| Blues, Rock, Soul |
Ruby James Turns Up the Heat on Call It Rock & Roll
There’s a particular kind of confidence that only shows up once an artist stops chasing a sound and starts owning one. That’s the story of Call It Rock & Roll, the new seven-song set from Ruby James, out August 7 (an August day for each of the titles?) via Mule Kick Records. Where earlier chapters of her career found her testing genres and geographies (blues clubs, Americana rooms, a horn-driven Midwest outfit) this record plants a flag. It’s blues at the root, soul in the phrasing, and enough rock ‘n’ roll nerve to make the whole thing swagger rather than simply play.
James recorded the album at Dogstar Studios in Austin, Texas, working once again with longtime creative partner Kyle Crusham, who produced and engineered the sessions (mixing and mastering came courtesy of Grant Eppley). It’s a partnership with real mileage on it by now, and that comfort shows: the record never sounds like it’s straining to prove a point. It just goes.
“Voodoo Queen” opens the album on a dare, all serpentine guitar and a sneer borrowed straight from the Exile on Main St. songbook. Co-written with Adam Mackintosh, the song digs into inherited pain and family history, grandmother, mother, self, and turns it into a hex you can dance to.
“Gasoline,” penned with Crusham, keeps the temperature high with a slippery, smouldering groove; it’s the sound of a song that knows exactly how combustible it is and doesn’t apologize for lighting the match.
“Novocaine” slows the pulse without losing the tension. It’s the album’s most cinematic moment, moody, unhurried, built for a late-night drive with the top down and something heavy on your mind.
“Honeydripper” snaps things back into a strut. This is James at her most self-possessed: a midnight-groove character study about a woman who knows precisely what she’s worth and isn’t handing out second chances.
“Bumble Bee”, the album’s lead single, is where the record tips its hat hardest to rock ‘n’ roll’s blues and R&B ancestry. James rebuilds LaVern Baker’s mid-1950s classic from the ground up, and the rebuild has serious firepower behind it: bassist Harmoni Kelley thickens the low end, David Jimenez’s baritone guitar adds shadow, and guitar legend Rosie Flores steps in to detonate the solo, a contribution earned her the nickname “The Red Hornet” within James’s camp. The arrangement rides a four-on-the-floor pulse before peeling off into a surf-rock solo, honouring the original’s bones while giving it a distinctly modern sting.
“Boogiedown Town” flips the mood again, trading grit for a neon-lit, funk-indebted strut that leans into James’s Sly and the Family Stone influences. It’s loose, groove-forward, and one of the record’s most purely fun moments.
“Punk Rock Love Song (Pretty Fucked Up),” featuring Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers, closes the album at its emotional centre. James takes on the Supersuckers’ own “Pretty Fucked Up” and flips its perspective, where the original line looked at a woman from the outside, James turns the lens inward, rewriting the hook from the first person and adding a new bridge that turns the track into something closer to a shared confession than a cover. Spaghetti’s vulnerable, lived-in vocal turn only deepens it.
The Band Behind the Record
Call It Rock & Roll is very much a band record, built on musicians who know how to serve a groove rather than show off inside it:
- Ruby James – vocals, piano
- Kyle Crusham – guitars, bass, electric and acoustic guitars, Mellotron, keys; producer and engineer
- Darin Murphy – drums and percussion
- Jimmy Paxson – drums and percussion
- Chris Von Streicher – drums
- David Jimenez – lead guitars
- Rosie Flores – additional guitar, lead guitar and solo on “Bumble Bee”
- Harmoni Kelley – bass
- Jan Flemming – keys
- Courtney Santana – background vocals
- Eddie Spaghetti – vocals, bass, acoustic guitar (on “Punk Rock Love Song”)
The Long Road Here
Ruby James was born and raised in Los Angeles, where her powerful and captivating voice made itself heard with bands in clubs across the South and Southwest before her debut album, Desert Rose, earned her a sold-out night at the Troubadour and a film placement for “Everything Good Goes Away” (co-written with René Reyes) in The Women. A move to Austin brought her follow-up, Happy Now, produced by Charlie and Will Sexton, and introduced her to Kyle Crusham, who’s remained her closest collaborator ever since. A subsequent stint fronting the horn-powered Wisconsin outfit Wifee & the Huzzband landed the single “She Won’t Go” at No. 3 on Little Steven’s Underground Garage year-end countdown.
After stepping back from music in 2020, James has spent recent years rebuilding, writing and recording across Austin, Nashville, and Door County, Wisconsin. Call It Rock & Roll is what that rebuilding sounds like: an artist who’s done experimenting with who she might be and has settled, loudly and gladly, into who she is.
At just under 25 minutes, Call It Rock & Roll doesn’t waste a second making its case. It’s short, sharp, cutting like a razor blade, and unapologetically indebted to the blues and R&B roots that built rock ‘n’ roll in the first place, but it never feels like a piece of the past updated for modern tastes. Between the swagger of “Voodoo Queen,” the reinvention of “Bumble Bee,” and the raw nerve of the duet with Eddie Spaghetti, this is a record about reclamation: of a genre’s history, and of an artist’s own voice within it. Call it rock and roll. Ruby James certainly does, and she’s earned the right.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 11th, 2026
Follow PARIS-MOVE on X
::::::::::::::::::::::::
Call it Rock & Roll – Autographed Limited Edition 1st Pressing on Ruby Red Vinyl
Call it Rock & Roll – Test Press Vinyl, Limited to 30!
