For Lara Ruggles’ new record Anchor Me, the Tucson songwriter “looks back on the truths” that she has uncovered over the past ten years. This includes “the fall of her first significant relationship, the magic of falling in love again, the reaching of another breaking point, and the ability to save a love worth saving.”

In many ways, Anchor Me is a return for Ruggles. She grew up 40 miles outside of Tucson, eventually moving to Denver, from where she spent the better part of a decade touring and performing. In 2016, she returned home to Tucson where she started her project Sharkk Heartt, which allowed her to explore songwriting through Electro-Pop. It was only recently that Ruggles found herself collecting songs, and writing a few new ones, that “felt too intimate and personal” for Sharkk Heartt.

The song “Bend the Truth,” is out now, where Ruggles “zeroes in on the work we do to protect ourselves from pain, even if it means telling ourselves a story that isn’t entirely true.”

“Bend the Truth” was the last song added to the album, written during a 2023 artist residency in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, and recorded at Saint Cecilia Studios in Tucson with Ruggles’s bandmates: Pete Connolly on drums, Patrick Morris on bass, Freddy Jay Walker on electric guitar, and Kevin Larkin on piano.