By Jim Barber
Not that this is the focus of this article on the brilliantly authentic, delightfully original and engaging as hell American alt-country artist India Ramey, but it’s got to be mentioned straight away, as an aperitif to what was a truly wonderful conversation, that Ramey loves Canadian music and cultural icons – The Tragically Hip.
And being that the writer of this piece lives in the town of Greater Napanee, which is about 15 minutes from the band’s Bathouse Studio, and 20 minutes from their hometown of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and knows a couple of the band members (shout out to Messrs. Langlois and Baker) we gotta get to the heart of how someone who was born and raised in Georgia, who spent her school years, including law school, in Alabama, and who now lives in Nashville, Tennessee came to appreciate The Hip.
It’s a worthy digression, and one that shows the impact that music can have on erasing borders, backgrounds and bringing folks together.
“My brother-in-law is Canadian. So when I was in college in Alabama, he used to make me mixtapes and stuff, because it was very important to him that I become a Tragically Hip fan. My husband Sean is from Texas, and we met at law school at the University of Alabama [Roll Tide!] and I overheard him at a very boring law school party telling someone else about the Tragically Hip. And I was, like, ‘I know who they are!’ We didn’t really know each other at the time, but as soon as I heard that, I went over to him, and I joke that the reason why we’re married is because of the Tragically Hip. So, it was at law school at Alabama, over a discussion about this Canadian band that Sean and I met,” Ramey explained, via Zoom, as she also proudly showed off her t-shirt, which was from the famous Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, where the Hip played many a show back in their early days.
“We’ve seen them five times, in small venues here in the U.S. like La Zona Rosa in Austin, Texas, The Variety in Atlanta, the House of Blues in Houston … any time they would come near us we would get tickets. And we met Gord [Downie] and Paul {Langlois] in Atlanta after one of the shows. I actually wrote a song about Gord Downie on my 2020 album, Shallow Graves. I wrote it the morning that I found out he passed away. It’s called ‘Hole in the World.’ I just love their music. My favourite is ‘Bobcaygeon’ and a close second is ‘Nautical Disaster.’ I’m also extremely partial to ‘Luxury’ [from the Road Apples album]. I also covered ‘Boots and Hearts’ on my second album, [Blood Crescent Moon, released in 2013.]
So, yeah, India Ramey is a bona fide Tragically Hip aficionado. And she is also a prolific musical artist in her own right, set to release her sixth studio album, Villain Era, on May 8, building on the elevated and well-deserved levels of acclaim, esteem and popularity that came off her previous album, 2024’s Baptized by the Blaze. It’s an album where you can tell that Ramey has truly found her voice. It is bold, it is beautiful, almost elegantly raw and profoundly honest, and soul-searingly memorable.
It’s no stretch to posit the notion that she has probably directly or even just through osmosis, picked up The Hip’s less-than-conventional approach to making music and building a career built on creative fearlessness, a penchant for wry and poetic wordsmithing, and establishing a foundation based on artistic integrity and bold authenticity.
Over 15 years, since she left her law career to take on music as not just a passion, but her vocation, Ramey has daringly and boldly asserted these traits, being unafraid to meld genres, to take the country milieu and make it even more ‘alt’ than what is branded alt-country these days – to the point where she calls her particular innovated style of Americana storytelling, Gothy Tonk!
In conversation, it’s obvious that besides her exceptional abilities as a songwriter and performer, Ramey has a huge heart, boundless passion and compassion, and is empathetic to a fault. Her life was hard at times, as evidenced by the choice to go to into law as one way of possibly healing from a past filled with domestic abuse, and a chance to help those currently enduring it. But it’s a brutal choice of profession because of the elevated emotional toll of such cases, but magnified to an immeasurable degree because of her own scarred psyche. At one point she chose to move into a different sort of practice, one not as psychologically triggering, but unfortunately she lost that position to layoffs.
“I practiced law for nine-and-a-half, almost 10 years. And I was already in a band. It was sort of a bluegrass cover band, made up of a bunch of lawyers and accountants and we played on the weekends. That’s when I started writing songs. And I had so many songs, I recorded an album [Junkyard Moon, released in 2010]. It’s not very good, but it was a first effort, and I got an opportunity to mix it with Pappy Middleton, who worked with Bonnie Raitt for years and years. Around that same time, I got laid off because there was a pretty bad economic decline in the U.S. and Pappy told me that he thought I really shouldn’t try to get another job, that I should do this. He was like, ‘you’re good, and you should try to do this while you’re young enough to do it. So I did, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” she explained.
