Bruce Robison pays it forward with The Next Waltz
Bruce Robison thinks about songs a lot — even compared to other songwriters.
He would appear to be somebody who had it all figured out, having penned No. 1 hits for George Strait, the Dixie Chicks and Tim McGraw. But Robison still obsesses over songs beyond their threeor fourminute durations. He likes to pick apart the construction: the writing, the instrumentation, the singing, all of it.
That interest led him to create The Next Waltz, a new web series and music delivery platform he started out of Lockhart. The idea is to create a 21stcentury version of the sort of art-first community that spun around the late songwriter Guy Clark in Nashville in the 1970s: a nurturing environment for creative people where interesting things happen.
For The Next Waltz, sometimes that involves Jerry Jeff Walker stopping by to sing “Song for the Life” and do an on-camera interview.
Other times, it means learning an old George Jones song.
Robison tweeted out an invite to Clint Black for the Classic Country Cover Song Challenge — a fairly self-explanatory video series. Black challenged Robison to record “Still Doin’ Time,” a 1981 weeper written by John Moffatt and Michael P. Heeney, and recorded by George Jones.
“When we started playing it, I had this vague, strange feeling about that type of song — how it can’t really be written anymore,” Robison says. “There’s nobody to write it. All the influences are so different now. Who’d come up with something like it? A verse and a half and two choruses. About two minutes long. The construction is really amazing, and it shows how far we’ve come in the time since — for better and worse. The sonic structure is so different. The piano would never be that prominent in the modern world as it would have 40 years go.
“So that’s part of what we’re hoping to do. To show some of these processes and tell some of these stories. It’s not like Hank Williams plugging in with two speakers and a mic. It’s not even the Beatles at Shea Stadium. There’s something to be learned from all this.”
Robison’s cover of the song ended up on “Bruce Robison & the Back Porch Band,” his new album. The recording is Robison’s first in nine years, though that period of time included two albums of duets with his wife, Kelly Willis.
But the lag between Robison albums speaks to changes that have occurred in the music industry in that time. Though Robison has always been a singer as
well as a songwriter, one of those two vocations was more lucrative when he started more than 20 years ago. Back when people bought albums, a musician like Robison could be enormously successful writings songs like “Traveling Soldier” for the Dixie Chicks or “Angry All the Time” for McGraw.
The industry has changed, albums don’t sell and songwriting royalties aren’t what they once were. But Robison’s essential job is the same: He writes songs. So he’s found ways to keep things feeling new. First, that meant two albums with Willis. And now he has The Next Waltz, a creative endeavor that can help shape future albums while also offering a platform to promote them.
“Essentially, what I do is the same, I make the stuff I want to hear and hope other people will like it,” he says. “That’s the basis. I never got anywhere chasing trends. I just make a song I think I’d like to hear and hope it’ll resonate with other people. I think it’s an exciting time in music, and a time of enormous change and possibility. I had 10 years to be depressed about it. It’s time to be engaged with what comes next.”
Though Robison and Willis still live in Austin, he knew real estate in the city was too unforgiving for him to build a studio there. So he looked outside the Austin city limits.
“Kelly saw this piece of property in Lockhart and selected it,” he says. “Even though she said, ‘I don’t think you should do this.’ But there was nothing on it. I built a fence, put a slab down. I’ve been putting the structure together the last three years.”
Robison’s reputation as a writer, producer and engineer guarantees a steady flow of guests. Members of the Trishas and fiddler Warren Hood were in the house to assist with Walker’s performance. The Next Waltz aspires to find that sweet spot between loose and professional. The quality of the sound and video are important to Robison, but he also wants the gatherings there to yield something that might not come from an overly arranged session. In doing so, he’s made a little nest for a sizable Hill Country music community.
And from that came “Bruce Robison & the Back Porch Band,” which includes the George Jones song, some new originals, a Who cover and one by Damon Bramblett, a great Austin songwriter and the kind of guy The Next Waltz believes should be heard by more people.
“He’s the kind of guy that The Next Waltz is all about,” Robison says. “These guys are out there, and these songs are out there. You know how great they are. But the marketplace doesn’t always place the right value on them. His songs just blow my head off.”
The mix of players and ideas made for Robison’s strongest album to date. It opens uptempo with “Rock and Roll Honky Tonk Ramblin’ Man” and carries a bit of extra energy through “Paid My Dues,” which Robison sings with Jack Ingram, Jason Eady and Mickey Braun. The Who’s “Squeeze Box” was a country song to begin with, but becomes more so with a fiddle.
But the quiet moments are the best. Bramblett’s love song “The Years” and Robison’s “Long Shore,” which is slow and soulful and not attached to any one identifiable genre.
“I guess it’s a vibe as much as anything that we’re going for,” Robison says. “It’s that thing that got me into music in the first place. Music that feels good and hammers that home.
“This is all just the culmination of a long time of trying to figure out how to keep making music in the future. You got to find something to look forward to. Our 11 year old got so excited the other day about a can of pineapple juice we put in his lunch. I told Kelly, ‘We all need a little something to look forward to. Sometimes it’s a can of pineapple juice. What do I know? Maybe that could be the secret to life, honey.’ ”