“We’ll be mostly just trying our best to bring these songs to life in a live setting,” says Minneapolis-based indie rock singer/songwriter runo plum, who is about to hit the road for a North American headlining tour behind her debut full-length, patching, which dropped last November via Winspear (home of our phriend Daneshevskaya). The two-month tour kicks off this Tuesday in Milwaukee and includes a February 10th date at our very own Johnny Brenda’s, where she says her four-piece band will be playing the majority of the album (along with a handful of older tracks), which she tells me during a recent phone chat has been earning pleasantly surprising responses from fans: “My favorite reactions have been what people consider to be their favorite songs, which have, surprisingly, been the songs with the more mellow, quiet vibes, which I love, because I like writing those kinds of songs.”
“patching doesn’t skip ahead to the healing phase of a breakup but instead sulks in the heavy, disorienting period that follows and lingers in the discomfort where grief and clarity overlap,” wrote The Line of Best Fit of runo plum’s first LP, which is a breakup record but ultimately concludes with the kind of creation of a new self that comes with the healing process (and discovering new love). The full-length follows three solo EPs (2021’s earlier from ’20 and softer, followed by 2022’s jupiter and mountain songs, a collaborative EP with Philip Brooks), but during our chat runo tells me that patching was a bit different from her shorter releases: “It feels a lot more professional, like a full piece of work. In the past, it was more like working with fragments, working with what I have with limited resources. Now, I have more resources.”
runo explains that her decision to go with Winspear was, in part, due to Minnesota-born, Vermont-based Winspear artist Lutalo, a longtime acquaintance who would serve as the producer of patching and who will be providing support for the first-half of her upcoming dates: “If Lutalo wouldn’t have spoken so highly of them, I may have gone with another one. But Jordan, who runs the label, is great and I totally trust him!” She also says that the relationship she formed with Lutalo over the course of two weeks in a cabin studio in rural Vermont was amazing, although admits that the two didn’t know each other terribly well prior to the sessions: “It feels really special. I’ve honestly only hung out with them a few times, but they’re the most warm, open, comfortable person, and I’m not the warmest, friendliest person with strangers, so they made it super easy. It was one of those things where you feel like you’ve known each other forever, even though we’d only hung out a handful of times.”
Her currently scheduled dates will have runo plum on the road until the very end of March. In addition to headlining shows, she’ll also be playing this year’s Treefort Music Fest in Boise, whose lineup also includes PHILTHY phriends Magdalena Bay, flipturn, Mother Mother, Samia, SEXTILE, Elise Trouw, Momma, L.A. Witch, Fust, Soft Blue Shimmer, The Velveteers, and Gully Boys… Although major festivals aren’t new to runo, who played last year’s Paris and London editions of Pitchfork, in addition to London Calling #2, and tells me she loves playing settings like that. But after runo wraps these dates, she excitedly tells me that she’ll be moving on to something new: “I’m gonna go full LP 2 mode when I’m back from tour. I believe heavily in the Spring Equinox being the new year, so it’s a new beginning. I’m gonna chop my hair off, wrap this album cycle, and get on to the next one!”
*Get your tickets here.
