All year long, we welcome nationally and globally touring artists to our stage for Studio Milwaukee Sessions, sponsored by Ellenbecker Investment Group. If you want to be in the live audience for these VIP experiences, become a member today.
What a way to open Studio Milwaukee for 2026.
Our mini-concert series goes on hiatus every year around the holidays, and every year we start to feel its absence. Thankfully, runo plum came along just in time to give our darkened performance space its first ray of light in weeks — an ironic-ish happenstance considering the material she played from new album patching.
The Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter’s first full-length effort was fueled by a breakup and all of the verbs that follow it: “contraction, expansion and release,” as she put it in her album notes. The sound she brought to this session felt more in line with that trio of words vs. the sadder, mopier aspects of love lost.
Album opener “Sickness,” which served as the session closer, is a perfect example of how patching set aside the one-dimensional approach to processing a past relationship. “In the moment, it was more like a fun, playful song I wrote just to feel good,” plum told Carolann during the mid-set interview, right before demonstrating how it’s possible to find something soothing in the wake of a tough time.
As for her time at Studio Milwaukee, calm and tranquility were the order of the day — from the serene but by no means sleepy tracks she picked for the set to the interview that veered into hot-button topics like reading and knitting. It was 17 minutes of warmth, well-timed for the cold snap we’ve hopefully put in the rearview.
Studio MKE: runo plum set list
- “Alley Cat”
- “flip your pillow”
- “Sickness”
