Sometimes you have to go through hell and back to make it on the other side. Nashville based artist India Ramey knows this journey well and wrote the road map for it on her latest album, Baptized By The Blaze.
India Ramey will perform in Houston on Tuesday, October 1 at The Big Top as part of the now two year running Horni Tonk Tuesday series featuring Christopher Seymore & The Western Cosplay.
Ramey, who spoke to the Houston Press somewhere on the road after a busy Americanafest where she played seven shows and did one radio show in a mere four days, is just as real in her conversation as she is in her art.
Since her debut album Junkyard Angel in 2010, Ramey has put out a steady stream of material with the majority of songs reflecting her rough real life experiences and personal path towards healing.
Ramey is open about having grown up in a home with scarce resources and high stress as a child of domestic abuse. As an adult, she decided to pursue a law degree and in an attempt to heal her own pain, became a domestic violence prosecutor helping women just like her mom while facing men with her daddy’s profile on a daily basis.
“Your body will tell you if you’re on the wrong path and my body was screaming at me that I was on the wrong path,” says Ramey of her law career which she thankfully left to pursue her lifelong interest in music and the creative arts.
“Your body will tell you if you’re on the wrong path and my body was screaming at me that I was on the wrong path.”
“People pleasing to me is sort of a trauma response and me going into law was I wanted to please my parents and sisters and make them proud of me. I wanted people to think I was doing something with my life and I wanted to feel I had some direction,” she says.
Ramey never looked back but continued to struggle with the PTSD from the violence she saw and through her doctor was prescribed Klonopin to treat anxiety and curb the panic attacks she had suffered since college.
During the pandemic, Ramey became more and more aware of the dependency she had developed on the drug and became worried not only about the long-term effects but the very real possibility of not being able to access her medication during the lockdown.
After 12 years on it, she decided to try to safely taper off it in an effort to avoid a physical breakdown and the possible life altering effects of coming off Klonopin too quickly.
“I was in really bad withdrawal,” describes Ramey. “Really excruciating, physically painful and taxing withdrawal and I realized that it was so bad that literally the day after we put out Shallow Graves, I checked into a treatment center to try to get off of it safely.”
After what she describes as a lifetime of trying to pretend that she was “okay” Ramey began the long process of trauma therapy where she carefully unpacked all the years of awfulness and accepted that she was in fact, not okay.
During the long and arduous process of learning more about herself in therapy and trying to find a way to live without the chemicals she had become dependent on, Ramey channeled it all into the glorious Baptized By The Blaze.
“Thankfully I’m on the other side of it. I’m finally able to enjoy my life for the first time,” says Ramey.
For an album where every song came from a long, messy hike into her own experiences it is surprising that Ramey went into the studio with not only a producer she didn’t know personally but also a band.
Ramey was set up with big time Nashville producer and engineer Luke Wooten of Station West. Wooten’s interest peaked when he heard Ramey’s impressive voice and after meeting and discussing the vision for the album Ramey encouraged him to use the players he saw fit, a team which nailed it all in the studio and delivered perfect sounds in just one day.
Baptized By The Blaze brings to the forefront Ramey’s intense lyrical strengths only matched by her voice that can rattle the walls as she digs deep inside her soul to deliver every line of truth. Look no further than “The Mountain” as evidence of the strength this woman not only carries, but constantly encourages others to find for themselves in their own worlds.
“On that particular day I was in a really dark place,” says Ramey of writing “The Mountain.” “I was in a place of shame and doubting myself. I felt like a failure on my healing journey because I was so triggered and I felt like I was right back where I started.”
As she talked out the often non linear path of health and healing in a session, Ramey’s therapist, who she says “saved her life” by telling her that she was indeed, no matter what, “the mountain.”
“It was so empowering and that day everything changed for me because I was always able to go back to that conversation and remind myself of how strong I am and how powerful I am even when I’m vulnerable and triggered.”
Ramey hopes to inspire others to find their own empowerment and inner ability to grab life by the horns through her music. It’s clear from her life’s work and song material that she has a strong desire to use her experiences to benefit others.
People pleasing and acts of service can sometimes blur the line between being helpful and then being taken advantage of, a fact known to Ramey and addressed on her upbeat country track, “Ain’t My First Rodeo.”
“Narcissists to me they are like vampires and they can smell blood,” she says in a thought which directly feeds into the fun, horror movie themed video for the song. “What I learned in therapy is that the more I practice nurturing myself, protecting myself and loving myself, the more aware that I would get of the very transparent textbook techniques and tactics of narcissists.”
Baptized By The Blaze is a no holds barred reflection of Ramey’s opinions, advice, life experiences and stories all told with a voice that much like fragments of her personality, ranges from sweet and funny to frightening and unbreakable.
“When you go through something that terrifying, you don’t want it to be for not and I don’t want it to be just be for me. If I’m going to go through this, I’m going to get some good out of it and pass that along to anybody that needs it.”
India Ramey will perform with Christopher Seymore & The Western Cosplay for Horni Tonk Tuesday on Tuesday, October 1 at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge, 3714 Main, 8 p.m., $13.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
