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Ruth Berhe (born July 2, 1995) is a Canadian singer and songwriter from Edmonton, Alberta. She started by singing songs on Vine in early 2013. In November 2015, she released her debut extended play (EP), The Intro. On May 5, 2017, she released her debut studio album, Safe Haven. It has gathered over 2.5 billion overall streams globally as of June 2024. Her double-platinum single "Lost Boy" has accumulated over 850 million streams on Spotify.

In 2022, her song "Dandelions" from Safe Haven became a sleeper hit, when it grew in popularity due to TikTok and charted internationally, including chart debuts in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Germany. It has accumulated over 2 billions streams on Spotify alone.

Early life and education

Ruth Berhe was born on July 2, 1995, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. Her parents emigrated from Ethiopia in the 1980s. At the age of eight, Berhe began playing the piano. Berhe speaks her parents' native language Amharic fluently. She spent some of her teenage years working at a local Reitmans clothing store and described herself in an interview with The Canadian Press as an "introvert". She said she was "never the big party chick." While working part-time she started posting videos on Vine. She says she chose the six-second video service because it took less effort to upload short clips, compared to other popular services like YouTube.

Berhe graduated from Ross Sheppard High School in 2013. She attended MacEwan University, but took time off her studies to focus on music.

Career

2013–2018: Debut and Safe Haven

Berhe posted her first Vine video in May 2013, and started making singing Vines about a year later. Her singing Vines, typically six second covers of popular songs, helped her grow a following. In November 2014, she posted a Vine of herself singing a line that she had made up, which was inspired by the television series Once Upon a Time. It garnered around 84,000 likes within a week, which was unusual for her at the time. She took note of its popularity, with some of her followers commenting that she should make it into a full song. It became "Lost Boy", which she shared to YouTube on January 18, 2015. The song "Superficial Love" was featured on her debut EP The Intro later that year and on her 2017 debut album Safe Haven, which also included the song "Dandelions".

In September 2017, she performed Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" for Bryan Adams's induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. The CBC Kids television series Addison debuted in 2018, with a theme song performed by Ruth B. In May, her song "Shadows" appeared in the second season of the Netflix series Dear White People.

2019–present: Subsequent releases

In 2019, Ruth B released an EP called Maybe I'll Find You Again, which includes the song "Slow Fade" that she co-wrote with the British alternative group, Oh Wonder. In the summer of 2020, she released the song "If I Have a Son" as a response to the George Floyd Murder in Minneapolis. "Dirty Nikes" was the first single released from her then upcoming second studio album. On December 3, she performed a virtual concert representing the MusicCares Foundation to raise money during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, her second album, Moments in Between was released. In August 2022, her song "Paper Airplanes" was featured as the leading original song for the Tyler Perry Netflix film, A Jazzman's Blues soundtrack.