It’s not easy being pregnant in a heatwave, even with a precious rainbow baby (a child born to a family that has previously lost a child due to miscarriage, stillbirth or death during infancy). Grammy-nominated songwriter RuthAnne Cunningham (36) from Donaghmede, Dublin, has f ans all over the house — cool-air producing ones, that is. She has fans of a different kind all over the world, not least Britney Spears, but we will get to that later.

“I’m not showing myself,” says her disembodied voice over Zoom from London. “I’m literally sweating. I don’t think anyone can see me today. I’m trying to enjoy the heatwave but, also, it’s just a tiny bit too hot for me.”

RuthAnne’s musical talent was also a tiny bit too hot when she flew to LA straight after her Leaving Cert and three days later wrote the hit Too Little Too Late for American pop star JoJo. It sold over a million copies.

A former Billie Barry Stage School kid, RuthAnne’s previous claim to fame had been winning the RTÉ 2FM/Jacob’s Song Contest and €10,000 of musical equipment. Now she has written in rooms with superstar singers Kelly Clarkson (“amazing”) and Jennifer Hudson (“her voice is unreal”). Her tearjerker The Vow was played in the 2019 Love Island finale and used in Netflix superhero drama Raising Dion. The video of RuthAnne singing it — she is a fantastic singer too — has over two million YouTube views. People have commented that it makes them think of Jesus or a beloved deceased family member. Countless couples have already tied the knot to The Vow and it reached number one in the Irish iTunes chart.

She is a mistress of the saucy song, too. Niall Horan enjoyed over a million streams of Slow Hands. “He’s an amazing artist and a great writer and a great person. I love working with him,” she says. The feeling must be mutual because RuthAnne wrote on both of his multi-platinum albums; no less than five tracks on his debut.

She spearheaded the Irish Women in Harmony group who released a cover of The Cranberries’ Dreams during lockdown to raise money for domestic-violence charity Safe Ireland, and a reworking of Eleanor McEvoy’s A Woman’s Heart into Only A Woman last month.

Her Grammy nod came in 2019 for working with superstar John Legend on his album, A Legendary Christmas, nominated in the Best Traditional Pop category. But talking about this astonishing achievement is where the contrast between RuthAnne’s outward success and her inner trauma is starkest.

“When we went to the Grammys and I was able to walk upstairs and all those things you take for granted, it was brilliant. I know that sounds so ridiculous but walking upstairs was a huge stress for me when I was in pain.”

Shortly before the Grammys, RuthAnne underwent successful surgery for endometriosis, a painful disorder in which tissue similar to the tissue that normally lines the uterus — the endometrium — grows outside the uterus. She suffered in agony for years — and was “really down about my career because I missed out on so much” — before finding a clinician who took her seriously.

“He saved my life and he’s my doctor for everything now. He was the first doctor who listened to me. Everyone thinks you’re being just over-dramatic about the pain and that it’s just a period. Once I got my diagnosis and had the four-hour surgery — I almost lost my bowel because it had ravaged my bowels — I realised how important it was to talk about endometriosis. It is too important not to speak about.”

Particularly when, as RuthAnne discovered, the condition can impact on fertility. 

“I never really even thought about my fertility until I met Ollie; there was no one else I wanted to have babies with until Ollie. That was when my health battle kind of started with endometriosis.”

But before we get to her handsome fiancé and their roller-coaster journey from a devastating pregnancy loss in January to the joy and fear of becoming pregnant again in March, we must talk about RuthAnne’s new music.

Her new EP, The Way I Love You, is out on August 27 and, says RuthAnne, covers “topics like mental health, relationships, unconditional love”. The beautiful track Safe Place was inspired by her fiancé’s steadfast support during her recent trials.

A musician and DJ, Ollie Marland is from Stoke-on-Trent and the expectant couple and their Cavapoo Ruby live in an impressive home with a large garden — featuring a very sleek outdoor bar — in south-east London. They also built a studio on the grounds during lockdown and often write together. Ollie’s best friend is married to RuthAnne’s best friend (The Wanted singer Tom Parker and his wife Kelsey), and that’s how they met.

If you follow RuthAnne or Ollie on social media, you will have seen the video footage of their gender-reveal party, in which Ollie and both sets of grandparents-to-be set off pink confetti flares amid scenes of jubilation.

“We are having this rainbow baby because we had our loss in January of this year,” RuthAnne says. “At the time I didn’t speak about it publicly because I wanted to deal with it myself privately.”

Aside from the heartache of the pregnancy loss, RuthAnne needed an emergency blood transfusion and spent three days recovering in hospital. “It was a lot for me to deal with and I was on my own in hospital. After that I couldn’t really sleep and I was having a lot of flashbacks and night terrors.”

She read about women who marked their pregnancy loss by planting a rose bush or a tree or wearing a special piece of jewellery. “For me, I wanted my baby as close to my heart as possible so I got this little gold heart locket from Tiffany. As soon as it came and I put it on, I felt calmer.”

It is engraved with ‘Little one’, their nickname for the baby during pregnancy. “Ollie always knows when I’m triggered or struggling because I’ll be touching it. I rub it whenever I need to and it actually really calms me down. I can’t really explain it,” Throughout this sad conversation I can hear the sound of her running the heart pendant along the necklace chain.

