Kodachrome Shangri-La

Martin Ruby is a Roots/Americana band led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Marco North. Born in Brooklyn, he has been living in Moscow, Russia for the past 13 years.
Laying his demons bare, North pulls on characters like a series of strange coats. Paring back the extraneous, coaxing out the wry details, always seeking that conversational tone, his songs are a wandering collection of midnight confessions.
His first album, Heaven Get Behind Me was written on a 100-year-old parlor guitar, and recorded in a Soviet-era living room on a collection of vintage instruments, including a 1887 Pollman banjola. North’s unique songwriting is steeped in not only the melancholy grace of Nick Drake and Mark Linkous, but also the foggy noir of Johnny Cash’s American albums, and the somber meditativeness of Nick Cave’s most recent recorded output.