“I was the special prosecutor for domestic violence and violence against women in Montgomery County, Alabama, for about three years. But I then went into private practice because it was a tremendous PTSD trigger for me. I’m a domestic violence survivor and I don’t think I was fully prepared for what I would have to deal with. I thought that I was tough, but I found it really hard. So I moved into doing contracts and stuff like that the rest of the time.”
It can be said that, to a great degree, Ramey is using her platform as a public performer, as a creator and as a songwriter to advocate for those who struggle, whether it’s due to domestic violence, mental illness, or anything else that is causing people to suffer. She does this by chronicling her own journey of healing through her art, particularly over her last release and upcoming one.
“The previous record was so much an internal process of healing and just me sort of divulging what I had been through with my trauma recovery and getting off a very powerful tranquilizer that I’d been on for years. This new album is the healed version of me. It is the version of me that’s been through four years of therapy and it’s the version of me that can still do the heavy lifting, but I am also learning to enjoy myself and have fun with my writing and kind of letting my sense of humour out for a walk outside my home and into the rest of the world. Villain Era is not a concept album, but it does have a theme. It definitely has a theme of standing up for yourself. The title track is about having boundaries and valuing yourself enough to put those boundaries down and not people please any more. There’s that kind of current carrying through the whole album. ‘Scattered and Smothered,’ on its face is a very tongue in cheek song. But there’s a silent struggle that’s going on there where me, the narrator in the song, is grappling with the fact that I want more from the relationship, and I’m afraid to say that. I’m afraid to tell the other person that and I’m afraid to be the person that I think I am. It’s realizing who you are finally and seeing that the person that you’re with, who is great on paper and who’s a good person, but still, that person is not enough for who you truly are. I think that song, for me, was about the struggle of wondering do I have the balls to be who I am, because, you know, for a lot of years, I didn’t,” she said.
“There’s some retrospection on this record too, like ‘Crying in my Lingerie.’ I really wish that wasn’t a true story, but it is very true, and very sad. It was a very sad point in my life where I was made to feel like I wasn’t enough and was very coldly rejected, and I carried the weight of not feeling like I was enough for years and years and years. I feel like now that I’ve had so much healing and I’ve sort of discovered my worth, it meant I was able to tell that story for the first time in the way that I did. And I chose to tell that story the way that Loretta Lynn told tragic stories of heartbreak. I chose to make it a toe tapper.”
The term ‘villain era’ is so evocative, and the way that Ramey uses it makes it even more so.
“I can’t claim it as my own. I was just starting to hear it everywhere. I was seeing it on social media and out and about. I think it’s something that more and more people are saying. I think I heard it in the context of an astrologer that I was following on one of the socials. I am a Sagittarius rising and she said, ‘Sagittarius risings are going to be entering their villain era. They’re tired of people pleasing. They’re tired of being the yes man, or tired of being a doormat, and they’re going to start putting down boundaries.’ And I remember thinking, that tracks, because that’s what I am doing right now. I sort of just jotted the phrase down because I loved it and it resonated with me in such a real way. I thought maybe I’ll do something with it at some point, and a couple of months later, I sat down and wrote the song ‘Welcome to My Villain Era,’” she explained.
“It’s such a cool term because people think of the villain as a bad person doing bad things. And generally when you have been a people pleaser, you have also accumulated a certain amount of toxic people that depend on you to be a people pleaser. When you start your healing journey and you start to stop people pleasing, those toxic people who have depended on you to be their doormat really make you out to be the bad guy. That’s the first thing they do, and then the smear campaign starts. I had gone through that a couple of years ago with someone that I worked with. I had just started putting down some healthy boundaries because my therapist told me to. I was trying not to be codependent with this person, and the minute I started doing that, the story changed. This person went out to all of our mutuals and talked about what a bad person I was. But I had to stand on my decision. And I had to accept the fact that if I was going to be authentic to myself and protect myself from toxicity, I had to be prepared to be the bad guy in some people’s stories and I had to be okay with that. So if protecting myself makes me the bad guy, I’m fine.”
The Loretta Lynn comparison earlier on is an apt one, because old school country music, the really ‘hurtin’ songs of the 1960s and early 1970s was a big thing around Ramey’s household growing up.
“I was actually raised on a wide variety of musical styles. My father was an intensely loyal outlaw country fan. I think he wanted to be Waylon Jennings and I think he fancied himself to be Waylon Jennings, but in reality he was just a drunk. So I grew up on outlaw country music – Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter in my very, very early childhood. And then my mom is a rocker. She was really into Queen and she loves ELO and Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. My sister was a punk rocker, and she was really into The Ramones and P.I.L. [Public Image Limited] and of course the Sex Pistols, so I had all of this around me. When I was in college, I started hanging out with my best friend Joy and she was really into classic country music. So I spent four years of college revisiting all of that country music that my dad had played when I was very small and realized how much I loved it. So when I started writing music, I think all of those influences came into play. But I swear, anytime I would sit down to write a song, even if I intended to write a pop song or a rock song, it came out as a country song,” she said.
