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In the Here and the Now with Sam & Ruby
By Troy Rogers
 Nashville based Sam Brooker and Ruby Amanfu, better known as Sam & Ruby, are one of the more interesting and captivating duos on the music scene today, with an unlikely back-story that only enhances the soft, spiritual layers within their songs. A native of Green Bay, Wisconsin, Sam grew up with a diverse musical taste for James Taylor, Prince, Parliament and Bootsy Collins while Ruby, originally from Ghana before growing up in Nashville, was raised on gospel, classical, jazz, and pop. Together Sam & Ruby create an ethereal recipe of music from the heart, mind, body, and soul that taps into the here and the now inside all of us.
Having found collective success on The Secret Life of Bees soundtrack with their song, "Heaven's My Home," Sam & Ruby are expanding their musical horizon with Rykodisc Records and the release of their debut album, "The Here and the Now," which finds its way to the public here and the now on August 11.
With Sam & Ruby getting ready to take to the stage in Nashville on August 7 while also planning a new tour, TheDeadbolt caught up with the musical duo for an exclusive one-on-one chat to learn more about how they met, their approach to making music, how they write songs together, and what's in store for the future as Sam & Ruby enjoy success as a duo.
THE DEADBOLT: Initially, how did you two team up?
 RUBY AMANFU: Well, we teamed up as friends two years before we ever teamed up as a musical entity. I met Sam at a writer’s night in Nashville and he was doing something that I hadn’t seen ever before. So I approached him and said, "Will you be my friend?" So we became friends and two years later we wrote our first song. It wasn’t even for us to do, ot was a song to pitch. I was writing for a publishing company at the time, so I was trying to get songs for different projects and stuff, and we wrote "The Here and The Now" as a song to pitch. But as you do in Nashville, if you’re a songwriter, you do pull out the songs that you have written even if you don’t plan on singing them yourself. But the cool thing was that we actually ended up finding some kind of spark in that song and when we sang it together there was something that really jumped out and was very shocking. We were like, "Wow! Okay, there’s something here." [laughs]
THE DEADBOLT: "The Here and The Now" is a fairly self explanatory album title, I think. Is there another meaning to it?
RUBY: I think that’s it.
 SAM BROOKER: Like Ruby said, that was the first song we’d ever written together, kind of the beginning of the whole journey. So when we started talking about album titles, it was very obvious to us. That’s the song that started it all.
RUBY: And it ended up becoming something. That is what matters, it’s the here and the now. We are just, "be in the moment you are in." Then you listen to the lyrics of the song, it sums up everything that we hope for out of life. Like the forgiveness piece is not just a romantic relationship subject, it’s across the board. I mean, you can be in congress, you can be anywhere, and you got to work on it. What’s the focus? It’s the here and the now. It fits everything.
THE DEADBOLT: How do you go into the songwriting side of the process?
SAM: Well, it varies. That album is kind of a mixture of things. The majority of the album was written with Ruby and I just starting a song out of thin air. You know, sitting down with each other. I’m typically sitting with my guitar, or at a piano messing around with stuff, and then Ruby clicks to something like, "I like that. Play that again." And then it’ll start digging into lyrical ideas. Then sometimes we’ll have maybe a chord started. I might bring her the core idea and, "if you like it, okay, let’s do it," and vice versa. Like a U.K. song, she came to me, "Okay, I have the lyrics. They’re done, we just to make music to it." It varies, but it works. [laughs]
THE DEADBOLT: Some people describe your sound as R&B, folk, and rock. How do you guys describe it?
 RUBY: I think I would replace rock with pop. Also, we like to go back to original definitions of genres. Like when you say R&B. What is that? Well, that may be rhythm and blues. So with our music, there’s definitely a rhythm to the way the lyrics lay and there’s blues all across the board on this record [laughs]. We talk about some challenging things sometimes. When you say pop, we like to think, "What does that even mean?" It means popular. Or we like to say population, which means we think it reaches a wide group of people. It’s not just one person that is going to get it. I think a lot of people are going to get it. And when you say folk, in the sense of it’s storytelling, we love to write stories. We love to tell stories, people stories, specifically our stories, definitely. So I think when you bring that all together, that is everything that we are.
