“I had so much fun rearranging these songs,” Ruel tells Apple Music about his Home Session EP. The UK-born, Sydney-raised singer-songwriter revisited two songs from his debut album, 4TH WALL. The 2023 release came after years of pandemic-related delays which, in turn, led to numerous different creative musical paths and saw him toying with pop, folk, and even a concept album inspired by The Truman Show. “SITTING IN TRAFFIC,” the first track on his Home Session, is about “the honeymoon phase [of a relationship] where everything’s so easy,” he says. “But then that fear comes in of ‘I love you so much that if this doesn’t end up working, I can’t even imagine us not being friends. I need you to still like me even if this doesn’t go well.’ I thought that was a pretty desperate and depressing way of looking at the start of a relationship.” It’s his favorite track to perform live on tour with his band, and for his Home Session, he’s taken it right back to basics—just vocals and guitar. “To arrange a stripped-back version with the band was really cool,” he says. “‘IF AND/OR WHEN’ is probably my favorite song lyrically on the record, and doing this stripped-down version of it really helped accentuate the words and the meaning of the song,” he adds about his second Home Session track, and the song he considers to be the album’s most personal. “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy taking away the drums, but it just made me listen to the song from a whole different perspective,” he says of the tender reimagining. It was his Home Session cover song—The Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work”—which took the most consideration, but it ended up flowing quickly. “I had three different covers we were all ready to record that the band and I have been playing around with for months,” he says, “but this song popped into my head when we were in the studio. We’d never played it before and even after our first take we thought it was so special. It’s such an amazing song lyrically and melodically, it became so enjoyable to sing over and over.”