Ruth Minnikin

Twenty-seven months, two weeks, five days and eleven hours after its noble beginnings, Ruth Minnikin and Her Bandwagon will release their orchestral opus, ‘Depend on This’ on December 16th in Halifax (Feb 2010 throughout Canada, May 2010 across the United Kingdom and Scandinavia).

During it’s creation, Minnikin tirelessly cultivated her creativity over months of mournful mornings, aloof afternoons and nestled, late-night writing sessions. ‘Depend on This’ takes it’s walk on the red carpet of artistic endurance and tested every ounce of Ruth’s body and brain.

With the vision of a tiny symphony swaying in her mind’s eye, Minnikin mentally battled and yearned for the momentum to finish the piece. Minnikin describes the completed album as “a conceptually dramatized exaggeration of an avant-garde jalapeno pepper on a life raft.”

Depend on This’ uber-calculated conclusion spans the Atlantic Ocean and unites seventeen magical musicians, twenty-three integral instruments, a men’s vocal choir, three pop producers, one sound artist, and a handful of visual artists.

On her acclaimed 2006 release ‘Folk Art’, Ruth Minnikin stuck to the essentials. Contained in a hand-sewn, ink-stamped canvas case, the album’s packaging reflected the music within. Rootsy, bare and without pretension, ‘Folk Art’ offered eleven tracks from an artist with her focus set on the songs and the live-recording process.

Minnikin’s varied and accomplished musical history has surely helped hone this kind of concentration. Her first band, Booming Airplanes, was signed to EMI during the Halifax pop explosion of the ’90’s. Her chamber-pop side project, The Heavy Blinkers developed a cult following all over the world, and at the turn of the millennium, Ruth made two albums and toured the UK and the US with alt-country quintet, The Guthries.