“And it’s a genuine love. When I walk every day for my mental health, I listen to 1950s and 1960s country music. But I also listen to The Cramps, and I listen to modern Americana and outlaw country artists like River Shook. My music, the music I make, is a reflection of the music that I love and that I fill my life with every day. As far as performing music and playing in front of people, when I was five or six years old, any time any adult asked me, ‘India, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I always said I wanted to be a singer. For my whole life, that’s what I wanted to do. But I never really allowed myself to pursue it in earnest because everybody around me really needed me because we were so poor when I was growing up. I was the baby of the family and everybody was telling me how much they needed me to get a job, get a real job, have a career, get an education, make money. Not to be the breadwinner, but because they didn’t want me to be poor. My mom wanted me and my sisters to be more than what we came from and she especially didn’t want us to struggle financially. And at the time I didn’t even know what I wanted to do, or what I wanted to be, and my mom said, ‘well, you’re really good at arguing. Maybe you should go to law school.’ That was drilled into me so much that I didn’t ever feel like it was realistic for me to pursue music. It wasn’t until I was miserable in the job I thought I was supposed to get and then get laid off and just completely stripped away from any plan where I thought, ‘I’m in my early 30s, I’m going to regret for the rest of my life if I don’t try this and just see.”
It’s interesting to note that to help herself financially during college, she didn’t play music, but she did engage in another performative activity, one which is culturally significant and hugely popular, especially in the U.S. south – pageants.
“I did my undergrad at Birmingham Southern College. It’s a small liberal arts college in Alabama and it was like a smart, rich kid school, but I had a scholarship. I also did Miss Alabama pageants to earn money to pay for college. I made about $50,000 in scholarship money in pageants. My mom called me my senior year of high school and said they were advertising this pageant and there’s a talent competition and they’re giving away scholarship money. So I signed up and I did it. I did it all through college. I got $10,000 every time I made the top 10 at Miss Alabama,” she said.
Through her college days and into her law career, besides her affinity for The Tragically Hip Ramey continued to absorb different musical influences, adding them to her already unique inspirational mélange.
“I think Nikki Lane is just one of the baddest bitches around and has been for a long time. I think she is not only a talented writer and singer, but she’s a genius at marketing and has such a head for business. And she’s just got such a cool way about her. So I’ve always admired her. And I really love what Kaitlin Butts is doing right now. I really don’t like popular country or mainstream country radio at all, but Ella Langley is revolutionized popular country and I am in awe of her right now. She has two number one hits on mainstream country radio with actual country music, which hasn’t happened in a long time. I really like Sierra Farrell too; I didn’t want to leave her out. I think Sierra Ferrell is a tremendous talent and I want to see her get to the level where she’s playing stadiums,” she said.
Villain Era is coming out on Copaco Records/Blue Élan Records about 18 months after Baptized by the Blaze, which is a pretty quick turnaround for two full albums in the 21st century music business. It was very much thanks to Grammy-nominated producer Eric Corne’s urging that Villain Era came together with such an insistently urgent and dynamic manner.
“Honestly, it’s historically quick for me because I’m usually just slower and more methodical about writing. But I don’t know what happened. I had this feeling that I needed to have a bunch of songs. I said to myself, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I want to be prepared.’ So I started writing like crazy at the end of 2024 and into the spring of 2025. It was around that time when I was just writing and writing and writing that Eric Corne reached out to me and my manager. He said he was interested in putting me on his imprint label [Copaco] and that he wanted to produce me. And I just happened to have about 20 songs ready to go,” she explained.
“I really didn’t take a break because I was touring my ass off to promote Baptized by the Blaze and I had just come off the road and after just a couple of days rest, I sat down and started writing a lot and just kept writing all through December, January and February last year. And the thing that initiated it was Eric Corne. He saw what I was doing with Baptized and that it had made a lot of year-end lists and best ofs, and it was getting some really good attention and momentum. I think he was impressed by the work that me and my team was doing. I think he saw that I would work hard and he also said he liked my style. So when he said, ‘let’s do it,’ I already had the material ready. We were very quickly in the studio and once we were done recording we made a plan, got the timeline together and here we are.
