Joe Rut

Oakland, CA  singer/songwriter Joe Rut’s quirky humor underpins a heartfelt, richly lyrical, and subtly hallucinatory alt-country tapestry.  It is a deeply American music, although the border guards seem to have been bribed with psychedelics to look the other way as other influences stream in. Rut’s music has been compared to Todd Snider, The Band, and 70’s-era Grateful Dead, with an occasional side dish of Ween and Frank Zappa

“[Joe Rut] is where so many traditions and genres that have slowly started to disappear actually still reside…Jerry Garcia, Jorma Kaukonen, Guy Clark, and Townes Van Zandt. They would all be gracious in welcoming this young man to the tattered carpet stage…"humor spiced with poignancy." That’s Rut’s forte whether he is aware of it or not. He has cornered the market already...a classic in the making.” 

-John Apice, No Depression

Although Rut’s recent travels of the country in search of songs with his dog Potato were cut short by the theft of his van and instruments, he was able to recover “The Pretty Good Book”, a massive antique accounting ledger in which he records his songs. Says Rut, “I wanted to call it ‘The Good Book’, but it turns out the bible had that name sewn up, so…you know? That I was able to get the book back after distributing a massive stack of flyers was pretty amazing. It was returned by a homeless guy who refused any reward for its return. He had found it and held onto it for weeks before he saw my flyer because, he told me, he could ‘tell that someone’s heart and soul had gone into it.’ That moment almost made the whole incident worth it!”

While many of Joe’s songs clearly stem from an established folk-troubadour tradition, his adventurousness and refusal to shy away from “the weird” set his footprints away from the well-worn middle of the road. Joe’s songs find him drunk-dialing his friends at 3 AM Tuesday morning, critiquing Mr. Spock’s love-life, offering a lift to an abandoned black velvet Elvis painting, or pondering the tragicomic mating rituals of Porcupines. Says Joe, “I was recently accused by a critic of ’veering dangerously close to novelty songs’…as if that’s a bad thing?” 

Joe’s omnivorous musical tastes have seen him as a founding member of country harmony group Loretta Lynch, and as an alumnus of the bluegrass mowing Spikedrivers, folk rockers 86 (the band), noise/looping duo Lumper/Splitter, and experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser’s Grooves of Mystery. Joe has played with these groups at England’s Glastonbury Music Festival, the venerable Fillmore auditorium, Burning Man, side stages at Shoreline Amphitheatre and the Concord Pavillion, and fronting his own band as a headliner at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage, and to a sold-out crowd at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. 12 solo albums in, Joe Rut looks forward to talking about himself in the 3rd person for years to come!

So what’s new? 2023 finds Joe holed up in the studio putting the finishing touches on a gooey, multi-layered, psychedelic country/pop/rock album. It’s like the Beatles and Robyn Hitchcock mud-wrestling with The Flying Burrito Brothers while Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young try to explain to the police that they are a band and not a law firm.

Sign up for the mailing list to be kept informed about new releases and shows!