Rudy’s Song

ARTIST
Caius Hubris (Cory Huber)

SENIOR
Rudy Loy

ARTFORM
Craft & Music

LISTEN TO RUDY’S SONG
Apple Music
Spotify

ABOUT THE ARTFORM
I made this song for an 84-year-old gentleman named Rudy. Rudy, like me, is a hobby-woodworker, except I have two years of experience and he has like 30 or 40. After an hour and a half on the phone, we ended up spending almost the entire day together. I went over to his house and he showed me his workshop. He showed me how he set up many individual workstations that accomplished basically one very specific task in the construction of heirloom, ornate, in-laid wooden boxes.

Rudy can’t sell these boxes, because it would mess with his pension, but he does donate them to charities and has raised something like tens or thousands of dollars for children’s charities from around the world. As he was taking me around his house, it became very obvious that he had a hand in the construction of everything around there from shelves to beautiful picture frames that were custom-made for the art or photograph inside them.

He was telling me about his living room. When Rudy retired with his wife, he said that he wanted to build (custom) every piece of furniture in the living room. Unfortunately, after he finished the first piece (a coffee table), his wife died early. That part hit me the hardest about his life story. The idea that you have this unfinished business. It stuck out as a very powerful detail about his life for me.

After he showed me all of his really detailed and good work around his house, he took me downstairs and showed me some of his instruments. That’s when I realized that this gentleman that I’m having a conversation with is almost like talking to myself from the future. We go downstairs and he shows me his guitars and his records of him playing some songs that he loves from when he was growing up. Many of them were waltzes. I thought I need to make a song about this man’s life. And it has to be in the style that he would have chose.

I usually make very experimental hip-hop and that just didn’t fit. This time, I knew that it had to be a waltz. So I chose a 3/4 waltz format. I had the hook on the car-ride home from his house, based on the conversation that we had, and I fleshed it out from there, to an entire song.

– Caius Hubris (Cory Huber)

Cory also crafted a small wooden box, reminiscent of the boxes that Rudy creates, and gifted it to Rudy with a USB containing his custom-composition.

WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ARTFORM