Runaway June’s long-awaited freshman Blue Roses album is out! The trio, made up of Jennifer Wayne, Hannah Mulholland and Naomi Cooke, dropped the record on Friday, June 28.
“It feels like we have the album that we’re ready to let fly,” Cooke told PopCulture.com. “We’re kind of just waiting to see what everybody thinks now, but it’s out, and it feels really good to be like, ‘Okay, we’re finally done.’ All of that work is in a little package and it’s out there.”
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All three Runaway June members are prolific songwriters, writing six of the 10 tracks on Blue Roses, both collaborating with and taking outside songs from some of the biggest songwriters in town. The trio also included one cover, of Dwight Yoakam’s “Fast as You.”
“It’s such an honor when these huge hit songwriters are playing you their songs and wanting you to sing them,” Wayne conceded. “So, we have ‘Fast as You,’ which Dwight Yoakam wrote. It’s one of our favorite songs ever, and he’s obviously an extremely talented songwriter. But then, there’s one that stands out for all of us, I think, and it’s called ‘We Were Rich,’ and it’s Ross Copperman, Ashley Gorley, and Nicolle Galyon.
“The song is just so beautiful,” she continued. “We had been in a pitch meeting, and we were kind of tired, because we’d been listening to a ton of songs. Then all of a sudden, they played that song, and it just hit us, and all of us said, ‘Oh my gosh, play it again,’ and we just loved it. And I think that’s kind of how we’ve chosen the outside cuts is something will just really reach out and grab your heart.”
Runaway June released their debut single, “Lipstick,” in 2016, and has been working on their new album since then. While they have grown and evolved as a band over the last few years, the long gap meant they had a lot of songs to choose from while focusing on their freshman record.
“Hundreds,” Mulholland said when asked how many songs they went through. “It’s been four years really that we’ve been writing for this album, and that process – I mean, countless pitch meetings. And in each meeting, they probably play you 20 per meeting, and we’ve had a million.”
Each member of Runaway June was already working on their own music career before they formed a trio, so they each have their own opinions about music. But perhaps surprisingly, the women almost always agree on which songs to record.
“All the ones that are on the album, we all agreed on those,” Mulholland explained. “You hear so many things, and it’s the ones that really just like grab all of you right away, then we know it’s the one.”
“We really have never heard a song that one of us was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s our song,’ and the other two were like, ‘No,’” continued Cooke. “We’ve never been really far off. When we’re in a pitch meeting, we’re all looking for a spot to fill. We know what kind of a song we’re looking for; we all really have the same taste in music. We’re looking for the same pieces of the puzzle.
“It’s really good to be in that mindset together, and I think we’ve always had that, so we’ve never been super off-kilter,” she added. “I think there’s been a couple where it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we really like this,’ and someone else says, ‘All right, I’m gonna listen again.’”
The title track of Blue Roses was written by Cooke and Wayne, along with songwriting powerhouse Marcus Hummon and Caroline Cutbirth, and inspired by some of their own personal losses.
“It’s a deeply personal song, I think, for all of us,” said Cooke. “We’ve all lost people that we love. When we wrote the song, I was writing it with my brother in my heart. He was killed in a car accident a few years ago, and so every time I sing it, he’s just really, really present. I can almost feel him, so it can be very emotional. I wasn’t always willing to be that emotional and vulnerable on stage, and then after a little bit, very quickly, I got past that, because other people were sharing their experiences, and talking about the people that they loved and lost.
“They were crying in the crowd, and really connected us with our audience,” she remarked. “It’s a moment where us three really connect again, and we go back to our roots where we started, in the songwriting room. It was just our voices and a guitar. That’s how we present it onstage, and that’s how we end the record is how we started. So, it just was really kind of evident that we would name it Blue Roses, after that song that really kind of brought us to be who we are now.”
Mulholland drew the cover art for Blue Roses, which can be purchased at RunawayJune.com.
Photo Credit: Getty images/ Steve Jennings
