This weathered and wise debut album from newcomer Riddy Arman delivers a kind of rich, contemplative sound that evokes the classic country from decades past, full of story and gentle power.

Riddy Arman is a real deal country singer-songwriter. You see, Arman not only creates the most sublime, stirring, introspective music, but she also tends free-range cattle by profession (I’m just gonna steer clear—pun intended—from gendered labels for that). In fact, many songs off her recently released self-titled debut album are clearly influenced by the slow, steady days of solitude across plains and pasture, watching the sun rise and set against the breathtaking landscape of Montana in all weather conditions.

As difficult as I assume that type of work to be, I find myself envying the distance it might provide from the crowds, traffic, technology, and outward chatter that make it so hard for us to sit quietly and be okay with our own company. I don’t know if this is true, but I imagine that very, very few country artists live a lifestyle that directly harkens back to the origins of the style of music they play, a life that isn’t just legend but an everyday experience they can sing about firsthand.

At its core, Arman’s sound is beautifully stripped down of any frills or embellishments, just her acoustic guitar and her husky, unaffected alto voice that holds worlds of lived experience in each deliberate, thoughtful note. When additional instruments do enter from the wings, they are guests that never overstay their welcome.

Riddy Arman. Photo by Elisabeth Kokesh, 2021.

Arman’s lyrics are at moments meditative and gentle, then wrestle with demons, ghosts, and loss in the dark. The first track, “Spirits, Angels, Or Lies,” tells the true story of how her father, as he was nearing death, saw Johnny Cash come to him in a dream the night Cash himself died, asking him to join him on a freight train to whatever destination came next. While her father chose to “stay for my children and my wife,” he would pass on a month later.

Nurses explain the phenomenon to her mother: “You can call them spirits, angels, or lies / but you never know what someone sees with their own eyes.” This song is a nod to the fact that there’s so much we don’t know about life and death and everything in between. To nail each experience, dream, or memory down as a true or false, real or imagined thing is to discard all meaning that defies explanation or reason. While this song must be incredibly hard to play live over and over at shows, I’m positive this story speaks to the experiences of so many people in the audience, which is why Arman is so good at what she does.

My absolute favorite song on the album, “Both of My Hands,” takes her exploration of death in another direction entirely. In this slow, eerie waltz, a fiddle dances at the edges like the wind making the firelight wild and unpredictable, even as she sings of a “stillness in the air that makes me wanna drown.” Each verse swings like a heavy pendulum from side to side, the weight of something—existence, perhaps—that stretches time.

There’s more than melancholy in this song. It pulses with a sort of depression and a sense that something ominous, a danger of some kind, lurks in the shadows. It feels like a ghost song for the living, for someone who can’t shake their demons: “I pass the bottle around / To both my hands,” then they slow-waltz with their own personal devil. The imagery is so strong and vivid in this song that I can’t just see it, I can smell and taste the smoke, whiskey, and fear. This type of artistry sends chills down my spine in the best kind of way.

But not every song is tortured, but maybe just a tad melancholy. Many songs are of heartbreak, such as “Barbed Wire,” an easy, sloping trot about choosing the romance of life as a cowboy over the messiness of romantic relationships with other humans. “Maybe one becomes a cowboy for the open sky / It never asks for nothing more than he’s able to provide / The landscape’s as large as the pain he feels inside / He’ll be married to the mountains till the day he dies.”

“Herding Song” takes that sentiment a step further, lamenting that city life is breaking her down, that her “boots haven’t seen horse shit in weeks / Now it’s just the city that stinks.” But “Too Late to Write a Love Song” is a relatively upbeat acknowledgement that despite how much she misses her lover, a chorus of voices remind her that it's long past time to move on.

While the tough skin that “Half a Heart Keychain” evokes may not be the whole emotional story of heartbreak for a relationship gone sour, it picks up at a point in that story when Arman is over it, which feels liberating, like the satisfaction of an extended middle finger before walking away and not looking back. But “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” an excellent cover of the Kris Kristofferson classic, is proof enough that all is not lost where the heart lies.

In the final track, “Problems of My Own,” the narrator watches her parents’ relationship deteriorate, affecting both her and her siblings emotionally and physically. Then, in a wise-beyond-her-years sort of way, the girl says “I’ma grow up fast, never look back / Find some problems of my own.” Later, Arman speaks over the gentle guitar, “The older I get, the more pain in these people that I see. / There’s lies that are kept, for a comfort that needs settin’ free. / Someone’s gotta go, somebody’s gotta leave. / And I know that somebody is me.”

Riddy Arman was scheduled to perform here in Minneapolis just before Thanksgiving but had to cancel at the last minute. Because of the times we live in, my first thought was “fucking COVID.” While I hope that she, her band, and each of their families are healthy and okay, I was heartbroken myself to miss her show. But I hold out hope that Arman will find a way to put us back on her touring map sooner rather than later!

BUy the album now

The graphic/web designer, webmaster, writer, and editor for the Adventures in Americana project, Jaclyn Nott enjoys a wide range of music—and Americana is just one of many favorites. Her main hustle is grant writing and web design, but her true passion is screen- and creative writing.

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