Lara Ruggles, better known as Sharkk Heartt, is a Tucson-based singer/songwriter notable for making powerful alt-pop and acoustic ballads. The winner of a 2024 stART grant for the Artist Development Track, Lara decided to use the award funds to elevate her sound and work with L.A.-based producer Justin Glasco. The duo produced three songs that Lara premiered at a live release party at Habitation Realty on March 20th, 2026. Prior to her big show, Lara sat down with Tiera Rainey of the Arts Foundation to talk about her triple-single release party, why the stART grant meant so much to her music, and how collaboration was the backbone of her latest project.
Tiera Rainey (TR): From your 2024 stART grant, you produced three songs. Can you tell me about the inspiration and themes behind each one?
Lara Ruggles: Basically, the stART grant funded me being able to go and work with [Justin Glasco] in L.A. and pay his producer fee. I went with a whole collection of songs. And we kind of decided together which ones we were both drawn to most. The first two songs were really different. Boomerang is kind of whimsical, catchy, and bouncy, and almost dream-like in some of the lyrics, but very structurally like a pop song.
The other one, No Matter, was a little darker and a little bit more down tempo, slow-building…like if I had to choose one song out of my entire catalog to say, “this is the one I’m going to hold up as representative of me and the message I want to be putting out there in the world,” it would be this song. It’s very much an anti-capitalist anthem that is fighting against the narrative that worth is determined by productivity…
It started with those two songs, but about a year later, I was in L.A. again, and so I reached out to the producer again. We recorded a third song (The Glue), which was very much a disappointment-and-betrayal song about what happened at my last job after I left… I thought I was leaving on good terms, but then very quickly, in the wake of my leaving, they did some things that really impacted people that I really cared about in really unjust ways…I needed to do something to process through that intense level of disappointment and betrayal. This third song I recorded ended up being the first music video that I released back in January.
TR: Can you please tell me about how you began collaborating with producer Justin Glasco, and how that relationship developed/grew after you were awarded the 2024 stART grant?
LR: So, he was someone I had not collaborated with before. I reached out to him because I was looking to level up my sound and achieve something in the production of my songs that I hadn’t felt like I could achieve on my own. I was on this journey of trying to find a producer whose previous work I knew that I resonated with. [Justin said],” I like what you sent, I’d love to work on some stuff with you.” I had a meeting with him while I was in L.A. to discuss what it would be like to work with him. And pretty much right after I got home from that trip, I found out I’d gotten the stART grant, and I was able to write him back pretty quickly and be like, “We can actually do it!”
TR: Once you got the grant, how did your relationship further develop?
LR: It was kind of wild because I didn’t really know him that well. I had had the one meeting with him, and we emailed back and forth a couple of times…We had talked about possible songs we might work on… and setting up a time frame. We had four days on the calendar in August 2024 …we thought we could get two songs done… We just sat down, started working, put things together, and played with sounds and recording scratch tracks…
I was so nervous, I was like I don’t know how this will go, I don’t know this guy. I don’t know how pushy he’s gonna be about his ideas. Or how open he’s gonna be to hearing the direction I am hoping to go with. It ended up being the perfect dynamic. I see why he ends up working with a lot of strong woman songwriters because he was very open to hearing what I was hoping to create and trying to translate that into the sounds that he knew he had available to him, and he was really talented at making that happen…
TR: As Sharkk Heartt, you are a well-established local artist. How did getting a stART grant matter to your art practice as a musician? What did the experience mean to you?
LR: For artists, grants are very often the very difference between whether works gets made or not. Without this grant, I don’t know if these songs would have been recorded yet. I would still have them in my head and still want to record them, but without the budget to make it happen the way I envisioned. I could record them in my bedroom, and they would sound completely different. They would not be the same songs at all. I had this vision for them, and the way I wanted to see them come into the world required more of a budget to make it happen. Without [the stART] grant, I don’t know where that budget would have come from…
I think that the Arts Foundation’s approach is especially important because there aren’t really any limits on grant mediums. A lot of the arts grants that are available are specifically for visual, video, and creative writing kinds of artists. Performing arts is cut out, or music is cut out. Or it’s for classical music, but if you’re a recording artist and a songwriter writing songs with lyrics, it’s not considered “fine art,” and so there are not as many grants that are available for that. To have a local arts foundation working specifically with local artists is such an important and powerful thing.
TR: To complete this project, you needed to have A LOT of collaborators. Can you expand all the different people who helped bring this project to life?
LR: I’ve had so many good friends over the years who have given me advice and encouraged me to seek out collaborators in production. I kind of sought Justin (Glasco) out in the first place and proposed this for the grant because I had had friends say things to me along the lines of, “your songs are so powerful and I want to see them come to life in as powerful a way as I hear them. It would be so cool to see you work with a producer that does that…” For the first music video (The Glue), there were so many folks [who helped]. I put out a social media call for folks to film footage with the lyrics. And there were friends in different states who sent me footage and folks I’ve never met… There was one day when we needed a couple of extra shots, and we staged a protest. I showed up thinking, “I hope that at least 3 other people show up…” and twenty people in our community showed up. It was amazing!
The second music video for “Boomerang” is all collage animation. I worked with an artist who does that regularly; her name is Gabriella Molina. One of the career moments that I’m most proud of is that I got to go on tour with Andrea Gibson in 2018, until the pandemic shut everything down. We wrote some songs together that we were playing during a tour of theirs, and I would play the chords of [Boomerang] underneath one of their poems. So [Gabriella and I] tried to bring some of the imagery from that particular poem into the video for this song as a tribute to [Andrea].
For the final music video for “No Matter,” I worked with Syir, who is shooting and editing it. We kind of followed around our music video muse/protagonist Jameela Hill… When I thought about the message of this song, someone who is constantly creating and putting events together to show love to her community, Meela was the first person who came to mind. We’re following her through all the different creative things she does in her life as part of this video.
I feel like there are so many other folks who have helped this come together. My bandmates are really amazing, [all the folks] I’ve been rehearsing for this show with. I’m in a lucky place with community.
