Her Crooked Heart's Rachel Ries has changed a lot since she was a student at Goshen College two decades ago

Much has changed for Rachel Ries in the two decades since she attended Goshen College, including her hairstyle.

“I’m quite a lot more content in my own skin,” she says. “Certainly, my songwriting, production and performance abilities have grown since then. Unsurprisingly, back then I was trying on different voices, in a way, in order to find my own. I also suspect I have a bit more of a sense of humor now, too, and, thankfully, far fewer dreadlocks.”

Ries dropped out after a semester and a half, but her time in Goshen laid the groundwork for her musical career; singing in the choir, learning a Brahms piece for her voice study and collaborating and singing with friends such as Jay Lapp (The Steel Wheels) and Mike Rempel (Lotus).

“I decided early on that an institutional higher education wasn't right for me,” she says. “I don't think, though, I could say that I walked away in order to pursue a music career, as at that time, I had no clue what that actually meant or what steps to take. I did know music was all I wanted to do, and I knew that formal education couldn't show me the path.”

Ries has released three full-length albums — 2005’s “For You Only,” 2007’s “Without a Bird” and 2014’s “Ghost of a Gardner” — and three EPs — 2008’s “Country” with folk singer Anaïs Mitchell, 2012’s “Laurel Lake” and 2016’s “The Rouen” — under in her name.

In the last couple of years, Ries has stopped releasing music under her own name, instead billing it as Her Crooked Heart, with two EPs — 2017’s “To Gentlemen” and February's “Captiva” — and a full-length album, “To Love to Leave to Live,” which came out in May.

Ries wanted to stop touring, performing and recording as Rachel Ries for a decade, saying it didn’t feel right anymore.

“Increasingly, I was doing more band-focused work and had long since walked away from the ‘girl with acoustic guitar’ trope that a name like Rachel Ries conjures up,” she says. “One morning, while I was meditating, the name Her Crooked Heart popped up out of the quiet, and I recognized myself, the music I make and the way I want to present it. It’s poetically perfect for me. Having a project name like this allows me to unapologetically make the larger sounds and collaborations I’d already been doing.”

Ries grew up in South Dakota and has lived in Chicago, New York City and Vermont, but she feels as if she has finally found a home in Minneapolis.

“I now live in a wee little cottage in my brother’s backyard,” she says. “I help raise his kids and tend the garden. Our sister and her little baby live 10 minutes away. I cherish the music and arts scene here and the parks and the bike-ability and the Mississippi (River) just a walk away. It’s rather perfect for me.”

Putting down roots is just one part of the loving, leaving and living that inspired the new album.

“I wrote the songs on ‘To Love to Leave to Live’ during a tumultuous stretch of living that began with leaving a marriage and a good man in (New York), spinning through a wildly challenging rebound, then resting for a time in an easy long-distance romance,” Ries says. “The tumult of those years ultimately led me to build a literal home in the Twin Cities, intimately close to my siblings and their broods, and to building a community here that nurtures me deeply. I love this town. In some real ways, I’ve had dalliances with losing my way and living someone else’s life. A lot of the songs on ‘To Love to Leave to Live’ are a glimpse into my process of unshackling.”

As with her “Rachel Ries” records, Ries doesn’t hesitate to sing about personal, vulnerable subjects.

“It’s all fairly universal, isn’t it?” she says. “The more we keep our stories hidden, the more we alienate ourselves and others. Living and creating with openness and candor helps me deeply, and night-to-night, I see how it reaches my audiences. Recognizing ourselves in each other is crucial.”

To support the new album on tour, Ries enlisted the talents of three female musicians from the Twin Cities — Adelyn Strei (Adro), Hilary James (We Are the Willows, Bathtub Cig) and Siri Undlin (Humbird) — as her band.

“We’ve all been friends and occasional collaborators previously,” Ries says. “Each of them is a songwriter and bandleader in their own right. As such, they bring a lot of their own energy, story and perspective to the project, which I really cherish. Musically, there’s an awful lot of skill going on. There’s some necessary instrument swapping, but collectively, we play cello, woodwinds, drum triggers, synth, piano, guitars, and sing in four-part harmony.”

Ries says it just felt right to make music with these women.

“When I was pondering how to tour this album, I decided not to approach it from the instrumentation standpoint first, but to instead look at the humans I want to spend time with and then arrange the songs with the sonic palate at hand,” she says. “Addie, Siri and Hilary are the people I most wanted to spend boring, challenging, sleep-deprived, exhilarating, inspired, mundane, vulnerable hours with. And they’re wildly talented musicians. So there you have it.”

Ries and Never Lonely, her band at the time, played at Ignition Music Garage in 2014, and she is looking forward to returning to the Goshen record store/music venue on Sunday.

“I can’t imagine running a record shop is an easy proposition these days,” she says. “It’s a place that really seems to go above and beyond for furthering art, community and music.”