Robby Hecht sings like a whisper, like a hesitant truth that simply can’t go unsung anymore. His songs can invoke starry nights and fog rolling in on the beach. Lights turning off. Front porch silences and morning walks alone. Holding hands for the first time, letting go for the last.
Across his three indie releases, Hecht has distinguished himself as the second coming of James Taylor, a gentler Damien Jurado. But, whatever the comparison, it’s hard to miss that his songwriting is distinct and individual. He doesn’t shy from the obvious rhyme (city/pretty, stars/bars/cars), but manages it with a delicate audacity, placing it only where it best serves the story or the mood. And, there’s something about the way he unfurls a line that feels less like trying to work something out and more like just calling it what it is.
On his latest album – self-titled for reasons you can read about below, in our interview – Hecht grapples with loneliness and discovery, fear and epiphany, disappointment and love. But, where dichotomies exist in many releases, as in life, for Hecht, the songs he wound up grouping together for this disc captured elements of his being bipolar. He’s not the first or last to discover hints of his mental health showing through in his songwriting, and the recurring theme was less intentional than some reviews of the album may imply.
Music is, after all, a tool for understanding and redemption. It gives us pathways that workaday language don’t provide, toward our truer selves. That Hecht’s life has led him toward learning to live with bipolar at the same time as his songwriting has allowed him to capture the various ups and downs that come with it, is probably more coincidental than anything. Still, every situation brings with it a flock of varied truths, and the forces that shape a song are subject to the mood and perspective of the songwriter.
That said, what’s more moving here is Hecht’s ability to step back from it all. In the process, he’s created an album that is objective enough to be both honest and compassionate, without losing touch of the intimacy inherent in a shared silence.
Kim Ruehl: When I’ve heard you in the past, even when there’s other instruments in there, it seems like it’s just you and your guitar, singing. These songs, on the other hand, feel fully fleshed-out and arranged, deeply considered. It’s more song-centric and less you-centric. So it’s interesting that it’s self-titled.
Robby Hecht: Yeah, I think it is more song-centric than the other ones. I don’t want to say I’m getting better at writing songs but it’s becoming easier to not write heavy songs [that are] coming from inside of me. I don’t know if part of that is co-writing or how much is just experience. I felt like the album was more varied and representative of the whole range of songwriting that I like to do, as opposed to this little section of it that is songs I write for me. I was a little bit more out-there with it. I’ve always written a lot of different kinds of stuff but, when it came to recording, it was always this one little style of writing I do that would end up on my album. I tried to make it more broad this time, and a lot of that translated into more varied production than we’ve had in the past.
One thing I was fixated on was how totally simple so many of the lyrics are – stars, bars, cars; “Last night I saw you in the stars,” repeated; “There’s no pity in New York City.” All these songs get to the very basic essence of the point of the song. Do you start with 100 words and then whittle it down to the perfect line?
I don’t know. I think maybe I didn’t feel the need to expand as much as I have in the past. I think I started to get to the heart of what I was trying to say a little more than writing a bunch of cool lines. Some of them, there’d be a theme and I’d try to build around it. With “New York City,” there were these consistent themes. Instead of trying to rhyme AA/BB, I had the “it” sound and then I had to come up with a bunch of things that had [that sound], then I had to come up with a bunch of things that had the “ity” rhyme. It built from there. It built from the first two lines of the song, really – “Take my mind off it” and “The girls are witty.” Which started as “the girls are pretty,” but then I thought, oh wait, witty is much better than that. I was watching that show Girls a lot at the time, too.
Witty and pretty are very different things.
Right, exactly. I work the pretty thing back in, though. Later on in the song, I say, “I ain’t so pretty,” which is kind of implying that other people are. Relatively. You walk around New York City and it’s not like everyone is pretty, but that’s where the supermodels go. You’re walking around and then all of the sudden there’s somebody who doesn’t even look like a human, walking around, and you’re kind of like whoa! That’s a different class of… whatever that is.
