Running Red Lights

"I can see things that you walk right through," sings Aruna in "Break You Open," the opening track on her newest CD, Running Red Lights. Psyches, souls, lives and lovers: in the span of nine songs, she embraces them all with striking clairvoyance. Whereas her previous work was socio-political, Aruna now focuses on the intricate affairs of the human heart. "I grew up listening to pop music and it's in my head: the sounds and chord changes," she says, "and I wanted to show the lighter side of myself." She propels these songs with both the power of a live band and the gritty sonic realism of loops and samples "It's the merging point where nature meets technology; organic instruments, broken down and natural, against a backdrop of machines." Front and center is Aruna's radiant voice: expressive, insightful, breathing along its edges and borders like a sound inside the mind. "Break You Open," the first song she wrote upon arriving in Los Angeles, speaks to those who live only through what they can acquire. "What I'm saying is that you love something -- a house, a car, a body -- that can't love you back. This is my attempt to tell people I understand, that I sympathize and want to help." This empathy extends to the hymn-like "Into the Light," and contrasts with the pointed "Not Your Mommy," and "The Other Side," wherein the darker side of a lover is revealed. "Walk on Water," featured in the forthcoming Sundance-premiered film, Eulogy, starring Ray Romano, Kelly Preston, Hank Azaria and Debra Winger, uses water as a symbol for wisdom. Notes Aruna, "it's like the Wizard of Oz: throw water on the wicked witch and she dissolves." The title song, "Red Lights," is an extended metaphor. "It has to do with ignoring warning signs and overcoming obstacles. I had to do a lot of that just to get to this point." Born in Flemington, New Jersey, Aruna's serpentine route to the present included jazz piano and film scoring studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston, a stop in Miami, where she joined Roadrunner recording artists, Cynic; a return to Boston to earn a degree from Berklee, and ultimately a move to the West Coast. Concurrent with her performing career have been the recordings: first, a three-song sampler tracked in Boston with noted producer Alain Mallet and now her recently-completed full-length debut, Running Red Lights, recorded in Los Angeles. Now, achieving a new plateau of artistry, it is the understated grace of her songs that is the most memorable touchstone. "I'm not a prolific writer," reveals Aruna. "It takes me a week to write a song musically; the lyrics, maybe three weeks. I'll write pages and pages just to get one line. The hardest thing in the world as a writer is to say something that everyone has felt, but no one has ever said." Personal, intimate, encompassing: with Running Red Lights, Aruna delivers a stunning soundtrack that mirrors the complexity of modern humanity in a voice that echoes the tone of the truth.