Some Guy Named Robb

I first met the man known as Some Guy Named Robb while skateboarding in Russellville, Arkansas. If I remember correctly (it has been a long time now), Robb was wearing a The Cure t-shirt and we talked about music. As the years went on, we both joined bands and began expressing ourselves through music. While music was a phase for me, it has become Robb's life work. His new album, "The Folkster," recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, has just been released. Here are the questions I recently asked of Robb.

Q1. What was the deciding factor to keep you located in Russellville? Why didn't you opt to move to a place with a larger population?

Q1. What was the deciding factor to keep you located in Russellville? Why didn't you opt to move to a place with a larger population?

A: Growing up, most kids wanted to get out of Russellville. I always felt a strong sense of community in our small hometown so I wasn’t dead set on leaving. But what I have always loved to do is travel. And since I play between 200-300 dates a year, I found myself always leaving Russellville and exploring new places. Traveling as far as England and France with my music and all over the states,coast to coast. Music has taken me further than I ever thought it would and it’s shown me people and places I would probably have never seen. I’m grateful to have been able, not only to visit, but share my music with them along the way. Unbelievably, I’ve been doing this job, Some Guy Named Robb, now for 20 years, come October. I’m thankful to have this career and I daily recognize what a privilege it is.  

(This kind of answers number 4!)

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Q2. You are active in your Christian community. Do you play at any particular church functions?

A: I do play at a few of our local (and within an hour of Russellville) churches and church functions. My home church is the Fellowship of Christians, but the elders and leaders are always encouraging me to go out and engage with our community and to help other churches.

Some churches don’t have as large as a music team as we do so in those cases, we send out musicians to help! I love it, because it reminds us we are all under the same King. It’s not about denominations. It’s about Jesus.

I often find myself involved benefits and charities. I would encourage any beginning musicians to get involved in the art of giving back. Not only does it introduce you to a ton of people but it also satisfies a deep-seeded longing within us all to help our community. 

Q3. What artists influenced you the most in the past? Who influences you the most currently?

A: This is another hard question! :D

When I was 12-13 on a family trip to Colorado I found a cassette tape of The Cure, Standing on a Beach: The Singles with the B-sides, and I was hooked. I remember pulling it from the tape bin. It’s like it beckoned me. Around that same time someone gave me some bootlegged U2 albums, The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum.

It was a good year for music. My mom’s gift to me one year on the way to Colorado was The Police, Synchronicity. Years later I asked her why she had chosen such an excellent band. She responded, “Well, they were called The Police. So I figured they couldn’t be too bad.”  :D True Story!

When I went to college I found an appreciation for the classics, Rachmaninoff and Chopin, Bach, and Mahler are still faves to this day.

Recently Sting and Shaggy have released a great album of Jamaican-American fused songs I’ve been digging.

The world is more full of recorded music now than it ever has been before (that we know of) The statistics tell us every 60 minutes that goes by 10 more hours of music is uploaded to the internet (roughly 300,000 songs a day). Being a young musician these days would be about avoiding the art of obscurity.

As far as now, I drift from EDM to Singer-Songwriters, Indie-Folk Rock (which is what I tend to categorize myself in) and whole stack of oldies like Elton John, Paul Simon, Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Depeche Mode (yes it hurts to put them in the oldies stack) Neil Finn (Crowded House) Natalie Merchant, The Replacements. Peter Gabriel, Sharleen Spiteri from the band Texas, The Ramones, Prince, The Soup Dragons, Sting and The Police, Tom Waits, and always U2.

Newer stuff might include in the past decade:

Alabama 3, The Accidentals, Ryan Adams, Bora York, Devendra Banhart, Elizabeth and the Catapult, Esperanza Spalding, St Vincent, Phosphorescent, Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley, 30 Seconds to Mars, Yael Meyer, and tons of new artist that I’ve met touring. There is so much good music in the world it blows my mind. I Love being a part of it all.

Q4. How much do you travel/tour? How far has music taken you around the globe?

(See Answer #1)

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Q5. If you had to pick one song you've written for someone to hear you for the first time, what song would it be?

A: That’s really tough too. I love writing in different styles, from reggae to spoken word to rock pop, folk, indie. I try not to limit myself to writing in one style rather explore whatever I’m feeling that day.