I was thinking about “Hard Times,” the one cover on the album [originally by Gillian Welch]. I read a quote earlier from Bruce Robison, who was saying how he hates when people use the word “cover” because they’re all just songs. Some you write, some other people write, and it just matters whether they’re true for you or not. It seemed like “Hard Times” fit perfectly on this record. How did you bring that into the fold?
That’s great. That’s the first one we recorded so I’m glad it fits. I think we did that in one take. We got together as a band and were like, what should we do first? I said, “Why don’t we do this cover and see what it sounds like.” If it ended up sounding like crap, we wouldn’t even use it. I loved it at first. It was my favorite thing we did the first couple of days. By the end, it fit right in there. It’s the most live band thing on there. We didn’t add anything to it. Maybe, stylistically, it fits in really well because the core of everything else that’s happening on the album is what that song is, production-wise. Thematically, I don’t know. It’s a pretty amazing song. It’s got a lot of little intricacies but it’s pretty simple too. It’s just a song about time passing, I think. I just love that song.
When Gillian sings it, it sounds more like it’s about the economic state of a lot of people’s lives, whereas when you sing it, it sounds more personal.
It’s more like she’s telling a story?
No, it’s more like she’s singing about not being able to make rent and you’re singing about life in general.
That’s funny. To me, it starts out with a guy farming and ends up with him going to the store. That feels like the central theme in the song, to me. The changing world, where you used to be able to be self-sufficient and create everything you needed in a simple way. Now everything’s tied together a bit more. I actually sing the line wrong, the key line to the whole song. I sing it that “I see him walking down to the cigarette store.” I think 95 percent of people think that’s the line to the song. But I had this epiphany a few months after recording it that I thought maybe it was a Superette store instead. I saw a Superette store somewhere. “Cigarette store” is a great line, but “Superette store” is an even better line. I actually spent months asking around, trying to figure it out. Through a chain of three people, leading to someone who actually knows her, I found out it’s “Superette store,” not “cigarette store,” which even more modernizes the idea of someone in the beginning, plowing a field and in the end he’s going to the supermarket to buy what he needs.
That does change the whole thing.
I wish I could go back and change it, if we didn’t record it live. That’s the one song where we didn’t record the vocal separately.
I wonder if, when we originally set up this Q&A we’re having, Emilee [Hecht’s publicist] asked me to think about the part of the album that tackles themes about being bipolar. I really had to listen for that, because I think the album just comes off as a collection of great songs. But listening more deeply, I could totally catch it. I was thinking maybe my reading of your performance of “Hard Times” was because I was asked to listen for these themes.
Maybe. It’s kind of a subconsciously integral part of who I am in my brain, and what I’m creating. I didn’t really think of that being a theme in the album until we started sequencing the songs. I’ve never really talked about this with anyone, except Annie [his wife] when we were in the car, because we were trying to sequence the tracks. That’s one of my favorite parts of making an album. You’ve got the fast songs and the slow songs. [We were] trying to figure out where everything goes and I realized the best way to sequence the album was to have the upbeat songs and the downbeat songs contrast each other. I realized there might be a connection to bipolar.
I went back into the album the way you did, I think, and realized how much of it was influenced by that part of me. I mean, “Feeling it Now” is the one that does it the most, but there aren’t any songs on the album that are like “This is what bipolar is like.” “Feeling it Now” would be the good part of it – the up part, the part where you feel connected to the world. It’s a positive songs, it’s a happy song. When I put it in the context of bipolar, you get the feeling that maybe this is a temporary feeling, but that’s how I meant it when I was writing the song. You’re isolated in that moment. That was related to it.
I don’t think about [being bipolar] constantly when I’m writing and I don’t know that anybody actually does, unless they’re writing a concept album about something. But there’s that one and then “The Sea and the Shore,” which I wrote with Amy Speace, and that wasn’t something I was thinking about either. The main character is the shore in that song, which is a character longing for stability and finally standing its ground and saying, “Enough! I can’t deal with your inconsistency anymore.” Looking back on that song, I was like oh, I probably identify more with the sea, who’s sure it’s going to work this time and it doesn’t happen, so the sea winds up leaving again. I mean, it happens in the end, but only in reaction to the shore standing its ground. I’m the character who’s sure it’s going to work this time, then disappears, then has a realization and comes back again. That’s how all my relationships were until I met my wife.
