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Online success surprises singer/songwriter Amber Rubarth - cyrano - 01-07-2009 08:55 AM By Daniel Gewertz To be a grassroots success in the music business takes planning, ambition and sweat, right? Not if you’re Amber Rubarth. The 26-year-old singer/songwriter, who plays Club Passim with her duo, Paper Raincoat, on Thursday, has a MySpace site that has been visited nearly 1 million times, yet it’s taken very little effort on her part. “I have no idea how it happened, Rubarth said from her Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, “because I’m the lamest MySpace user. A lot of people just started posting my songs on their pages.” You might call Rubarth an accidental success. She never dreamed of becoming a musician when she was young and barely even listened to music of any sort until she was 20. She has never taken a voice lesson and still does not practice singing. At 18, her only artistic pursuit was sculpture: While her peers in California trooped off to college, Rubarth became an apprentice to a wood-carving artist. Rubarth’s winsome, quirky songs are reminiscent of free-spirited, eccentric 1980s folk-pop acts like Rickie Lee Jones and the Roches. But she says she has never listened to either. “I just started to listen to the Beatles,” said an amused Rubarth, who counts Tom Waits as her favorite performer. “I write about daily details and thoughts I normally keep to myself,” added Rubarth, who, in her song “23,” takes a traumatic episode of romantic betrayal in her life and transforms it into a bouncy, ironic, self-deprecating ditty. What Rubarth has accomplished in the past four years is notable. Three tours of Europe. Extensive performances across the United States. An expanding fan base. And as part of the Paper Raincoat, her duo with multi-instrumentalist Alex Wong, she is attempting to write a novel-length story in song. The inspiration behind the Paper Raincoat songs is a multi-layered story about a character named Grace, a 50-year-old woman who looks back over her meek and misspent life. The paper raincoat itself is an unprofitable creation of Grace’s late, inventor father, and it is also the title of a novel Grace is writing about her own life. Yet even the Raincoat project isn’t as thought-out as it seems. In fact, it sounds like another lucky Rubarth accident. “I was inspired by an improvisational acting exercise I heard about from a friend,” she explained. “Once we invented the character of Grace, then Alex (Wong) and I just wrote the first things that came into our heads. And then we developed it a little more consciously, I guess. Before this, my songs have been personal and pretty literal. But this is fantasy. We take things we’ve noticed in real life and apply them to these made-up characters.” The music of Paper Raincoat is available now on an EP, “Safe in The Sound,” and will soon be expanded on a soon-to-be-released full-length CD. Lithe and whimsical, the songs are meant to be enjoyed without any knowledge of the back story. “The story will thread through the whole thing,” Rubarth said. “Maybe we’ll put it out eventually on blogs or in a book.” Rubarth - who recently acquired her first manager - has developed a modern, even trendy sound without much exposure to pop culture trends, past or present. She never watched television, even in childhood. She doesn’t keep up with pop musical movements. “Maybe I sound modern because I respond to the world,” she said, “and not to media or hot trends.” ust last week she and a notable musician friend, Norah Jones’ guitarist Adam Levy, went busking at the 34th Street New York subway platform. “It’s all about the music down there,” Rubarth said. “It felt very natural.” Natural. Maybe that’s the Rubarth secret. Fans, musicians, gigs, MySpace downloads come to her because she’s a natural.