“We got pregnant again very quickly, at the end of March. It’s been a lot to deal with because you’re still grieving. And then I have this rainbow baby — and I do feel like the baby that I lost is in Heaven and helping this rainbow baby grow strong. I know that my first baby is there with me as an angel.”

The couple’s joy at this pregnancy is understandably tinged with worry. “It’s really tough to lose your first because the only experience you have of pregnancy is loss. So it’s hard to then be pregnant and not terrified. It’s a very confusing feeling to be very excited but also very cautious and anxious. But with every scan I’m getting more confident and relaxing more and taking it day by day. I think that that’s the best way to be with this one.”

As an interviewee, RuthAnne brings the same emotional forthrightness that she brings to her music. She jokes of talking too much but perhaps it is because her songwriting is so succinct, condensing deep feelings into short lines.

She describes her career as “up, down, rich, poor, hits, no hits”, but her vast talent means she earns royalties across perennial Christmas tunes, gym staples, date-night tracks, teen pop anthems and wedding ballads. She has written a hit for every occasion and is a self-made woman.

Her success is all the more remarkable given the patronising attitude that exists in the industry towards female songwriters. RuthAnne has seen “a lot of misogyny around women in music” and found it very hard to be heard when she was “the only woman in a room with six men. A few times I’ve heard, ‘Oh Ruth, it’s a boys’ club so you can’t come’ — so, missing out on opportunities just because of my gender. Or people saying, ‘There are not that many good women writers out there, you’re one of the good ones’.”

It gets worse. Much worse.

“There’s pressure sometimes, like, ‘You need to sleep with producers’ or ‘You need to have sex with that A&R’. I never did any of that. I saw a lot of women around me pressured to do that and it just was never my thing.”

RuthAnne dated industry guys during her 20s in LA but never in order to progress her career. Yet the unwanted ‘advice’ continued.

“Someone said to me, ‘You need to act like you’ll have sex with them so that they think that you will — but you don’t have to’. You know, using your sexuality to get further and I didn’t. I’m just like, no, I don’t want to do that just to get a song. I’d rather the song be taken because it’s a great song. So I’m seeing that I sometimes hinder my career and seeing other people advance because they would do that — that was difficult. But then, ultimately, I’ve had the success I wanted to have. So I feel like sticking to my guns — and sticking to my own morals of the way I was raised — was better. My parents always were like, ‘Let your talent lead first and don’t let it be about anything else’. I think that’s why I’ve been in the industry a long, long time.”

RuthAnne was also the victim of a sexual assault in a professional setting when her career in LA was already established. The experience precipitated her move back to this side of the Atlantic. The details are shocking but she is not in a position to speak about it publicly yet, as a wider case builds against the perpetrator. Her ordeal happened shortly before the #MeToo movement and she informed management about it immediately.

“The way the record label handled it at the time was very much [in keeping] with the times. If they handled it the way that they handled it with me now, the label would be finished.” 

Discussing music industry misogyny and abuse brings us neatly to its poster girl, Britney Spears. RuthAnne wrote the star’s 2013 comeback hit, Work Bitch, which has taken on more poignancy and relevance since the #FreeBritney campaign highlighted the unfairness of Jamie Spears’s conservatorship of his daughter.

“I love how much the fans embrace that song because when you go to Britney’s Vegas show, which I brought my friends to multiple times, she opens the show and ends the show with Work Bitch. It’s on all the merch and everyone’s wearing Work Bitch hats and T-shirts.”

RuthAnne didn’t write the song with Britney in the room — will.i.am was their intermediary — so she does not know if Britney chose the song to send out a message about her father controlling her finances.

“If it becomes kind of an anthem for what she’s going through right now, that’s just amazing. She’s such a pop star, it’s just amazing to be a part of it.”

RuthAnne is a huge Britney fan. As a teenager she didn’t just sing along, she learned the choreography to all of her songs. At the time of our interview, coincidentally, Britney’s fight to end her conservatorship inspired a proposed law in the US House of Representatives. The Freedom and Right to Emancipate from Exploitation (Free) Act would allow a person bound by a conservatorship to petition to replace their court-appointed private conservator with a public conservator, family member or private agent without having to prove abuse.

“I just hope for her that she gets the freedom because I think that we all know that there’s been a huge abuse of power. That’s why it leans into all the women’s movements going on. I don’t think this would ever happen to a male artist so it’s another huge example of how the mistreatment of women needs to stop. I’m all for that and so I hope that she gets freedom soon. I think it’s coming for sure.”

RuthAnne’s baby is coming too — in early December.

“Ollie and I are huge Christmas people; we are the ones putting up the decorations in the first week of November. So for us, I was like, ‘This is really meant to be, because we love Christmas’.”

The couple had to postpone their wedding because of Covid-19 restrictions, but it will take place in the same Irish venue in June 2022.

“We are just so excited. It will be nice to be able to have a celebration and we’ll have our little rainbow baby with us. She’ll be six months old and we’ll be parents. This year is just going to be so, so special and we’re really excited.”

RuthAnne’s EP ‘The Way I Love You’, is out on August 27

Photography by: Lee Malone
Styling by: Harriet Nicolson, see harrietnicolson.com
Hair and make-up by: Jade Farmiloe, see jadefarmiloemua.com