“Bruce wrote really memorable sad songs long before I ever met him, so it’s not my fault,” Willis points out. “Years after we sang ‘Angry All The Time’, people are asking me if I’m still angry and I say, only at being asked that question.”
Now, after a long layoff to get his and Kelly’s three (now four) kids settled into a family routine, Eleven Stories is set for release on March 14 via the new independent label Sustain Records (with distribution through Universal). Its understated title reflects the quiet, tensile strength of the best of Bruce’s songs.
Robison, very deliberately, sets his scene, poses his characters and puts the machinery in motion. Then he stands back and gives them room to breathe. It’s an approach that is a luxury in this day of blunt-object sentimentality and sledgehammer nuance that passes for most commercial country music.
“I like setting these little scenes and letting people make up their own minds about it,” he says with a shrug.
Charlie Robison, who has labored in the Nashville vineyards for years and has cut a number of his brother’s songs in the process, is in a unique position to appreciate the distinction.
“I think he’s one of the few guys that’s gotten away with a certain way of putting things,” Charlie suggests. “Take ‘Angry All The Time’, where the subject matter might be extremely sad and deals with things that country radio doesn’t want to deal with. But he has a way of sliding a subject past them [and] they don’t really know it’s going by.
“Some people will think this person [one of Bruce’s musical protagonists] is the coolest person in the world, and someone else will think the same person is a scumbag. And they’re both right. In ‘Days Go By’, for instance, I would dare anyone in the world who thinks homeless people are lazy or no-account to listen to that song….This guy is not a hero, but Bruce humanizes something in a way that is very hard to do without being maudlin.”
“Days Go By”, with its air of stoic resignation (“Some days you find love if you try/Ooh, but the days go by”) and its homeless, mentally ill protagonist, is as simple as a shoelace. But there’s an entire life lived between the lines.
As one of the songs on Eleven Stories, “Days Go By” shares in common with tunes such as “Every Once In Awhile” and “I Never Fly” a certain pensive quality that sneaks up on the listener. It’s an elusive quality that seems to mirror Bruce’s more inward-looking persona.
The most popular of Charlie Robison’s songs brim with a certain honky-tonk shot-and-a-beer bonhomie. The most powerful of Bruce’s songs are morning-after creations, where you find yourself sitting in the empty kitchen, staring at the dead flowers and the bottle of whiskey on the table, and wondering just where, exactly, life came irrevocably off the rails.
“Simplification is the goal,” he says. “The songs that I put on the top spot — like ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, ‘Maybe Baby’ or ‘No Woman, No Cry’ — they’re, like, ten words.”
At the same time, he adds, “I’d felt a lot of my records were guitar/vocal-y things that I had shoehorned some music onto. With this project, I really did want the music, and the feel of it, to be the thing. It’s poetry, not music. You need to be able to clap your hands for it to deserve to be called music.”
Exhibit A in that regard is “It’s All Over But The Cryin'”, a song so melodic and hook-laden that a dead man could have a hit with it. That song is yet another in the Robison canon about love’s day-after denouement. With its quietly anguished lines — “The battle is over and the other side won/It don’t help to know that it ain’t a matter of tryin’…It hurts like hell when you’re livin’ in a love that’s dyin’/And you know that it’s all over but the cryin'” — the tune’s essential melancholy sneaks up on you under the radar.
(A case in point: My fiancee, The Beautiful Lawyer, was staring into her laptop screen with fiendish concentration, intent on unraveling some hideous legal Gordian tangle, when “It’s All Over But The Cryin'” wafted out of the speakers. Midway through the song, she abruptly sat bolt-upright, eyes widened, and exclaimed, “That song is so me! That’s exactly why my first husband and I broke up!”)
There are also some unadulterated jaunty uptempo moments on Eleven Stories, to be sure: the dance-floor reel of “You Really Let Yourself Go”, a remake of the venerable “Bandera Waltz” (a hit for Ernest Tubb and Slim Whitman, among others), the Taj Mahal/J.J. Cale-flavored groove of “Kitchen Blues”.
And, in a juxtaposition that perhaps unintentionally reveals Robison’s myriad influences, a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Tennessee Jed” leads straight into a reverent remake of Webb Pierce’s 1950s hit “More And More”.
Should anyone be surprised at a Grateful Dead song resting cheek-by-jowl with a vintage beer-joint weeper on a Bruce Robison album?
