We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marshall Ruffin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marshall below.

Hi Marshall, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

I found a guitar in my parents attic when I was a kid that my Mom had bought when she was in college. She hadn’t kept up with playing it, but lucky for me she had kept it around.

I wasn’t supposed to be up in the attic at all, and normally didn’t like going there anyway. It was dark and felt kind of spooky, always smelled funny, with hangers full of dead grandparent clothing, stacks of sealed boxes, clusters of weird old furniture. I must have just been looking for a place to be alone, which was hard to find with three brothers that seemed only to want to hurt me or get and keep me in trouble, but what I found, this hidden, neglected instrument, was tantamount to discovering a magic wand.

I opened its strange rounded box, lifted out the old acoustic Alvarez that was much too big for me, sat it flat across my knees, brushed the strings with the tips of my fingers, and all the bad feelings that had sent me up into the attic were gone.

For days, maybe weeks, I can’t remember now, I would sneak away when one or both of my parents had their hands full enough with my brothers so as not to notice or maybe even to welcome my absence, and I would take out the guitar and press down on the fretboard, learning how to make sounds that I liked, until one day my Mom caught me up there.

I was playing on the floor in my clumsy, childish way when she asked from behind me “What are you doing?” and I was immediately embarrassed and sad and scared and certain of the punishment that was soon to follow, as it had so many times before, whenever any of her rules weren’t obeyed. But this time I was wrong. She asked again, and I noticed that her question wasn’t angry, it was almost sweet, and curious, or something else I didn’t recognize, so I played a little more. And instead of punishing me, she helped me.

She helped me take the guitar down from the attic, and out to a music store, where a man showed me how to change the strings, gave me a book of chord charts, and showed me how to read them, how to make a few of the shapes with my small, slow hands. He showed me how to hold the guitar upright on one knee, so that we, the guitar and I, were facing the same direction, and how to play it that way, which took some getting used to, but turned out to be better in the long run.

My parents made mistakes. They would take the guitar away from me as their new means of punishment if I did anything wrong, because I now cared about it more than any of my little kid toys. That was bad. They would only let me play in my room, and would sometimes come and close the door so they didn’t have to listen to me while I was learning, and would complain about how it didn’t sound like I knew what I was doing. That was bad too. But after the first few years, once my calluses hand come in strong, after the many mornings where I almost smashed the guitar to bits out of frustration, after many nights where I would hug it and sleep with it in my bed, they would ask me to learn something they liked, and I could, at least well enough that they would tell me that it sounded good and that I should keep playing, that the more I played, the better I would get. That was right.

When I decided to study music in college, they discouraged me, saying that making money as an artist is hard, almost impossible, and that they wanted more security for their kids. But when I later showed them the acceptance letter from a school they recognized and respected, one I had applied to in secret because I didn’t expect to get in, they supported my decision to go, helped me pay for it, and came to watch me graduate. That was right.

My relationship with my instrument, and in a way all instruments, is a real relationship, one into which I have to continuously invest if I want to stay sane, one that fills my life and the lives of those who care for me with joy and novelty, with purpose an peace of mind, and may end up being one of the most consistent and rewarding partnerships I’ll ever get to have. I’m lucky I have it at all. If I hadn’t found that old guitar up there in the attic that day, I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know who I would be. And it still feels like magic.

So that’s something my parents did right.
Consciously or not, begrudgingly or not, lovingly or not, they gave me magic.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m in a band called Improvement Movement.

My three band mates and I have all been in many other bands, with and without each other, still have our own solo projects, and continue to find freelance work for hire in a wide range of musical contexts.

But the group we share together is the one from which I have received the most consistent fulfillment in recent years.

We have one full length album out on Acrophase Records called “Don’t Delay, Join Today!” available now on all streaming platforms, and hope to release our second record by the end of ‘23 or early ‘24 with subsequent touring to follow.

We wrote the forthcoming album all together, in the same room at the same time, and recorded all the songs that way too, which isn’t always how it’s able to happen, but is now our agreed ideal circumstance. And since we are all writers, singers and multi instrumentalists, we’ve prioritized making music where we can vocally harmonize together as much as possible, trading the role of lead vocalist back and forth, part by part, and song my song. We also get to switch instruments as much as we want during studio sessions and concerts, which seems to help keep audience members and recording engineers engaged. And we’re able to write the music that most inspires us first, in hopes that afterwards it finds an audience and provides for us an income, these days primarily through streaming, live merchandise sales and licensing placements.

So basically, it’s a vocal-heavy indie psych-rock outfit from Atlanta, and I like it a lot.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I was in music school, getting out of the shower, running late to my proficiency exam, which was a test that happened every semester, where all students would have to play a selection of music that was meant to prove their various levels of competence and allow them to graduate from one degree of technical difficulty to the next. These proficiencies were performed by each student alone, in front of all of the heads of their respective departments.

