Lara Ruggles – Boomerang
On Friday, March 20th, Tucson songwriter Lara Ruggles will celebrate the release of her new single “Boomerang”, the second of three songs she’ll release in early 2026.
“Boomerang” captures the push and pull of leaving for the adventure of touring and performing on the road, and the way that nurturing freedom and independence within a relationship can counterintuitively strengthen the desire to return to its safety. The lyrics are sometimes whimsical: “my heart is a restless soldier / got a map of the world drawn on its shoes”, and sometimes expansive and yearning: “my love wants to save somebody / my love’s gonna grow ‘till it can’t be contained”.
“Boomerang” was engineered and produced by Justin Glasco (Paris Paloma, “labour”) at his Los Angeles studio. This was made possible by a stART grant from Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.
The music video for “Boomerang” was made by Colorado artist Gabriella Molina using collage animation, and features Ruggles traversing a wild and snow-covered landscape that eventually blooms into spring, guided by Cupid’s arrows and in one sequence, riding astride a giant insect. Molina has made music videos in a similar style for deerhoof, A. Billie Free, and the Octopus Project’s remake of the Reading Rainbow theme song featuring The Flaming Lips.
The “Cupid” character in the video and the eventual bending of her arrow back to her own heart are a loving tribute to the late Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson. Gibson and their wife Megan Falley are the subject of Oscar-nominated documentary Come See Me In the Good Light, which follows them through the final year of Gibson’s life with an incurable cancer diagnosis.
Ruggles toured, wrote and performed with Gibson between 2018-2020, and often played the music for “Boomerang” underneath Gibson’s live performances of their poem “Boomerang Valentine”, embodying a beautiful alignment of the themes in each other’s work. In early 2020, Gibson and Ruggles performed a show featuring music they wrote together on the “Right Now I Love You Forever” tour. The West Coast and European legs of the tour were cancelled due to the COVID pandemic.
The release of “Boomerang”, along with Ruggles’ recent release of “The Glue” (January 23) and upcoming single “No Matter” (April) is supported by funding from Tucson’s Ward 5 Small Business Grant, awarded in partnership with Groundswell Capital. All three songs were produced and engineered by Justin Glasco.
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