Given her foibles, Ruby Kendrick's decision to give up visual art for music seems like a brambled path.
In a phone interview promoting her September 7 performance at Rozz-Tox (under her band name Ruby the RabbitFoot), she said she used to be "terrified" to play live.
She loves pop music but writes these lyrics: "People with nice homes / Shouldn't play with matches. / They'll burn it right down, / Tear their hearts right up. / And all that's left in the middle / Are some smoky lungs."
Because many of the songs are deeply personal, they sometimes resurrect pain in live performance.
And in a business in which the release of new material often comes years after a song is written, she's admittedly impatient. Talking about her songwriting process, Kendrick said: "If it doesn't happen immediately, I'm just not interested."
Despite all that - and even though she and her family knew she'd be a visual artist - she ditched that assumed calling in college to pursue life as a performing songwriter. (She still works in the visual arts, making her own videos and album artwork.)
