In the late summer of 2023, something shifted for Michael Rudd. Songs began arriving in the middle of the night — fully formed melodies, stray lines of lyrics, entire arrangements vivid enough to jolt him awake. Within weeks, the music was no longer confined to sleep. It followed him through the day, insistent and unrelenting, as if making up for decades of silence.
That silence stretches back more than 30 years. In his twenties, Rudd packed a two-door Datsun with a typewriter, notebooks, a guitar, and a bag of clothes and drove from New Jersey to New Mexico, tracing a personal triangle between Albuquerque and Western Massachusetts that he and his growing family would navigate for years. Long before that, he had already claimed the identity of writer — a voracious reader as a kid, drawn to characters who felt out of step with the world and determined to understand his own restless mind.
Music entered the picture almost by accident. In Albuquerque, Rudd joined a fledgling band as its lead singer despite limited experience as a guitarist and no real history as a frontman. Immersed in Southern California punkabilly, blues variations, and rockabilly grit, he began writing songs to match the sound that had captured him. After three years playing steady gigs in the local scene and opening for artists like Charlie Musselwhite, the band released a CD featuring several of his originals. Not long after, it dissolved — and Rudd largely set his guitar aside for the next three decades.
In the intervening years, he built a life in education, teaching in Albuquerque before moving through public schools, charter schools, and colleges in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Eventually, he returned to New Mexico to serve as principal of a K-8 school at Acoma Pueblo, a community rooted in more than a thousand years of continuous presence on ancestral land. The daily drive west from Albuquerque — across mesas, arroyos, and open desert — and immersion in a culture fiercely protective of its traditions marked a quiet turning point. The experience underscored ideas that would later surface in his songs: identity as excavation, meaning as something layered and hard-won.
For years, Rudd occasionally heard phantom strains of music — symphonic passages, Latin-tinged melodies, fragments in Spanish — that would drift in and out of his consciousness. By the time he left Acoma in 2023, the phenomenon had gone quiet. Then the songs returned, this time urgent and undeniable. He began capturing them on his phone’s voice memo app, later shaping the fragments on acoustic guitar, adjusting melodies, building chord progressions, and refining lyrics until they felt true.
The burst of creativity has been prolific. In less than two years, Rudd has completed three studio albums, with a third, Ways of the World, set for release on February 27th via Invisible Road Records (PRE-SAVE). Two additional records are slated to follow in late 2026 and 2027. All three albums were recorded at Frogville Studios in Santa Fe, grounding his late-blooming catalog firmly in the New Mexico landscape that first shaped him.
Rudd’s songwriting centers on seekers — people grappling with mortality, mental illness, isolation, love, and the possibility of redemption. His characters often occupy emotional margins, wrestling privately with doubt and longing while presenting a steadier face to the world. There is suffering in these songs, but also grace — flashes of beauty and connection that cut through the noise.
Today, Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of Ways of the World, an album that builds on the terrain mapped out by his debut, Long Way from Paradise (2024), and 2025’s Going to the Mountain. The new record broadens his sonic palette while maintaining the reflective core that defines his work. Some of its material was written in direct response to a cancer diagnosis that arrived just a week after finishing sessions for the previous album, adding a sharpened sense of impermanence to an already introspective body of work. The album features a seasoned supporting cast, including Brant Leeper on keys, Mark Clark on drums and percussion, Pat Malone on guitar, Asher Barreras on bass and cello, and Kelly Khun on backing vocals — collaborators who help translate Rudd’s intimate sketches into full-bodied studio performances. Musically, the album finds Rudd evolving his sparse folk and Americana that feels uniquely Southwest with its lyrics and compositions that unfold like the majestic landscape of the place he calls home. These are songs that burn slowly and connect deeply. At times, they rock, and elsewhere, they convey a sense of intimacy, but they also get delivered with passion and soul as Rudd continues to carve out his place as a quietly prolific troubadour worthy of attention.
Listen to the album and read our interview with Rudd below…
What inspired you to write the songs on this album overall? Was there a defining moment that was the impetus for you to begin working on it, or did it happen more organically?
I’m always writing, so I’m not usually conscious of a long-term plan. Whatever comes to me that moment is where I am musically. I will say that a cancer diagnosis soon after the last session for my previous album inspired a number of these songs and provided a kind of foundation for the rest.
How long did it take to pen the songs on the album?
Hard to say. Maybe a month or a little more. I’ve had a lot on my mind.
What do you think are the key themes or common threads among the songs on the record?
For the most part, the threads here run throughout the five-album project: mortality, redemption, love, mental illness, acceptance, spiritual concerns.
What was the studio session (or sessions) and recording process like for this album? Any great stories from the studio? What kind of vibe did you aim for overall?
When I first got the diagnosis of Stage 4 Metastatic Prostate Cancer, I learned conflicting information about life expectancy. So I wrote and rewrote frantically before things got worse, wondering if this would be my last album. Sessions began just a few days after I’d finished five weeks of radiation, and I was tired and a bit depleted. As it turned out, we’ve since recorded a fourth album (to be released in September 2026), and we’re headed back to the studio in early March to record a fifth. But I didn’t know that then. On the first day back at Frogville in Santa Fe, NM, where we always record, the vibe was not what I wanted. Same incredibly talented musicians, same friends. But it was really quiet. I had a suspicion that it was about my condition. We talked about it for a minute or two, and the room transformed back into the perfect, collaborative space it always is.
If listeners can take away one thing from having heard this album, what do you hope that is?
Like the people I write about, we’re all dealing with something. In that respect, I’m hoping that listeners find emotional or spiritual connections with the lyrics or the music or the songs themselves.
How is this album similar to or different from your past releases?
It’s a continuation of sorts as far as what and who I’m writing about, but each album seems to get a little closer to matching what I hear in my head. There’s also a handful of songs on this album that I couldn’t write just a few months before. My songwriting keeps changing. I’m just trying to keep my ears open so I don’t miss anything.
What is coming up next for you, Michael?
Midnight at Dawn will be released in September, and we’ll record ten new songs in March for an album that will be released next year.
