Rubyhorse

History

Friends since kindergarten, the group became bandmates at the same time as they became teenagers; they assigned each other instruments according to personality. Taking their name from a Wonder Stuff song, and having toured Ireland to the point of saturation with their first release A Lifetime In One Day, they decided that their best shot at success was in the Untied States.

The group left for Boston, Massachusetts, in January 1997, and eventually landed a weekly residency performing at an Irish pub called The Burren, in the Davis Square area of Somerville, Massachusetts.

From having an audience of four, word quickly spread about a band who would eventually host a 60-week residency. Also setting up shop under the floodlights of Fenway Park every Saturday night at the legendary Bill’s Bar on Landsdowne Street, they won three Boston Music Awards within one year of arriving on American soil.

National tours ensued, as did a battle among various record labels to sign them. Fueled by the group reaching number one on the fledgling MP3 charts (a first for an unsigned group at this point), Rubyhorse signed an ill-fated deal with Interscope Records which saw them relocate to Los Angeles, and record an album with producer Paul Fox, which despite its enormous budget, was never released.

Major-label big-budget lesson learned, the band eventually returned to their roots, finding Ohio-born, Nashville-based producer Jay Joyce, and created the independently released album, How Far Have You Come, on a 16 track machine in his suburban Nashville basement.

Having toured the new album across the country, Island Records signed the band to their second deal under the same Universal Records umbrella they had just left in order to rework the How Far Have You Come album.

In the summer of 2001, the band returned to Nashville with Jay Joyce, recorded some new material (including "Sparkle"), took the tapes to Miami beach for Tom Lord Alge to mix, and finally released Rise, their only major-label album, which features slide guitar by George Harrison on the track "Punchdrunk".

The band toured the country, appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and Good Morning America, showcasing their single "Sparkle" which eventually hit #17 in the 2002 Billboard charts, won an Irish Meteor award, and can still be heard in movies such as Ed Burns’ Sidewalks of New York, and TV shows like Smallville. The song "Fell on Bad Days" was used in the final scene of the season finale of Season 1 of Rescue Me.

Following the departure of songwriter and original member Owen Fegan in August 2003, the band returned to Jay Joyce’s Nashville compound to record Goodbye To All That, a critically acclaimed album which was released on the Atlanta-based Brash Label. The band toured extensively through the United States and Ireland, and although critically acclaimed, the album never gained the traction it needed to sustain the band, and eventually the remaining members agreed to split. While the band have never officially broken up, their website has not been updated in years. The lads finally put together reunion shows, playing in their native Ireland in 2016.

Band members