On my Spotify site the statistics tell me these are the most popular songs on there this week. (By the way, everyone please follow me on Spotify! Thanks!) For an Indie-Folk song I like “What Would You Say?” or “What Do You Think, Christine?”

For a reggae feel, “The Innocents”. For a Rock song, “The Songbird” or “King of Nothing”. For an eclectic song, “When The Heart is Gone” or For Spoken Word, “The Common Distance” or “Three Cheers” have been received well.  For a Funny song, “Express Lane Love”. Though I have some new songs coming out that will fall into the realm of hilarious. Look out for DING! and Death By Panda… :D

For a song with meditative, reflective, thoughtful lyrics maybe “Random Little Mysteries” or “Ain’t No Love”, or Everybody’s Beautiful But Everybody’s Broken.

It’s so hard to choose favorites when you’re the parent of them all. :D

Q6. Tell us briefly about the new album. Where did you record? Who is helping mix it down? What should we expect musically from this album that might be different from your past work?

A: The Folkster is the name of the new album and we begun recording this at Sun Studios, infamous for recording Elvis Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, U2 and so many more. We worked with Matt Ross-Spang whose very next project earned him a Grammy with Jason Isbell.

We also recorded at Blue Chair Studio in Little Rock with the amazing Darian Stribling. I’ve been part of the entire recording, overseeing, producing, and mixing but I always trust the ears of the sound engineer over mine. They understand placement so much better than I do. There is a sonic landscape and they know how to paint on that canvas far better than me!

I noticed a few years back I was writing a trend of rootsy songs. They had more of a folk flavor to them than their predecessors. The idea with The Folkster was to have an organic album with its roots in folk, but it’s done by me, so naturally, I've screwed it all up. The Folkster is my tongue-in-cheek way of saying, “I’ll do the best I can to make a folk album out of this.”

And when I say “I've screwed it all up”, I mean I couldn’t help but throw in some tunes that will jack with the listener’s heads. From an old western-tinged murder ballad I wrote, to a lullaby for my kids, to a song that ends in 7/8 time, to an almost autobiographical song about my life called “The Stars” which (confusingly) has some12/8 beats mixed with some 6/4 time signatures and trumpets to top it off.  It’s a whirlwind of music. 12 songs right now, but I could easily go make another folk album tomorrow. I have twice that many I’d like to invest in down the road.

But, as I have to remind myself so often, one step at a time.

The next album I have planned after this I’m equally excited about is called, The Adventures of IndieBoy, and it’s going to be the exact opposite of The Folkster. Synthesized, EDM-flavored, and not what people will be expecting after a folk-themed album. But then, that’s part of the fun!

Q7. What is your discography and how can people get your previous albums?

A:  For those who like to purchase directly from the artist please go to my website, www.sgnrobb.com It has my full library and even some unreleased covers. there is still a pre-order available for The Folkster and the new T-shirts are pretty dope or as the kids say now, “on fleek”.

(If I didn’t have kids, I would no idea what that means) :D

1998 Out-takes and Mistakes: The Irresponsible Demos
1999 The Irresponsible Years
2003 Everything is Nothing
2005 The Pale Session: Everything Matters
2007 Nothing and Everything Else
2008 Previous & Preview (Compilation with 4 new songs)
2010 Up Seems So Down
2012  7 the Album
2018 The Folkster
2019 The Adventures of IndieBoy
2019 ROBB: Two B’s or Not Two B’s
2020 The Folkster Strikes Back
2021 Wonderland
2022 Return of the Folkster

Q8. What closing message do you have for those that will read this?

A: For the young musicians who are entering an over-saturated market, my advice is to stand out. Be excellent, but be humble. Work incredibly hard because no one is going to hustle for you like you’re going to hustle for you. And if you want to succeed in this market, it’s going to have to be intentional. Basically, be a conundrum.

Don’t worry about being famous, concern yourself with are you creating something worthwhile. Fame is a fickle and elusive thing and many a fool has wasted their life chasing after it.

Make something beautiful. Add something of value to this Earth while you’re here.

Thanks for having me as a guest, David! I’m a longtime fan of your writing and poetry.

robb

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