Arum Rae

Born Arum Rae Valkonen in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the singer-songwriter Arum Rae developed an eclectic sound shaped by blues, soul, and vocal jazz. Her upbringing spanned Colorado Springs, Savannah, Georgia, and Austin, Texas, where she first sang during kindergarten. A high-school music instructor steered her toward Berklee College of Music in Boston, and only while enrolled there did she begin playing guitar and composing original material. She issued her earliest solo recordings in 2004 under the short-lived alias White Dress. After her family settled on a Virginia farm, she captured her blues-inflected debut EP, the self-titled Arum Rae, entirely on acoustic guitar in 2005. For her first full-length album, 2006’s Too Young to Sing the Blues, she assembled a band featuring electric guitar, pedal steel, upright bass, and drums.

She later established herself in New York City and spent years touring, sharing bills with Willie Nelson, B.B. King, Gary Clark, Jr., and the Black Keys. In 2012 the song “If I Didn’t Know Better,” co-written with the Civil Wars’ John Paul White, appeared in performances by the cast of the ABC drama Nashville. Valkonen released her own acoustic rendition on an LP of the same title that October. Working with producer Sanford Livingston, she next crafted the indie-rock-oriented Warranted Queen EP, which arrived in April 2014. Before year’s end she issued the John Congleton-produced Waving Wild EP. By mid-2016 Secret Road Records had put out the genre-blending Loners EP, which prompted widespread “indie soul” descriptions and included a revised take of “If I Didn’t Know Better.” Relativity Entertainment followed in 2017 with the earthier Sub Rosa, an album supported by dates alongside Rodriguez.