry should be, and is, out of our vocabulary, when we’re the ones who are the victims. “I deserve to occupy this space without feeling like I don’t belong,” she sings. “I’m done excusing myself.” Her rootsiness, gleaned from playing in her family’s bluegrass band as a child, is gone, too. But in this context, the raw aggression and angsty chug of guitar screams, appropriately, for independence from the life she left behind. It’s okay to start over, and it’s okay to start speaking up at any moment, be it five minutes or five years later. It’s never too late, but the time has come for Mayfield — and the rest of us — to just stop apologizing.  

Kaia Kater on Breaking the Wheel of Silence (Op-Ed)

I remember exactly where I was when I first saw Amber Coffman play with the Dirty Projectors. I found myself on a second date with a kind and sweet person; I had ended my serving shift at work and he picked me up right as I finished stacking the last chairs in the restaurant. We exited the subway and promptly walked the wrong way down Saint Catherine Street. He was a foreigner, and I was terrible with directions, though we didn’t panic too much because shows usually start late in Montréal.

When we finally found the venue and walked in, I was transfixed. I loved the show, but it was Amber that caught me in the way she sang and the power with which she moved. We went back to his apartment after the show and listened to Swing Lo Magellan and Bitte Orca again and again and again. The records suddenly had new meaning.

I also remember exactly where I was when I first heard Amber Coffman talk about her abuser, a music publicist who, she stated, “RUBBED my ass and BIT my hair at a bar a couple of years ago.” When she posted to Twitter, I was in Glasgow, Scotland, in frigid January with the same man I had seen the show with so many years ago. When we spoke about it over dinner at a café, I commended Coffman on her bravery for even speaking his name. I fidgeted with a cloth napkin on the table, wishing I had the courage to do the same.

On the walk back that night, Coffman’s statement still preoccupied my mind. She was tired — tired of men getting away with bullsh*t. I felt tired, too.

It’s a type of fatigue that seeps into your bones and threatens to become a part of you.

It’s a type of fatigue that makes you hesitant to walk down streets alone at night in towns that you don’t know — or worse, in towns that you do.

It’s a type of fatigue that renders you permanently quiet, and makes you just want to get through it … whatever it is.

In all of the Hollywood films I’ve seen about boxing — of which there seems to be an infinite amount — the first lesson the coach teaches the hero is to keep moving their feet as soon as they step into the ring. As a young woman, the same authority figures drill you to always carry pepper spray or to never leave a party without a friend.

We internalize and name these coping mechanisms and hold them close like lifelines: a buddy system, a self-defense system, or any system that helps keep us alive.

I’m a musician. I’m also a woman and a young person. My parents led by example, encouraging me to shrug off people who doubted my abilities, my character, or my strength and to aim to prove them wrong through my actions in life rather than through direct confrontation. When uncomfortable situations did arise, I often heard my mom’s voice counseling my more indignant self: “Don’t give them power over you!” Like most women, I was expertly conditioned to keep hustling and moving no matter what.

Throughout most of my teenage years and into my 20s, I was always fighting a proverbial match against somebody. I floated on the surface in order to stay okay. I had quick feet. Any experiences of harassment I endured — of which there were many — I promptly filed away and ignored. That was how it went, day in and day out. Like most women.

Why is today different?

Today is different because one of my close friends, a mentor and someone I look up to, was recently verbally harassed and insulted by a man at a professional music conference. Today is different because the same man exhibited this pattern on me, and several women in the music industry prior to this incident.

Thankfully, my mentor did not stay quiet. She took to the Internet that evening with dizzying quickness: “Tonight, I was reduced (in an introduction) to a f***able vagina by someone trying to sound smart and funny. Someone who knows better … or who I thought knew better (married, father to a daughter). I'm equally shocked and saddened when this happens. I'm also a loud mouth. While I wont shame them online, I am retelling the story to everyone in person here at the [conference name].”

Her post was flooded with supportive comments from both men and women. Most women were appalled but ultimately unsurprised, and most men were equally appalled, yet trying to figure out how best to be allies in the situation.

I was so angry that I couldn’t speak. I had to leave the “well-deserved-margarita-after-a-long-week” bar stool and spend a minute outside to cool my head.

When I had an encounter with the aforementioned abuser, he cornered me alone and made me feel so emotionally unstable that I lost my quick feet. I couldn’t move around him. He stood above me, under me, around me, like an immovable blockade. I couldn’t breathe. He verbally ejaculated the words he had to say to me, words of abuse and discomfort. And then, I had to promptly walk onstage and perform a show, as if nothing had ever happened.

Abuse occurs everywhere all the time. It’s a fear that lives within all of us. We work to deprive it of oxygen, to kill it. We work to bring our better selves forward.

But monsters live among us. And we feed them constantly with our silence. They become gluttonous and greedy. They want everything and they take it. They invade the lives of our mentors, our children, and our friends.

The hidden bruises of sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse are terrifying for anyone to endure — not only because of the incidents themselves, but also because victims are forced to live within a society that is designed to see them fail. There is no coping mechanism, no system to employ after one has been victimized. This rings true for self-employed female musicians, who are often told to put up with it and shut up about it, lest our careers be threatened for raising an honest voice.

It’s “part of the deal” to agree to the ugly underbelly of the music industry.

It’s “part of the deal” to oftentimes not be taken seriously as a businessperson.

It’s “part of the deal” to constantly be sexualized.

And it’s “part of the deal” to accept career success in return for docile behavior — to be the ever-silent and smiling beauty.

Sparring with shadows is one thing, but dragging them into the light is a grueling and upsetting task that takes a lot of bravery. For a long time, I admired and looked up to Amber Coffman, to Ke$ha, to Lucy DeCoutere, and to any woman who dared expose these people for who they really are. I admired them because, most of the time, not many people are on their side. And, most of the time, their careers suffer.

A close friend once pointed out to me that the boxing ring threatens to become a prison if women and men don’t both collectively step away from it and acknowledge its dysfunction. As the self-described black-feminist-lesbian-mother-poet Audre Lorde once wrote, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

Amidst the confused realization that this abusive man in my community was placing calculated and cruel psychological landmines on the women around me, I immediately became sure of one thing: I had to say something. And so I did, and I am — here. Now.

We can’t let these women stand without us. We must work together to expose the coyotes that deliberately eat away at our own social circles, at our self-esteem and joy of being human. We stay in the ring to live and get by, but the decision to step out of it is something driven from the gut — a stubborn and validating determination to take off the gloves and free ourselves.

So let’s break the wheel of silence that allows malignant cancers of abuse to spread like wildfire. Let’s stomp on the wheel, and set it on fire, and hold those people accountable for their actions.

What does breaking the wheel of silence mean?

It means refusing to shrink to anyone’s idea of who we should be.

It means choosing to be surrounded by people who respect us both personally and professionally.

It means both men and women making a conscious point to regularly speak up against — and stop — abuse in the workplace, whether that workplace is at a rowdy pub at midnight or a quiet afternoon show in a concert hall or a music conference.

Let’s have slow feet, feet that are planted firmly within the understanding that we are worth more than remarks on appearance, or unsolicited touching, or being moving targets for wolves. Let’s teach our daughters and sons to do the same. Only through these daily acts can we raise each other higher — beyond the reach of monsters — and into the upper pure bright air.

Let’s break the wheel.