Eleven Stories marks Bruce’s fifth (or seventh, depending on how you are counting) album and ten years in the record business. With nearly five years between releases, Bruce was ready to being recording again. “Man, I was really chomping at the bit to get back to work,” he said via phone from his Austin home, “I love making records and I love doing all that stuff. For me, making records is really indispensable to my songwriting career.” It is that songwriting career, with Top Ten singles recorded by George Strait, Dixie Chicks and Tim McGraw that allowed Bruce to be able to concentrate on other areas of life. “When we got pregnant with twins we decided to take some time off and really put our efforts where they should be at that moment… The songwriting success I’ve had really gave us the luxury of taking that time off.”But songwriting was never far from his mind and Robison spent his hiatus studying his craft and trying to expand his sound. “I ended up listening to, like, Stax records and Muscle Shoals records and JJ Cale records. All of this stuff that was really groovy, that was kind of what I felt was missing in my stuff. I’m a lyric guy and sometimes the lyrics get kind of shoved into a rhythm or some grooves or stuff or things don’t fit as well as they could. I wanted to focus on that, I mean, it is music at the end of the day. It’s not poetry and it’s not prose, it oughta feel good and I was listening to stuff that was the grooviest music ever.” Such research might seem odd for a songwriter not predominantly known for his upbeat songs. “Historically, I’ve had an easier time just trying to do something that feels real to me. Well, it gets right back to the Blues, you know? And the music that I listened to as a kid, Country music, when I was a kid was just over the top morose. And that to me is what Country music was, the white man’s Blues and it’s a working-class music for working-class people that had hard lives.” Many of Robison’s songs, such as “Virginia” and “Every Once in a While” place a listener in a situation where they draw on their own experiences to fill in the blanks. “You have a very short time, so that might be part of the assumption of where you walk into the middle of a situation, you don’t have a ton of time to set everything up and I’m always trying to simplify,” he says when asked if that style was by design or accident. Robison believes that leaving his songs open to interpretation allows the listener participation in the process, he says, “occasionally people ask me about what a song is about and I’ll usually not want to say because it invariably is less interesting than what they had come up with on their own. I think with my songs, the strength and the weakness of them, is that I don’t really take stands on positions and I do that purposely.”But just because he doesn’t take stands doesn’t mean he avoids the tough subjects. “Days Go By,” co-written with Miles Zuniga, tells the story of a homeless man and how he became that way. “It’s one of those things that I like to explore,” Bruce says about the song, “And as a Father that’s been one of the things… In Austin there’s lots of homeless kids and every person I go by I just wonder about their story, I know everybody does. And everybody’s got a story. And so I just tried to explore that and it’s a fascinating thing to just make that up in your mind and take somebody that ends up in that situation and try to put them back where they had the same hoped and dreams in life that all of us did. ‘Cause I assume everybody out there did, you know, so that’s where that came from. Those are questions…it’s hard to… you know, again the question of homelessness and mental illness and everything, those are just huge questions and so it’s a real challenge to carve off one little niche of it that you can explore for three and a half minutes. And that’s what I feel like my job is.”And it is a job he allows himself to have fun with, most recently writing the song for the allergy medication commercial featuring wife Kelly Willis and himself. When asked how they came to star in them he replied, “I don’t know, I still don’t know. They called and they asked if we would consider it, we said yeah and then a couple of weeks later they called back and said let’s do it. I don’t know, it’s interesting, the whole thing is interesting how they, you know…We aren’t exactly huge household names and they did that, they put our names on there (laughs).”Another television prospect Bruce looks back fondly upon was the 2003 CMT pilot Stars Over Texas, a show hosted by Ray Benson and focusing on music from and about the Lone Star state. In the pilot, Bruce was introduced to the audience and after taking a few suggestions, sat quietly on the side of the stage writing a song that he sang to close the program. “Yeah, I loved that!” he said with much enthusiasm, “That seems terrifying, but I loved it! It was a challenge. And also, when I was a kid Mac Davis used to have a show and he used to do that. I wish that thing would have gotten picked up, I would have loved to have done that every week.”