India Ramey Enters Her ‘Villain Era’ with Sixth Studio Album

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the print edition of American Songwriter we stated that India was a Cumberland School of Law graduate, we corrected the mistake for the online version to read University of Alabama School of Law graduate. AS regrets the error.

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With music fueled by the childhood trauma of watching her father abuse her mother, India Ramey delivers her sixth album, The Villain Era, and in the process herself and her healing.

Like most songwriters, her work has been an emotional outlet. But unlike most artists she spent 10 years working as a prosecutor in domestic abuse cases. 

The University of Alabama School of Law graduate began working on what would become her first album, Junkyard Angel, after she was laid off from her job in 2008. She hadn’t entertained the thought of leaving law but, with the encouragement of mixing engineer Pappy Middleton and her husband Shaun, the couple moved to Nashville in 2010.

Ramey knew songwriting was soul-soothing in the early 2000s when she pulled over to the side of the road to write a song about her grandparents. “I thought, ‘I just want to tell my story this way from now on,’” Ramey says of her first attempt at songwriting.

She calls her previous album, Baptized by the Blaze, a full-on exorcism. The opening verse to the title track begins: Yesterday I set myself on fire / with my own hands I built that funeral pyre.

“I was really having a personal reckoning,” she says, explaining while writing “Never Going Back” she was literally going through Klonopin withdrawal and experiencing tremors so intense she thought she’d never play guitar again.  

As for Villain Era, Ramey told producer Eric Corne she wanted the record to sound like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn had risen from the grave to score a Quentin Tarantino film. Even though the songs on this outing are mostly in third person, the outlaw-style artist calls it her most personal album.

“They’re still so much of me, but I just thought this was a way to take the focus off of me a little and invite the listener in to find where it resonates with them.” 

Ramey says that the tongue-in-cheek “Scattered and Smothered,” details an autobiographical experience that occurred more than once in her life where the man she was with was “the kind of man I was supposed to be with and it didn’t fit. And I felt like a bad person. I struggled with, ‘Am I even a good person because I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore? What’s wrong with me?’”

Of her writing process, Ramey says, “I’ll go ahead and write it down and think on it.  ‘Where do I want to go with that? What kind of story do I want to tell around that?’ Once I get the story in my head, then I sit down to start writing and usually I’ll try to musically get at least some kind of a melody that I like that goes with whatever that hook is gonna be. Then the rest of it happens simultaneously. I write the words as the melody is developing, getting a melody going for the hook, and putting the words into that puzzle of that cadence.”

Ramey says the most personal song on this album is probably “Cryin’ in my Lingerie,” sparked by a conversation with her publicist and good friend, Susan Hamilton. “We were talking about our exes and how society and gender programming sets up a dynamic where a mediocre man can make an extraordinary woman feel like she’s not enough. We buy into it. I was just as culpable as he was. I believed that I wasn’t good enough for him. I said, ‘When I look back at pictures of us, I thought he wasn’t even that good looking. It shouldn’t have been me getting rejected and crying in my lingerie.’ She said, ‘Promise me that you’re gonna go home and write that song.’”

Ramey’s favorite song on Villain Era is “Nobody’s Coming.” “I specifically wrote it about depression, because that really can creep into somebody like me that has PTSD. There was a moment for me where I realized that nobody’s gonna get me out of this, but myself.”

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 Ramey takes a lot of walks for her mental health. Often during those quiet moments, ideas come. The song “Silverado” on Baptized by the Blaze, came out in full movie-mode in her head. “I came home and wrote that song in, like, 30 minutes. It was like I was watching a movie and writing about it.”

Also, on that album “Rotten” came to her at 3 a.m., during a dark time of the pandemic lockdown. 

“Everybody was pitching a fit about not being able to get haircuts and not being able to go to Lowe’s to get their grass seed, and I was just lying awake, thinking…about how my granddaddy volunteered to go into the Navy during World War II because he was too old for the draft, but he volunteered when he had five kids at home because…he wanted to support this country. And I thought, ‘Y’all can’t go without a haircut? We’re so spoiled ‘rotten,’ as my mother would say.”

Disclosure: American Songwriter and Savage Music Publishing, which Ramey is signed to, are both owned and operated by Savage Ventures.

Lead photo by Adrienne Cohen