“I always had very high goals and a very high opinion of myself as a songwriter,” he says, adding, “and I don’t say that in a conceited way. I just think everybody should feel good about what they do.
“And I really loved calling myself a songwriter, from the time I first started doing it through the first ten years, when I never made a dime. And I have to assume that I would have loved calling myself a songwriter if I had never made a dime at it, because I always felt good at it from the first moment I started. And it really was ten years, and looking back on it — because nothing happened — I go, God, why did I keep doing that?
“I wasn’t good at sports. And I wasn’t good at academia. So until I started writing songs, I didn’t know what it felt like to be good at something.
“And it’s funny about people…I get asked all the time, ‘How did you start writing songs?’ And if you say, well, I was bad at everything else I tried to do before then, they all turn into your grandmother: ‘Oh, no you weren’t! You were good!’ But I don’t want your sympathy. I’m talking about something great! All I would love for my kids is for them to find something that they feel great at.”
At this juncture, Bruce Robison is speaking as a proven commercial commodity, a guy with a track record of hit covers and the royalty checks to prove it. He’s on the other side of the looking glass, recalling the tall, uncertain gangly guy who used to pick up gigs the Broken Spoke and the Continental Club, and then drive his beat-to-shit car to Nashville over and over, to pitch songs until the Music Row carousel spun him off and sent back down the road to Texas.
But he still looks back at that struggling acolyte with affection. The eventual vindication helps, too. “Success wipes away all past damages, man,” he says. “All of a sudden, the doors opened up. And it was ten years of struggle, but that’s what an open door is. And so those were good times; they still are.”
Robison experienced both the perks and the pitfalls of stardom by proxy. Kelly Willis was a critics’ darling who never quite crossed over to massive mainstream success even though MCA Records and label president Tony Brown threw clout and money behind her by the truckload. Willis had all the tools, but the house never quite got built.
Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, on the other hand, could not make a foolish move. Robison got word that McGraw and Hill had cut his song “Angry All The Time” the same week his and Kelly’s first child was born in 2001. It was an interlude of unalloyed rapture that Robison knows in his heart will never be repeated.
But then he had a ringside seat as the Dixie Chicks were turned into political pinatas after a remark Chicks vocalist Natalie Maines made to an English audience in March 2003: “We’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Overnight, the trio — which includes Bruce’s sister-in-law Emily Robison (who’s married to Charlie) — were transformed from America’s Sweethearts to unpatriotic pariahs, largely at the hands of conservative country radio conglomerates.
Their #1 single at the time just happened to be a Bruce Robison composition called “Travelin’ Soldier”, and it could not have dropped off the chart faster if it had been a share of Enron stock. Robison jokes that it was the fastest-falling single in the history of the Billboard chart.
No one could have blamed Bruce for feeling a little chagrined as all those royalty dollars took wing. But he wasn’t having any of it. “We never felt sorry for ourselves,” he said of himself and Kelly. “The song still did very well, and the album [the Chicks’ Home] sold, God, 6 million or whatever.”
Still, the whole protracted episode made him just a little bit hot. As far as he was concerned, it was his family that was being vilified. “They were punching bags for so long, and I feel like everybody missed the point,” Robison says in retrospect. “I wanted to defend them but they, probably wisely, decided to stay quiet and take the high road. But it was relentless and, I thought, unfair too.”
The “Robison family” extends far beyond blood. There is Charlie, of course, and younger sister Robyn Ludwick, who recently released her first album (her husband has played with both Kelly and Bruce). There’s Kelly and the kids, naturally. The Chicks are family, too, by virtue of both marriage and music. Natalie Maines’ father, acclaimed steel guitarist and producer Lloyd Maines, produced Bruce’s second album, Wrapped.
And, at another remove, there are friends and family relations, including Robert Earl Keen (who wasn’t born in Bandera, but he got there as fast as he could), Jack Ingram, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Radney Foster, Jerry Jeff Walker, and other members of the far-flung Texas songwriters’ fraternity.
Family is as family does: For brother Charlie, the Rosetta Stone that unlocked the world of music and revealed a level of coolness that even trumped small-town sports stardom was a Fender Precision bass. Bruce’s bass, to be exact.
“My dad, in his wisdom, bought me a bass guitar in seventh grade,” Bruce recalls. “And it was one of those things where I look back on it and…we had no money at all. So to spend $250 on a Fender Precision bass, so I could join a band…” He shakes his head in wonderment at the memory.