Out of the shower, I used a towel to dry off my body, tied it around my waist, and with my left hand reached up to wipe away the steam from the mirror, the hand that I use to press the strings down onto the fretboard, not knowing that the top edge of the glass was exposed, and after feeling a sharp sting slide across my fingers, I pulled my hand away and looked down into the sink, just in time to see a piece of my pinky circle and disappeared into the drain, followed first by little, then a lot, of blood. All four fingers on my left hand had been cut open, and badly.

Feeling angry, panicked, a bit dizzy, I took the towel from around my waist and held it tightly in my warmly throbbing left hand, getting dressed with my right. Once I had slung my book bag and guitar case over my shoulder, I ran all the way from my apartment to the hallway outside the classroom where my test would take place, hair still wet, hand still bleeding.

I got out my guitar just as my name was called, and carried it and the towel into the room, sitting down in the only available chair, in front of all of the teachers who were there to decide wether I would pass and move on or fail and have to retake the entire semester.

Referring to the paper on the music stand in front of my seat, they asked me, when I was ready, to start with the sight reading portion of the test, which was the only part that was not given beforehand, and as such was meant to be played sight unseen in order to test that very ability. This was by far my worst skill and the portion of the exam that I had been fearing most.

I let go of the towel in my left hand, and began to play. As the strings dug into and out of the cuts on all four of my fingers, within seconds the fretboard was reddened and drops of blood were falling down onto the towel on the floor. It was like being in a nightmare, and is still one of the most surreal experiences of my life.

I was playing slowly, and poorly, until one of them asked me to stop, and if I would tell them what had happened to me. I told them, apologized ashamedly, and asked for the chance to continue.

They conferred briefly, then told me they would instead prefer it if I could come back later, and asked if I thought a week was time enough to heal and return to retake the exam. I said it was, apologized again, thanked them for their concern, for their patience, for their kindness, for their consideration, and aced the test a week later, partly because in that time they hadn’t thought to provide me with a new sight reading exercise, either as a knowing act of charity, or a simple and understandable oversight, or because they hadn’t expected me to be able to remember it. Either way, I hadn’t thought it necessary to mention during what I knew would be the only second chance I was ever going to get.

I do feel bad about it, my incredibly unlucky injury and my subsequent willful omission, and still don’t actually know if it’s an example of my resilience of lack thereof. I wonder sometimes what they would have done if I had pointed it out to them. Maybe they would have thanked me for my honesty and given me a new exercise to sight read, and maybe I wouldn’t have been able to, maybe I wouldn’t have passed because of it, or been able to afford to retake the semester, and never would have graduated at all.

That’s what I was afraid of, and that’s why I didn’t say anything, instead choosing to use what little advantage I had and quietly move on to the next semester. I also never went to the doctor, opting instead for superglue over stitches. I’m not sure if that was the right choice either, but I guess all’s well that ends well, or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

Sometimes people who don’t make music or art ask or tell me things about it that make me think they see my ability to do so as a privilege or a gift, one that was given to me miraculously, and one I should be willing to share with them gladly and freely, for the benefit of us both.

But that’s not it, or that’s not all of it, not for me.

It feels more like a compulsion, an obsession, or a part of some kind of spiritual hygiene routine, something I know now that I have to do regularly, regardless of the personal and professional goals attached, of the content, or the context, or if it’s for any audience at all, because in the times in my life where I haven’t wanted to write and play and sing, or haven’t been able to, all other aspects of my life have suffered. All other aspects. All of them.

Put simply, my daily musical practice, much like a practice in meditation for some, or prayer for others, is an exercise that keeps me interested and engaged, more than anything else that I have found, in life, in living, and removes most consistently and completely all other insidious and unhealthy ideations to the contrary.

I don’t think of it as a gift, or an innate ability. I think it’s more of a coping mechanism, one that takes hard work every day to maintain, its main value is in its prevention of atrophy and death. It’s a survival tactic, that has the secondary benefit of alleviating the suffering of others, but is developed desperately and selfishly, or at least it was for me, at first. It’s a basic human need, the need to create it and the need to consume it, and is in part a tradition, like cooking food or making maps, benefiting from but in no way dependent on the previous work of others.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://song.link/s/6xid7gMj8fSy3rOm1u5Yyd
• Instagram: @marshallruffin
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@MarshallRuffin
• Other: https://linktr.ee/myimprovementmovement?fbclid=PAAaamNpiqSk9EmS41pKb-VvOI_wmcrH5U_wxFnslyp3x1Bbt203cgKeu1YW4_aem_AV6CYxvquFvoHAFvwSs_q6XHz2O0JQQx81njoRrMayx_GP0yJ5zI7qcChR4Nc0JoIPY