Annie DiRusso
The sound of distorted guitars speaks to indie rocker Annie DiRusso. That sound also speaks for DiRusso on her new EP God, I Hate This Place.
“I feel a lot of emotion from a distorted guitar, so I think that’s pretty reflective on the EP,” DiRusso says, speaking to the Scene in advance of her show at The Basement East on Wednesday June 29. “I highlight more heavy and emotional moments with that sound.”
God, I Hate This Place is full of heavy and emotional moments. Working with her longtime producer Jason Cummings on the record’s five tracks, DiRusso sets a darkly honest mood, magnified with fuzzed-out guitars.
“I’ve always been very guitar-driven,” she explains. “That’s what I write all my songs on. In the last few years, I’ve been mostly using electric guitar.”
DiRusso was inspired to experiment with distortion by other female artists working that sonic landscape.
“When I got to college, I started listening to Margaret Glaspy and Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski, Adrianne Lenker and all of these people who were being so incredibly honest,” she recalls. “It was like they were being conversational, almost, with their honesty over these distorted guitars. And I absolutely fell in love with it. I was like, ‘This makes me feel so much.’”
DiRusso also drew inspiration from these artists’ dedication to unvarnished lyrical truth.
“That feeling of hearing something and being like, ‘Oh my gosh, I felt that so many times, but I would never say it out loud,’” she says. “That was a huge moment for me, of just realizing that honesty and vulnerability is the most important aspect of songwriting, and saying things that I’m scared to say out loud.”
DiRusso understands that degree of honesty can be unnerving to some. Case in point: the unsettling opening lines of the EP’s opening track “Emerson,” a song about the street in a suburban part of New York where she grew up: “Baptized by a pedophile / In a church that reeks of oak and death.”
“I think some of the stuff I say makes people feel a little uncomfortable,” she acknowledges with understatement.
In many ways, God, I Hate This Place represents a journey of self-discovery, prompted by a breakup she went through during her junior year at Belmont University, where she was studying songwriting and music business. At the end of “Emerson,” she shares a key realization from her experience, which she describes as “the thesis” of the record: “Guess I’ve never escaped me for too long / Guess I’ve only ever been who I was.”
“It’s like this weird juxtaposition, that I found to be really inspiring writing this EP, of the limit that puts on someone — being only able to be who they are — but also how freeing that is,” she says. “And I think being honest is the only way to really capture that juxtaposition.”
Both directly and indirectly, the aforementioned breakup and the causes behind it inform much of the record. DiRusso confronts unrealistic male-centric notions of female body image and beauty that can be damaging to the psyches of women young and old. While most of the material was written in 2022, DiRusso wrote “Body” in 2020 as a sort of personal declaration of independence right after that toxic relationship ended. At the beginning of the song, she poses the question, “Should I lose weight just so he’ll want me?” She defiantly provides an answer in the opening line of the chorus: “Not really one for trying to be who you want me to be.”
Annie DiRusso
DiRusso recorded the EP at Forty-one Fifteen Studio in Nashville and Cutting Room Studios in New York. Josef Kuhn played drums, while Cummings played bass, as well as additional guitars, often contrasting DiRusso’s distortion-drenched riffing with soaring, melodic parts.
“I’ve been working with Jason since I was 16,” DiRusso says of Cummings, who has produced and engineered all her releases. “And I think with this project, as my first-ever project [that’s] more than just singles, we were really able to push the boundaries.”
Wednesday night at The Beast, DiRusso will be performing with her touring band — Kuhn on drums, Zack Lockwood on bass and Eden Joel on lead guitar. A short while ago, she recorded a new song with the band.
“My only understanding of recording is just the kind of insular recording situation with just me and Jason playing everything,” she explains. “We typically — and we did for this EP — start with tracking the guitar with a click and then building a track around that.
“But recently I had an experience where I did record a newer song I’m working on, live tracking with my band, and it was an ‘aha’ moment for me,” she continues. “I really loved the process me and Jason have done, but I think for future stuff, I really like that feeling when I listen back to the thing I just recorded. I really loved [that] you could hear the whole band playing together and moving together, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want.’”