“Working with someone like Eric is really an incredible feeling because I’ve been doing this mostly on my own for 15 years. And when I decided that I wanted to be a full-time musician and songwriter, I treated it like a proper job. I treated it like I was opening a small business, so I’ve been working at building that business for 15 years. So it is pretty gratifying when someone like Eric gets behind you. It definitely came at the right time because, you know, sometimes when you work really, really, really hard and you don’t think that there’s going to be a giant payoff or whatever, you start to think maybe you’re wrong, that this isn’t going to work. And that was starting to creep in around the time that Eric reached out. It was very fortuitous.”
The ‘Goth’ part of her self-described genre of Gothy-Tonk comes from her unique aesthetic – at least unique in terms of country music. It infuses her look, her personal style, and also her music.
“I have a lot of special interests and one of them is skeletons and classic horror movies and stuff like that. So, everywhere you see that in my image, or my branding and in my songs, it’s all just stuff that lights me up, that makes me happy. It just gets into my songs naturally too. Usually a phrase, or turn of phrase or a word will pop in my head and pique my interest, and then I start to think what would that story be about? How do I build that phrase or word into a story? And then the next thing I think of is what would that phrase or that word or whatever sound like in the chorus, like in a hook? I’ll kind of sing a couple of things and come to something I think sings well and then sit down and sort of write the whole song. The music sort of just comes with the lyrics and the cadence all at the same time, but it’s always words first, or a sentence first, and then the music, and then I add in the rest of the lyrics for verses and stuff,” she said.
‘Scattered and Smothered,’ mentioned previously and one of the many truly standout tracks on Villain Era, actually had an interesting beginning.
“That one kind of came out of the blue. My first band that I told you about, the name of our band was Scattered and Smothered, and it was because we would do bluegrass versions of cover songs, so we did a bluegrass version of ‘Purple Rain,’ for example. So we’d say the song was ‘scattered, smothered and covered.’ I had been thinking back about that band for some reason and thought I should write a song called ‘Scattered and Smothered’ about the Waffle House, and that was about as far as it went in my brain. Then later, on one of those days I was sitting and writing, I decided to try to do something with that idea, and it sort of wrote itself. It was just like this confessional of where I had been at one point in my life where I had been conflicted about not wanting to be with this otherwise seemingly Mr. Right guy and not being a match for that,” Ramey said as she talked about using the setting of the Waffle House and the stark imagery and bleakness of the situation in wonderful and identifiable detail.
“Waffle House is everywhere here in the States, and it’s open 24/7, and they’ve got really good, salty, greasy food that’s practically medicinal when you’ve been out getting drunk or having too much fun. It saved my life many a time. It’s sort of like somewhere whenever I sit down to write a song like that, I get this little movie that plays in my head and I see the whole thing like a movie and then I kind of start narrating it, and that’s the way that song came out. When I sat down to write I said, ‘okay, I’m going to write a song called ‘Scattered and Smothered, but what does that mean?’ I’m not just going to write about hash browns, and that’s when I tapped into the 20-something version of me that was really scattered because I was being smothered by the relationship I was in that was supposed to be good for me.”
There’s more than heartbreak at work in the song ‘Crying in My Lingerie.’ Again, there is a visceral sense of place and setting and atmosphere created by the image, but the emotions being evoked or perhaps remembered, are more than just sadness, but also a sense of humiliation, worthlessness and a forlorn, existential melancholy.
“I am very open about my trauma and my trauma recovery and I think that resonates with a lot of people, so I do have people come talk to me about it. After every show, I have at least one person come up and tell me that they grew up with domestic violence in their house or that their partner was abusive to them and they always thank me for talking about it. It’s about human connection and I try to remind people that they’re not alone, and the whole thing of ‘Crying in my Lingerie’ is part of it. Number one, that actually happened. And number two, when you put on lingerie to say, ‘I’m ready for romance, I’m ready for this,’ that’s you being very vulnerable. Probably one of the most vulnerable moments in a relationship is when a woman puts on something frivolous and sexy and says, ‘I’m here, love me.’ And when your partner says, ‘nope,’ it hurts. It hurts so bad. That song started when I was talking to my friend Susan [who is also her publicist] one day, and we were talking about our exes and I was looking back at how ridiculous it was that he made me feel so worthless. And I said, ‘I mean, he wasn’t even that good looking. It shouldn’t have been me crying in my lingerie.’ And Susan said, ‘please go home and write that song.’ So I did.”
“Dead to Me,’ is almost a narrative continuation of the characterization that happens in ‘Welcome to My Villain Era,’ in that not only is the subject of the song refusing to allow themselves to be taken advantage of and taking ownership of being labelled a ‘villain’ by one of her parasitic companions, but it’s how she deals with any lingering feeling towards those individuals and others who have treated he disdainfully and disrespectfully.