THE DEADBOLT: Since you were originally going to be a songwriter, what changed to get you singing?
RUBY: It took me a while to find the love for performing. Now I have it in my system. But when I was younger I was always writing songs. I was always writing lyrics and doing little grooves here and there. But I was always knew how to sing and always knew how to perform. It was one of those things; I knew how to do it and it came so easily. I always liked to find challenges, especially coming up and trying to figure out who I was as a person. Writing lyrics was just me. So that’s what I worked on and I didn’t have to work on singing so much. But now, after all of that is said and done, I have found such passion for performing and for singing, and it’s interesting how it happened late in life. It’s interesting how it didn’t happen until Sam and I decided to be a duo and to step out together. I don’t know why. I just all of a sudden - literally, it’s like a beam of light came down and I understood my purpose and I understood why I’m doing this.
THE DEADBOLT: When you're on-stage and performing, what do you get from the audience?
SAM: We get a lot of good energy from the audience. Those songs are very healing to us, and in our personal lives, too. I noticed that whatever day we’re having when we get on-stage and start singing about what we’re singing, I feel it in my heart and I know they pick up on that. Obviously we see tears at our shows and we see laughter, and it just kind of runs the gambit of emotions during our shows. It’s nice. I think what Ruby is saying about the live aspects, this type of music, it sure makes me feel good about what we’re doing when you see people have such a connection to the music.
THE DEADBOLT: How did "Heaven’s My Home" get on The Secret Life of Bees soundtrack?
 RUBY: Well, let’s rewind to a party in Nashville Tennessee. I was at a party at Tony and Anastasia Brown’s house and what happened: they have a great big old music room, and at a certain point in the night who’s ever there that’s a musician, you just come together and you just start playing songs. Anastasia had asked me to play a song and I chose "Heaven’s My Home," and I fumbled through it. You know, Sam wasn’t there to play it perfectly [laughs] ...
SAM: I was at a fishing tournament.
RUBY: Yeah. So it ended up that I fumbled through the chorus, the guitar, but I sang and got the point across. And it was amazing because Lee Ann Womack was sitting on the couch next to me and she jumped in on harmony, and Randy Scruggs and Ashley Monroe, and it was just kind of an unreal situation. One of the people in the room was one of the head music supervisors for Fox Searchlight and she and I just hit it off and started just a friendship, and then one thing led to another and we found ourselves a year and a half later coming to Los Angeles. We told her and she asked us to come into Fox Studios to play four songs in the conference room for the President and the interns.
It’s so funny, because you said what do we get from the audience, sometimes I am so moved by what I’m feeling from somebody in the room. So we were doing the song "More" and I started getting teary-eyed and I just looked around the room trying to find out who is doing this. I saw a woman and she had on sunglasses and she started crying. So I was trying to stop, and I was like, "I can’t look at you," and went on to do the song. But it was in that time, and we were able to get in front of people, and that’s what we love most, is getting in front of people and being able to feel that which connects us all in the present sense.
THE DEADBOLT: So on August 7 you guys will be back home and performing in Nashville. What does the city give you as musicians?
 RUBY: Oh, wow! I mean, Nashville, across the board, is all of the changes that this music industry has seen. Obviously it’s had a name, its main name about twenty years ago. Not just twenty years ago, but country was it. In the last ten years a lot of rock has come out of here. In the last five years a lot of singer, songwriters have come out of here. You talk about Mat Kearney, you talk about Kings of Leon, and people are really starting to do big things. But across the board, what it comes down to is the power of the song and not just the lyrics. You have to work really hard in this town, because there’s a slew of people writing songs just like you and it makes us work harder on our songs across the board. That’s the focus and concentration. It’s not about how you look. It’s not about can you dance, you know? It’s about the song.
THE DEADBOLT: Are there any plans for a future tour?
RUBY: Yeah. We’re actually tying those loose ends up right now before we post our tour dates. But we’re looking forward to getting busy and just getting out there and connecting with the people. We’re really excited to meet people and learn their stories and try to do well by them and have fun out there.
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