Marian Runk has a habit of picking up some vinyl whenever she stops to drop off show fliers at her local record store. One such trip yielded Willie Nelson’s 1983 release, Without A Song. When the Chicago-based singer/songwriter pulled the album from its jacket, she was struck by an image on the inner sleeve. It was a shot of Nelson and producer Booker T. Jones sitting beside a swimming pool set against the rugged backdrop of the Texas Hill Country. The place looked remarkably familiar.
“An immediate physical memory washed over me—the rainbow stripes on the slatted pool chairs, the highway and rolling hills, even the wood railing these two musicians were sitting on,” says the Dallas native. “I posted a photo on social media, and my cousin immediately confirmed: ‘That’s where we used to go swimming with grandma.’ We’d weave our limbs into those rubbery chairs to try to get striped suntans.”
That became the unlikely starting point for “Scorpion’s Nest,” the latest single from Runk’s forthcoming self-released Brighter Blue LP, due March 5. Runk spent childhood summers traveling with her mother to visit her grandmother in Spicewood, Texas. The soundtrack for those drives was Trio, the 1987 landmark collaboration between Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt.
“I have strong memories of my grandmother’s house and the landscape, yet very few of her as a person,” she says. “Friends of mine have long and deep relationships with their grandparents. That was not the case for me, and I wanted to explore that.”
So Runk reconstructed the relationship from the sensory evidence: the swimming pool, the Hill Country landscape, even the scorpions her imagination exaggerated over the years. Musically, Runk sent her band Parton’s “Coat Of Many Colors” as a reference point. “Scorpion’s Nest” also gave her the opportunity to finally incorporate Max Subar’s pedal steel alongside Jess Baldissero’s fiddle.
A pianist in her youth, Runk didn’t begin playing guitar or performing publicly until her 30s. Along the way, she studied biology and visual art at Oberlin College, earned an MFA in book arts from Columbia College Chicago and spent a decade working in reproductive healthcare. She eventually found a nuturing musical community in Chicago’s queer art scene and at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
Runk’s 2024 album, Two Wires And A Spark, paired folk with vintage country. Recorded largely with Runk’s vintage 1960s Harmony Rocket hollow-body electric guitar, Brighter Blue retains her fascination with fallible people and the natural world while allowing more room for gratitude, friendship and hope. That shift is also reflected in the video for “Scorpion’s Nest.” Runk wanted its visual counterpart to show the intimacy possible in friendship and intergenerational chosen family. She filmed it at the Chicago apartment of her voice teacher, whose wall of framed birds and collection of vintage objects had immediately fascinated her.
“The first time I walked in for a lesson with Carol, I thought, ‘This is what my house would look like if I lived alone and had a couple more decades to amass precious objects and furniture,’” says Runk.
We’re proud to premiere Marian Runk’s “Scorpion’s Nest.”
—Hobart Rowland
See Marian Runk live.
