Indie Musician Kaleb Rudy to Release Debut EP, My Own Volition

GENEVIEVE RICO

The entirely self-funded project includes visualizers for each song and depicts the highs and lows of gay relationships.

Being a self-funded music artist isn’t an easy thing to do, and indie musician Kaleb Rudy knows all about that struggle.

After starting out with a demo in 2016 with producer Scott Smith, Rudy played around with his sound on his initial four tracks. While being unsure of how to navigate the music world, he published his tracks on SoundCloud before ultimately releasing his debut single, “Burn,” in 2019.

Throughout 2023, Rudy has been building up to his debut EP one song at a time, with an accompanying visualizer for each track.

“I wanted to tell the full scope of a relationship,” Rudy told Out of the project. “You can expect that these characters go through different, very different chapters in their time together. They were already kind of in love, but it was just showing them in love.”

Rudy found a mobile home in the Santa Monica Mountains and hired an actor, M. Taylor Hall, to make the scenes more believable and intimate. The first two tracks cover the couple in their honeymoon stage, and by the third track, things start to take a darker turn. As for creating the visualizers and funding the project himself, Rudy said, “It was a really big swing and a hard thing to do. We shot it all in one weekend.”

Rudy’s journey has been full of ups and downs, with a darker period in his life finding him struggling with sobriety. “That explains the gap between 2016 with the demo and 2019 with ‘Burn,’” he said. “I got sober January 2, 2018, so the release of that song was during that year’s anniversary.”

After his sobriety, Rudy joined a songwriting group and fell into a relationship with someone who pushed him to achieve what he wanted to.

“He was the type of person who was like, ‘Well, let’s figure out how to do it.’ By the end of that relationship, I was ready to actually pursue things, and both he and sobriety really, really helped me.”

Rudy is dropping the EP’s third track, “Tornado (Lie With Me),” on Friday, March 17. This new song joins previously-released tracks from the My Own Volition EP: “Mess” and “Eighteen,” which have been released over the last few months. Rudy hopes to see all the tracks from this EP out by the end of the year.