Nice. I did want to talk about that song, because Amy’s version with John Fullbright is like a different song, having the two voices singing it, versus having your once voice singing it. It’s an interesting reinterpretation of that tune.
I think maybe her version is less sad than mine. [laughs] I don’t want to say what her version is, but it feels more strong and defiant, whereas looking back on mine, I think it’s a little bit…not negative but just sadder in a trying-to-demonstrate-reality way. That song’s kind of the opposite of the simplicity we were talking about. That song was actually one where we wrote a bunch of stuff and whittled it down. I think we had ten verses at one point. We eliminated entire characters and whittled it down to its essence, I think, which is five really long verses.
You mentioned, in terms of seeing bipolar in this record and it not being a concept record… I think it might be gratuitous for somebody to try to write a concept album about their personal mental health situation. But the fact that it’s self-titled when you’ve already put a couple records out, makes it feel like there is a concept to this album, and that’s Robby Hecht. Who is this Robby Hecht character? Why did you decide to make it a self-titled record?
I don’t have a perfect answer to that, either. There are multiple reasons, which I think is why a lot of things happen. It probably started because we couldn’t think of a good title for the album. I didn’t think any of the songs made a good title track. I could’ve called it Cars and Bars and had a picture like a Tom Waits album on the front, or something. But it didn’t feel like anything worked as a title track, then I went into the songs and there wasn’t really a line that worked as a title. I always wanted to do a self-titled album and felt like I’d lost my chance a little bit when I did my first one. It felt right. Without being able to come up with a title, it felt like a chance to do a self-titled album. It felt like maybe if we can’t find the title track or a line that sums it all up, maybe the only thing holding it all together is that I’m singing and I wrote all the songs. Except for one.
Why did you always want to do a self-titled album?
I don’t know. It felt like a thing I missed that people do. They do an introduction album. I wish I could not name any albums because I think it’s really hard to come up with something that sums up a batch of songs that weren’t written to intentionally make an album . These songs were written in a pretty wide range of time… they weren’t written with the intention of putting them all on an album. I actually came to Rick with 38 songs and said here you go, let me know which ones you like and we’ll whittle it down from there. There was a lot to choose from and, once we were down to the 12 that are on there, it’s hard to say I intended for those 12 songs to be together. It’s hard to group them together and call it anything, really.
Maybe that’s the difference… my first thought I shared with you, about this being more of a song-centric album. It’s not like you just recorded the songs you had to record and put them out, under a title.
You can think about it as, like, I call it the album of my own name, which really is what I was thinking of it as when I did it. It’s almost like not calling it anything, not trying to unify everything together… this is just me. I’m not going to call it anything. Leaving that space blank.
What made you decide to end with “When I’m With You Now”? That’s the most stripped-down song on the whole record. It’s a good period at the end of the sentence.
I don’t know. We played with so many different sequences to the album, but we recorded that song a few years ago. We recorded it pretty soon after the last album. Then we added some stuff to it a year later, but I’ve been sitting on it for a couple years. Part of putting it at the end was that it had a different production. It has different people playing on it and different people singing backing vocals on it. We have Julie Lee and Elizabeth Foster singing on it, as opposed to Rose Cousins, who sings on the rest of the album. It stands out for that reason and that’s part of wanting to separate it, not put it between anything else. The song is an uplifting song. The melody is quiet and the production is quiet, but it’s a song about moving forward in a happy way, in a good relationship with someone. It’s a good note to end on, especially with the second to last song about missing someone. It’s all about missing someone, and then it works its way to “I found someone new.”
For a full list of Robby Hecht’s tour dates, and to stream his new album, visit RobbyHecht.com
