When Rachel Ries began recording her second full-length disc, “For You Only” (Waterbug Records), she chose to leave Chicago and its many distractions. She did so by retiring to a “ridiculously small box home” in South Haven, Mich., with friend and collaborator Andru Bemis to work on the record. The relaxed vibe of the album mirrors the intimate setting of that Lake Michigan cabin.
“In those sessions, we were in the thick of winter and we’d play a song sitting in a rocking chair all bundled up in an afghan,” says the 25-year-old Ries. “It was great. We’d be sleeping on army cots with an ever-evolving pot of stew on the stove and just doing what needed to be done.”
The resulting album, with its understated arrangements (touches of acoustic guitar, piano, banjo and fiddle) and out-front vocals, is akin to the debut from North Dakota’s Tom Brosseau, “What I Mean To Say Is Goodbye” (Loveless Records). Songs such as “Lonely Spires” and “Luckiest One” sound not unlike back-porch folk gems you’d hear on a 78, channeled through Lucinda Williams.
Ries, herself not a stranger to the small-town life, was raised in Zaire and Freeman, S.D. as the daughter of Mennonite missionaries (“It wasn’t like they were proselytizing missionaries,” Ries is quick to point out. “My dad was a doctor.”). Though she has few memories of Africa (the family moved away when she was 4), her childhood in Freeman, a town of roughly 1,000, still informs her music.
“I’m from a very different world and that’s ultimately the kind of life I want–a small town, prairie life,” Ries says. “I think [life in Chicago] gives me something to fight against. It helps me to long for home, and longing and love–and where I come from–are great things to write about.”
The move to Chicago two years ago was especially jarring because Ries had been living in Lupus, Mo., a tiny town of 30 residents on the banks of the Missouri River. “That was a random point in my life. I got antsy and realized I was living someone else’s dream and not my own,” says Ries. “I had never lived in a city this large and I wanted to see if I could do it.”
Coaxed in part by a college friend who needed a roommate, Ries spent a good deal of time adjusting to her new surroundings by holing up in the apartment, adding that “it was hard to get me to go out.” Eventually, the sadness of missing both her home and a lifestyle she was accustomed to forced Ries to pick up her guitar and head to an open mic at Uncommon Ground.
“I’ve always known that singing makes everything better for me. It’s a coping thing,” says Ries. “So in one of my more lucid moments I decided I just needed to go sing for somebody.”
It was at one of these open mics that Michael Cameron, owner of Uncommon Ground, first heard Ries sing. “Her voice really drew me in,” says Cameron. “She was someone who made me stop what I was doing and come into the room to listen. So it was her voice that drew me in it first, but her songwriting is great also.”
For Ries, writing songs has replaced journaling as a means of getting thoughts out–though a pile of jam-packed notebooks remains near her bed.
“I knew I had to make it my music and I had to make it so I was expressing myself from the heart,” says Ries. “I wanted to speak and that’s why I learned to play the guitar. It wasn’t very thought out. It was just a way for me to write my songs.”
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Rachel Ries, 9 p.m. Saturday at Red Line Tap, 7006 N. Glenwood Ave. $5; 773-338-9862.
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