“He was the roommate of this guy who was teaching a percussion class,” she recalls. “He was practicing for hours. He had a key to the concert hall and he would go in there and play all night, every night. I had never been around anyone like that. He was full-tilt making music and I thought that was great. After about a year the personal relationship began.”
When Horvitz moved to New York in 1977, Holcomb followed him soon after, and they were married in 1980. In New York, they co-founded an art-jazz-rock band called White Noise and a performance space called Studio Henry.
“John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Bobby Previte, Eugene Chadbourne and our bands all performed there,” Holcomb says. “It had a dirt floor; it was under a pet store, and little creatures would escape. You can hear crickets and rodents on the records that were recorded there. It wasn’t much bigger than a living room, but it had a real community, storefront feeling. To hear what all these people were working on as soon as it was done was very exciting. People were collaborating with each other and with theater and dance groups. It was a pressure cooker in the best sense.”
At that point, Holcomb had only performed in public as a keyboardist and composer, but she was seeking a way to combine her poetry and her music. She tried writing lyrics in regular meter and rhyme, but that didn’t work for her. As an experiment, she tried putting some Shakespeare poems to music, and when that worked, she tried doing the same thing with her own poems.
“In the mid-’80s, I had strung together a series of poems I had written about my experiences in North Carolina and had set them to music,” she remembers. “One day I was teaching parts to Shelly Hirsch, one of the singers I had asked to sing these pieces, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just sing them yourself?’ So I gave it a try not long after that in a show at the Kitchen. It was the first time I had sung in public, and when people responded to it, it was immediately gratifying.”
The full song cycle, Angels At The Four Corners, premiered at the 1989 New Music America Festival, and three of those songs — “Yr Mother Called Them Farmhouses”, “Waltz”, and “Deliver Me” — appeared on Holcomb’s self-titled 1990 album on the Elektra/Musician label. Two more, “Widowmaker” and “The Natural World”, emerged her 1992 Elektra disc Rockabye, once again produced by Horvitz and featuring Frisell, guitarist Peter Holsapple (dBs, Continental Drifters), mandolinist Peter Ostroushko and gospel group the Steeles. A sixth song from the cycle, “I Want To Tell The Story”, surfaced in 2002 on The Big Time.
The 1990 release wasn’t her first album. Todos Santos had featured her instrumental compositions performed by Frisell and clarinetist Doug Wieselman without her help, and Larks, They Crazy featured Holcomb performing her own instrumentals and singing on the title track. But both of those 1989 albums were released on Germany’s Sound Aspects label and barely made a ripple. Her self-titled effort, by contrast, was a critical favorite, earning raves in Rolling Stone and The New York Times.
“I first I knew Robin as a wild improvising piano player, and then as a composer,” Frisell reflects. “She wasn’t singing in public at all then. So it was a surprise to everyone when she started singing and this whole other side to her musical personality came out.
“It was bizarre, because suddenly she was doing this fully formed, totally original thing as if she’d been working on it in secret all her life. She doesn’t sound like anyone else, because it’s this strange mixture of old and new. You can hear where it’s coming from, from the old-time stuff, but she also has this modern thing going on, too.”
“Robin’s an unusual case,” her husband says. “Her songwriting bloomed from her own unique, isolated work, and it happened relatively late in life, in her late 20s. Most of us form our musical personalities long before that. I’d known for Robin for years as an improvising pianist and composer, not as a songwriter. So I was surprised when that side of her emerged, but so was she. She hadn’t played with a lot of other people, which is usually a disadvantage, but she turned that isolation into an advantage.”
Holcomb didn’t abandon instrumental music. Her 1996 Nonesuch release Little Three featured five solo piano works, supplemented by two songs for voice and piano. But it was her vocal music, close enough to conventional songwriting to seem familiar but different enough to be unsettling and intriguing, that drew the most attention. By borrowing phrases and melodic fragments from the mountain songs she loved as a young woman, she roots her songs in a rural tradition, yet her art-music chords and elliptical free verse dislocate the songs and allow them to float free through time.
“With the little songs I’ve written,” she says, “there are little discrete batches of words that don’t always fit together. They’re not the kind of songs where the words tell you everything and direct you how to respond. They leave you with an impression.
“I prefer songs that don’t tell you everything, because I don’t think songs have to be any more earthbound than instrumental pieces. They can have the same effect, even if they get at it in different ways, and I think there is room for both in the same concert and the same music.
“I use a software program to generate sheet music, and there’s a feature in this program that highlights parallel fifths in red, because that’s something you’re not supposed to do in classical music. But that’s a hallmark of my writing, and it’s also in a lot of old hymns. Those raw, open harmonies are just what I gravitate toward.”
