Singled Out: Michael Rudd's Going Away

03-28-2025

Michael Rudd just released his new album, "Going to the Mountain," and to celebrate we asked him to tell us about the song "Going Away." Here is the story:

"Going Away" was one of the first songs that I wrote after songs started coming in the summer of 2023. Even though the song was finished and one of the first chosen for the album Long Way from Paradise, there was still something missing. So I pulled it and put it aside. Months later, when I started thinking about Going to the Mountain, I listened again and what was missing became clear, and I worked on the arrangement until it matched what I heard. Most importantly, it still moved me when I sang it. What I didn't know is that the song still had some changing to do.

First, a few words about why I wrote the song. The story goes back 30 years, beginning not too long after I first arrived in Albuquerque. Often, I write to figure things out. In this case, I'd been thinking about one of my closest friends from a period of my life in which I was too blind to see the suffering I caused others and too ignorant to understand how my mind worked and the self-destruction that seemed to be its primary goal. A kind of revelation came much later.

But, back then, my new friend, older by at least 25 years, swept in with all his flamboyance and stories and elaborate meals and love and accepted every one of my flaws and glitches. Genelle, my wife, and I both loved him immensely, and we spent every day with him. For a short time, he and I set up a little bake stand at a weekend flea market. We rented out the kitchen of a bakery in our neighborhood and stayed up all night baking bread and small cheesecakes, making sure we got to the flea market by the time it opened. But things quickly took a turn. The small piles of papers all over his apartment grew much larger, and when they grew too high he got a storage space in which he did the same thing. He became obsessed with escaping the city and going home to Buffalo even though most of his family had either died or moved away years ago. He drifted in and out of deep depression and suicide was always on his mind. At some point, at least from our perspective, his thoughts devolved into action, and once that happened, the endgame seemed almost inevitable. His method of choice was food, alcohol, and cigarettes, any two of which, if you're diabetic, was a guaranteed way to do the job. He lost his foot and he lost his apartment and then he shuffled between friends' places to sleep, including ours, pulling up in his loud, old, blue VW van, which he sometimes slept in, leaning his seat back as far as he could amidst all the debris behind him. One day, he ended up in the V.A. with an illness that turned out to be lung cancer. He lasted another ten days, and he died with the two of us and a few other friends holding onto him. His last words to me, which I'll keep to myself, are something I'm still trying to understand all these years later. In one way or the other, all of this is in the song.

I bring songs and arrangements to the studio and an idea of how I want each one to sound in the end, but the process is intentionally very collaborative. I work with gifted musicians, and I listen hard and think deeply about everything they have to say. For them, it's all about the song.

I write primarily on my acoustic guitar, and I'd hardly touched my electric, a mid-'70s U.S. Fender Strat, since my nights playing blues and rockabilly in the Albuquerque club scene a long time ago. But someone suggested playing my electric, and that changed everything. The sound of an electric guitar echoed the mind of my friend in ways that an acoustic couldn't. The change seemed to open up possibilities for everyone, and the song was transformed. "Going Away" came to the studio as acoustic-based Americana, and it left as something much closer to 1970s rock.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here