Meet runo plum, the Minnesota songwriter drawing from nature
The singer’s debut album, ‘patching’, is the first of a two-part project that picks apart personal upheaval through beauty and melody
When we speak at the end of 2025’s long summer, runo plum is settling into her new home in the city of Minneapolis. The story behind her emergence as a special new songwriter and upcoming debut album, patching, takes place in a polar opposite setting though.
At the onset of the COVID pandemic, plum left the city for her family’s base in the Minnesota wilderness. As she describes it, her writing desk looks out over 40 acres of woodland. “There’s a creek that runs along, and there’s a beautiful trail that goes through the woods. It was the inspiration for a lot of my songs,” she smiles.
While her earliest material was written and performed alone on acoustic guitar, transmitting the woods-y feel of her surroundings, debut album patching – announced today – fleshes out her sound and sees her digesting and processing a period of personal upheaval.
It’s done through frank and open-hearted lyrics, with the added instrumentation giving her words even greater heft.
Read our Play Next interview with runo plum and listen to her music – including new single ‘Sickness’ – via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below. patching is out on November 14 via Winspear.
Can you explain what was happening in the five-month burst when you made this album – it seems like it was a big period of transition in your life?
I went through a breakup and writing was the only thing I was doing. I wrote more than I had ever written in my life. There are loads and loads of songs. Some of them made it onto the album, and some I’m waiting to do stuff with. All all of the songs are written about my ex, who I wasn’t talking to at the time, but who is now one of my closest friends. That is a whole other weird thing to it, but I can access the feeling pretty easily. That time was very intense for me – I can definitely still feel it.
Is it right that you’ve got two albums’ worth of material from those sessions?
Yeah! I split them into two. This album [patching] was supposed to be the more gentle vibe, but there are some that actually are not gentle at all – they’re very heavy. Where it started was that these will be the softer, gentler ones, and then album two is the rage album.
Where you recorded the album, at a cabin in Vermont with Play Next alumni Lutalo, also sounds idyllic – can you tell us about that experience?
It was a totally magical experience – I love them. It was pretty intense, and honestly I think it got more intense than the longer we were there. We ended up extending our stay by three days. At first, I think we’re probably a little too chill, just hanging out and not working at the pace that we should. The final days were really intense.
Tell us about new single ‘sickness’, which opens the new album…
It has a double meaning – literal or metaphorical. I originally wrote it because I was scared of having COVID and dying or having some disease. I’m a hypochondriac, and every time I feel a little sick, I’m like, ‘I don’t want to die’. But then it’s just a common cold. It could also easily be seen as [being] lovesick.
‘patching’ is a really lovely word and sounds like a process that is very soft and careful – is that how it felt to you?
Yeah, totally – it really is loving. It’s a lyric in one of the songs. It feels perfect for the album. The album is a timeline – the pain, but also the healing. By the end of the album I’m writing about moving on.
Did you feel like you were being loving to yourself in working through all of this through music?
You know, I definitely was not. It actually hadn’t even occurred to me that that [process] is loving until you said that. I find that very beautiful and really good way to look at it, because in the moment it was definitely more like, ‘I’m broken, I need fixing’. I love that you’re thinking about it like that and… shit, maybe I should too!