“My husband jokes about how incredibly unforgiving that I can be of other people. I’m very forgiving of him because he’s the most wonderful person in the world, and I love him like crazy, so he gets a pass. I admit, I am generally not a forgiving person. Most of the time I live and let live, but once that line is crossed with me, it’s over. There’s no going back once that line has been crossed. One time my husband asked me, ‘what’s so and so doing these days?’ And I replied, ‘I don’t know, they’re dead to me.’ I thought that it was time to write that song because we’ve had that conversation before. It was around the time that we had gotten my Gothy Tonk t-shirts printed. And we were really having fun with our self-named subgenre or sub- sub-genre of country music and I thought, ‘I’ll write a Gothy Tonk song and call it ‘Dead to Me.’’ Here’s the thing, though. I got that song done and I loved it when I got finished with it. I felt it was definitely going to be a focus track for the album. This is going to be the hit of the album. I’m a week away from going into the studio, and I’m taking a break from songwriting and I’m scrolling through TikTok, as you do, and I see Kaitlin Butts doing a song and the chorus is, ‘you don’t gotta be dead to be dead to me,’” Ramey said.
“And I was like, ‘damn it!’ So I called my manager and said, ‘I guess I’m not going to put the song on the record because I don’t want anybody to think that I’m copying Kaitlin Butts,’ because I really love and respect her. Both my manager and my producer said, ‘hey, slow down, lots of people write songs about love. Lots of people write songs about rocking. Your song is very different from hers and you love it, so let’s put it on the album.’ So I did, and I am very happy I did.”
‘Cult Money’ is Ramey at her sardonic, but also prescient best as a songwriter, as the track is part social commentary, part absurdism.
“I was talking with my friend Chris Lowe, who has a band called Volk, and he and his musical partner were both decked out all in white, and they were about to go onstage and I was backstage and said, ‘you guys look cool, you’ve got matching white outfits.’ And Chris said, ‘yeah, we felt really cool until we got here and then I realized that we kind of look like we’re in a cult. But you know what, I wouldn’t turn down that cult money.’ And I said, ‘people will pay a whole lot of money to stay out of hell,’ to which he replied ‘please tell me you’re going to go home and write that song. This stuff just drips off your mouth.’ And I did,” she said.
“It is kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also a bit of commentary too on that whole thing of people being taken advantage of. And it doesn’t even have to necessarily be about religion either. There’s all kinds of wacky stuff out there that people will give their money to, thinking it’s going to be the big solution or the quick fix to whatever problem they have. Listen people, there’s a sucker born every minute. And there’s con men born every minute. I’m a deeply skeptical person. I am incredibly, incredibly inclined to pattern recognition, so I’m not easily suckered. It is frustrating to me to see so many people get suckered by an obvious con man, whether it’s a televangelist, whether it be a politician – it just breaks my heart to see otherwise relatively decent people just turned into something else because of the cult mentality. And the reason why cults are so dangerous is because the primary objective of a cult is to protect the delusion. There’s no room for reason or for critical thinking to come in because everybody is working so hard to protect the lie. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish that we’d get to a time and place where people weren’t susceptible to a con.
“But people are scared and confused by all the change and everything, and they’re looking for easy answers. In the chorus for ‘Cult Money’ it says people are lonely and people are scared, and those two things – loneliness and fear – are the things that feed cult mentality, because people are lonely and they crave a sense of community and they crave that human connection. And cults, whether they be religious or political, give them that sense of belonging and that sense of common purpose. The way that they’re drawn into those things is that they’re also scared. They’re scared of what they see on TV. They’re scared of things that they don’t know about, so con men and con women play on those fears and those vulnerabilities. ‘Cult Money’ is, I think, actually a pretty funny song. There’s a lot of funny imagery and everything in there but just like everything I write, there’s a very serious undercurrent, a very serious observation in that song.”
Ramey is playing a few shows in and around Nashville to wrap up March, before heading for a run through Texas in May. Once Villain Era gets released, more dates will come, with Canada on her agenda. She was wearing a Horseshoe Tavern t-shirt because she played the venerable Toronto venue last year, and confirmed that at the very least, she will be making a return there and hopefully adding more shows in Canada later in the year.
“I love Canada. I would love to just go up there and spend a couple of weeks going around and playing, but like a lot of bands we need to get a booking agent up there. Fingers crossed,” she said.
For more information on tour dates, Villain Era and more, visit https://www.indiaramey.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
