Before You Turn Into A Dog

Ruby of Thanks is the songwriting and home-recording project of Hudson Valley musician Andy Weaver. A fourth-generation New Yorker, Weaver is also a house painter and drummer whose work has included Widowspeak, Castanets, Wildflower, and Andre Ethier. With Ruby of Thanks, he turns toward something quieter: intimate, handmade songs that find beauty in ordinary life.Before You Turn Into A Dog is the project's second full-length album. Split between solo recordings made at Weaver's home in Kingston-where he played every instrument himself-and collaborative sessions with friends in Cairo and Catskill, the record values process as much as Polish. Several songs preserve their very first complete performances, documenting ideas as they emerge rather than after they've been refined.Hopefully it captures some spirit of creation, Weaver says. The idea of songwriting as a way to process events and create peace at home by working with your hands, making things. Self-recording as a response to capitalism in art.That philosophy gives Before You Turn Into A Dog it's quiet gravity. These songs dwell in everyday rituals and fleeting moments of transcendence, moving through love, depression, work, and the search for peace with remarkable patience and generosity. Weaver's warm acoustic guitars, understated melodies, and homespun recordings never ask for attention-they earn it through honesty, intimacy, and careful craft.There are echoes of artists like Little Wings, John Andrews and the Yawns, and Hand Habits, but Ruby of Thanks resists easy comparison. Like the records that have long defined the Woodsist orbit, Before You Turn Into A Dog feels less like a statement than a place to inhabit: unhurried, deeply human, and quietly transformative.... folk ballads subtly layered with a rush of a languid art-pop atmosphere. With a synergy in line with the auxiliary worlds of a Little Wings or John Andrews, Weaver's songcraft is adjacently warm and melancholic in it's thematic exploration. -Aquarium Drunkard