Bruce Robison’s new world and his old one, too
There’s one thing I’ve come to know about Bruce Robison, in a couple decades of watching his gradual rise from an Austin nightclub and dancehall upstart to the likely future dean of Texas songwriters. And that is, despite the significant success he’s had writing hits for other artists, he’s not content to simply coast on the coattails of past accomplishments. The creative spark still burns in him.
So it wasn’t really all that surprising to hear the wholly uncharacteristic sound which kicks off “The Hammer”, the opening track of his new disc The New World. Robison’s repertoire has always been pretty diverse honky-tonk shuffles settle aside deeply personal ballads, poppy country melodies share space with raucous rave-ups but this is something entirely different. It’s downright…funky.
You get the feeling Robison probably enjoys the heck out of playing this particular tune. To be clear, it’s not the precursor to a career-shift in an entirely new direction; the majority of The New World stays in touch with the songwriter’s bread-and-butter moves, with a few subtle twists and turns here and there. But “The Hammer” is a pretty strong signal that Robison still wants to stretch the bounds of what he can do, not only as a songwriter but as a performer.
And perhaps as a homestyle record man as well. The New World is one of two new releases Robison is issuing more or less simultaneously on his own label, Premium Records; the other, a collection of re-recorded back-catalogue gems titled His Greatest, will be available digitally this coming Tuesday (November 11), with a CD release to follow on January 20.
On His Greatest, Robison reclaims the material on which he staked his reputation. His initial recordings of songs such as “Angry All The Time” (a huge hit for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill), “Desperately” (ditto for George Strait) and “Travelin’ Soldier” (the ill-fated chart-topper for the Dixie Chicks the very week their prescient anti-war/anti-Bush remarks were delivered) came out on discs released in the late-’90s by the long-gone Sony imprint Lucky Dog. While those versions perhaps remain definitive, Robison’s own recordings of them were never “hits” per se note the clever title-tweak His Greatest rather than Greatest Hits and thus there’s a little more freedom for him to do what he wishes with his classics here.
Indeed, a large part of what makes these songs worth not only revisiting, but re-recording, is that they’re good enough for Robison to continue playing them the rest of his life, without ever really wearing them out. Any of the three songs mentioned above would serve as a nice career-apex for most writers; in Robison’s case, it’s just scratching the surface. “Wrapped” and “Not Forgotten You” didn’t become mainstream-country hits, but they did become first-rate entries in the ouevre of his wife, Kelly Willis; and if one of your main live gigs over the long haul is at South Austin’s legendary Broken Spoke, it helps to have sure-fire boot-scooters such as “Poor Man’s Son” and “Red Letter Day” to rely on.
The best of all, though, remains “My Brother And Me”, which echoes Guy Clark’s towering “Desperados Waiting For A Train” in some respects, but ultimately emerges as unique and unparalleled in the pantheon of Texas songwriting. This one hasn’t been covered perhaps because its observations are too specific, too personal; maybe only his brother Charlie could do it justice but it will always be priceless, an art apart from anything else in the Robison songbook.
It’s also a good object-lesson in why it’s important to do things like the new album’s “The Hammer”: Though they’re completely different songs, both “My Brother And Me” and “The Hammer” are unlike what you might expect from a guy playing for the two-steppers at the local honky-tonk. Not that Robison can’t still come up with such stuff “Twisted” from The New World is evidence enough of that but the transcendent moments more often strike when inspiration overrides form. And if “The Hammer” doesn’t quite elevate to transcendence, well, it sure is fun.
One other intriguing inclusion on The New World is “Hanging On Hopeless”, which is notable in that it was not written by Robison, but rather by longtime Austin musician Kevin McKinney, a key sideman on the album. Buoyed by the steel guitar accents of Lloyd Maines, the song sways and swells to an aching melody, delivered by Robison with an emotional resonance that suggests he has grown comfortable enough as a singer to turn the tables on the songwriter/performer relationship.
“I never thought I was gonna have any hits,” Robison told me a few years ago in an interview, “but I always had this feeling of moving forward.” With His Greatest and The New World, it’s evident that he’s managed both, at the same time.
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A postscript: You’ll note that one of the photos above features Robison with our new president-elect. Coincidentally enough, yesterday’s e-mail brought a note from photographer Ryan Sweeney, who earlier this week was kind enough to provide us with a couple of shots from Mavis Staples’ live-album taping at the Hideout in Chicago, passing along a link to a video he shot on Tuesday night at Grant Park (edited and set to will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song). Those who share Robison’s inclination toward Obama may find it worth a few minutes of your time: