RuthAnne

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If anyone understands the alchemical ability of music to soundtrack and add meaning to the highs, lows and messy in-betweens of life, it’s Dublin-born songwriter, artist, mother and now author, RuthAnne. 

Under the first of those creative guises, RuthAnne has been penning juggernaut hits since she was 17 and wrote JoJo’s 2006 smash ‘Too Little, Too Late’ - a track that, by the time she was 19, had soared to the Top Five in both the US and UK singles charts, immediately transplanting RuthAnne’s life from Irish student to globally in-demand writer. Since then, she’s been behind equally seismic and era-defining songs for Britney Spears (‘Work Bitch’), One Direction (‘No Control’, ‘Where Do Broken Hearts Go’), Martin Garrix and Bebe Rexha (the 1.5 billion-streaming ‘In The Name of Love’) and dozens more.

Under her own name, meanwhile, RuthAnne’s debut 2018 solo single ‘The Vow’ has built its own colourful and still-snowballing story. Seven years since its release, the track continues to go viral on an annual basis, providing the soundtrack to weddings, engagements and gender reveals around the world, whilst breaking the UK Top 40 and hitting the Irish Number One spot twice.

The thread throughout all of her considerable successes is her innate ability to tap into feelings that are somehow both personal and universal; to create songs that feel like succinct vignettes plucked from the narrative of a life. 

“It’s always about the storytelling,” she says. “When I give advice to songwriters, or even as an artist, I'm like: just tell the truth. In a movie there's a start, a middle and an end, but in a song you're capturing one moment in time so you don't need to tie it up in a bow. You don't have to resolve it, but you have to make people feel something - whether it’s happy or sexy or sad, it has to create that emotion.”

Now with two decades of experience in the industry, RuthAnne is taking a lifetime of lessons and imbuing them into her most multi-faceted year to date. 2025 will see the release of second solo LP ‘The Moment’ - a collection of soulful singer-songwriter excellence that puts this lightning-in-a-bottle feeling front and centre. “It goes through grief, it goes through love, it goes through loss, it goes through joy; through celebration and womanhood; becoming a mother and being in love and and everything like that,” she says. “People don't need to have had the same story as me, but I hope it will resonate and soundtrack people’s own moments because really, it’s just about the human condition.”

She’s also gearing up to release her first book, ‘It’s Not Just A Song’: a text designed to act as the guidebook she wished she’d had entering the industry, and a helping hand offered out to young songwriters and artists trying to navigate the sides of the job that nobody normally teaches you. “I feel like I was just thrown into this industry that nothing can prepare you for. It was a huge, adult world and I was only 19. I hadn't traveled the world. I hadn't really been outside of Ireland,” she explains of those earliest days. “I think a lot of creatives in the music industry are walking around kind of traumatised and damaged. It's a very cut-throat place. I don't know if there's ever been a book like this from a female songwriter who's done it professionally now for 20 years. I really wanted to write something that would be able to pass down and pay forward what I've learned, and mentor people from afar.”

Still prolifically writing for other artists and being a mother to two daughters, RuthAnne’s current life might seem like a whirlwind of activity, but for the creative polymath it’s all about finding different outlets that fit under the umbrella of her personality and tastes. Having experimented across genres, “doing dance music, folk music, rock music, pop music… being creatively quite greedy” as a songwriter, when she thinks about herself as RuthAnne the artist, she’s able to focus on the truest parts of herself. Musically, it stems back to her roots as a lifelong student of Whitney, Mariah, Aretha, Etta and history’s most singular, powerful female vocalists. “When it came to being an artist, it was like, well, what is the realist to me? And it really came back to what I was listening to as a kid, trying to emulate Mariah’s runs and being obsessed with great singers,” she says.

Lyrically, meanwhile, the songs that make up ‘The Moment’ could only have been written and performed by RuthAnne. Much like ‘The Vow’, a track influenced by Irish Celtic hymns that she explains she would never have penned for someone else, these are meaningful songs embedded in personal stories, that needed her own voice at the helm.

First single ‘The Way I’m Wired’ is an immediate example of the generous and connective spirit that floods the album. Having lived with chronic endometriosis for eight years, the richly affective ballad was conceived “in the middle of a bad flare up”, and arrives as a message of both comfort and education on the debilitating realities of the condition. “Now I’m lying on the cold floor in the bathroom / The painkillers don’t work like they used to / And the doctors say I’m fine, must be all in my head right?’, goes one particularly devastating line.

As an ambassador for Endometriosis Ireland, and having started an educational touring schools project - Endo&ME - with her two sisters, spreading the word about this condition that is, like many women’s health issues, so often dismissed, is a hugely important subject for RuthAnne. “It frustrates me that so many women are suffering, still undiagnosed. If it was a men's disease, I think it would be in a very different state because it's so debilitating that men would not be able to work if they were in this type of pain but women have to get on with it, and get up with the kids, and go to work and do it all,” she says. “It's also not just a song for endo justice. There's a lot of people who might be able to see themselves in it because of postpartum or just mental health, depression, anxiety in general or any other chronic illness that's kind of invisible. I think that it's really a song for anyone going through anything like that.”

Co-written with frequent collaborators Future Cut (Lily Allen, Pink Pantheress, Little Mix) over the course of 2024 - writing “on the tube on the way to another session, or in the shower, or whilst feeding my child and also being pregnant” - elsewhere on ‘The Moment’, all of these other facets of RuthAnne’s life also shine through. ‘Complete Me’ is a classic, big-voiced love song to her husband and children, while ‘Through It All’ is a grateful acknowledgement of the tenacity that it takes to stay strong in a relationship when kids and Covid and all manner of other things arrive.

On ‘Queen of LA’, RuthAnne directly speaks of the tumultuous relationship with the city that led her to leave after eight years and return home in 2018. “I didn’t have the perfect body or the perfect face for Hollywood, and I was trying to just kind of get by with my Irish charm and humour, and ultimately I realised that I wasn't happy there,” she says. “The song is about acknowledging that ending something or leaving something that might not be serving you is not a failure. It can be a new beginning.”

Now, having cemented herself as a true powerhouse force in the industry, 2025 for RuthAnne is not so much about new beginnings but pulling together everything that she has and is into a pair of projects that showcase her at her core: as an artist always striving for connection and to capture these vital moments of magic.

“I think the ideal is just getting to create and be creative; to be an artist, be a songwriter, be a mum, be an author,” she says of her current mindset. “I always felt like, when I was younger, you had to be this or you had to be that, but you don't have to just be one thing. It all goes into the same pot. For me, my creativity knows no bounds”.