“There were so many things that I was bad at. I was a bad college basketball player, I was a bad student, I was a bad fry cook, I was a bad credit risk. Again, for a long time when I had no success at all, I felt good at being a songwriter. I still feel good at it, whether anybody else thinks it not,” he says lightheartedly. But plenty of people like the aforementioned Strait, Chicks and McGraw, along with artists like Lee Ann Womack and Garth Brooks feel he is good enough to mine his catalog for hidden gems. Even so, he doesn’t feel tempted to direct his songwriting in that direction. “To be honest with you, it’s not really a question of integrity for me, I would like to think that it was, but I started calling myself a songwriter in the mid- to late-Nineties and it was literally about ten years before I ever made a penny or got any cuts,” he says remembering the early years, “I couldn’t get anything going, I couldn’t get a publishing deal, I couldn’t get any cuts, I couldn’t make anything happen. What I’m getting at is, doing that ten years, I tried that a million times and then I ended up having these songs cut that were so completely different than that, that were songs that I was not trying to get on the radio or get cut or anything, they were just songs that I wrote when I was just writing for that moment, just like, for whatever reason it is that I like writing songs. And so that lesson has been easily learned. There really are no market forces that are pushing me to write for the radio. And when I’ve done it, I found out the truth of the matter which is there are people that can do it so much better than I can.”The idea of getting songs on the radio being a compromise as an artist is something Robison doesn’t believe. “I think it is folly these days to aspire to be anti-commercial or anti-establishment. I think you’re on the other side of it if you are forced to be by the market forces and they won’t accept what you do. You just have to do what you do,” he notes as he recounts his heroes that came before him, “My heroes from Carole King to Johnny Mercer to Hoagy Carmichael to Willie Nelson… I don’t have this negative delineation between something that’s commercial and something that’s non-commer
cial. To me, commercial means that a lot of people can relate to it or a lot of people can like it. The Beatles were commercial. Gary Stewart was commercial.”Commercial or not, his goal is to make what he calls interesting records. One of the things to does to accomplish that is to include songs by other artists on his albums. His newest release includes three: “Tennessee Jed” originally by the Grateful Dead, “More and More” from Webb Pierce and “Bandera Waltz” by O.B. “Easy” Adams. How does a songwriter like Bruce pick songs to cover? “The main criteria I look for is to try to make interesting records” he replies, “and that usually figures into harmonies that I like to do. So most of those songs were picked because I thought they’d be interesting to have harmonies on or more specifically to be able to sing with Kelly.”Co-writing is another way that Bruce tries to keep things fresh saying, “it’ll get you to write a song you really couldn’t have otherwise.” But he also notes “I’m just not that great at it, at co-writing and I really need to feel comfortable with someone before I do it.” Some of those on his dream list co-writers are Al Anderson, Bob McDill and Sonny Throckmorton.While songwriting keeps Bruce focused, he does have other irons in the fire including his new Premium Recording Service, where he recorded many of the tracks for Eleven Stories. PRS is also home to another project, Premium Records, Bruce’s new independent label. Currently signed to the label is the Austin-based band The Damnations whose release is scheduled for this summer.Another iron burning brightly is the often talked about collaboration with Charlie. Although the project has been tossed around for several years (“Charlie’s a busy guy”), Bruce hopes it will become a reality very soon, “we have days in the studio, in May, that are booked right now, so we’ve been working on it and the time feels right.” In addition to the brother collaboration, a duets album with Kelly is also on the table. “My sister [Robyn Ludwick] is writing songs, I’m married to a musician, Charlie’s married to a musician [Emily Robison of the Dixie Chicks], so I just hope there are tons of collaboration in our future,” He muses, “That’s what I want to do with my life these days is make these projects and make it be interesting and make lots of records.”
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