A Conversation with Rich Robinson – HuffPost 6.20.14

Mike Ragogna: Rich, The Ceaseless Sight, what’s the vision of the album and what was the creative process?

Rich Robinson: I knew I wanted to make a record and it worked out perfectly, time-wise. I knew we weren’t going to be touring after 2013. Instead of going in with full songs, I had more skeletons. I had a chorus or a verse or whatever and then when we got into the studio, we used that energy of, “We’ve got to get this done.” We had a short time, we only had a month to make the record. A lot of times, that happens in Woodstock, or in the studio in general. You have a couple of ideas, but when you get in the context–especially with me, because I like to write with drums in the room–you get in that context and it kind of clears the path and allows for that energy to come through and create those songs. I didn’t necessarily have a context going into this record. For twenty-five years, I’ve always tried to approach making records as a collection of songs that create something slightly greater than one song as a whole piece. The sequence of a record, the songs of a record, how does the verse fit into a song, how does the chorus fit into a song, how do they songs fit into a record, how does the record fit into my body of work? How does that fit into twenty-five years of doing this? To answer the question of the uniqueness of this record, a lot of times, I would have songs done before I went into the studio. For twenty-five years, I would have ten or fifteen almost done going into the studio, but this time, like I said, I’m just using skeletons.

Some songs took a while to write. “Down The Road” was a song where I had this verse part for a long time and every time I would sit down with it it wasn’t ready to be finished and then I finished it and that was it. Then “I Know You” and “Giving Key” I wrote right there on the spot. It took about five minutes to write those songs. In a sense everything just flowed for those two songs. It doesn’t make eitehr song more or less valid, it just makes them different. Over the years with Crowes there have been songs that took me a long time to write. I wrote the verse to “Nonfiction” early on Southern Harmony but I dind’t finish it until Amorica. It took a year and a half to find the right parts to make that. There’ve been songs like that over the years. I just kind of look at it as this one giant experience as opposed to this singular experrience. But I like how they all fit into a greater piece of work.

MR: “Ceaseless Sight” has larger a concept, “Giving Key” has a larger concept. It looks like lyrically and conceptually, you took a bigger swing with this album.

RR: Yeah, I think so. I think creatively and lyrically, yeah. I focus on the music first and throughout writing the songs, I’ll come up with a melody idea or maybe a concept for the actual song, just a general, “This is about this” or “This might be about that.” Then I just sit and listen to the song over and over again in the studio and just start writing, finishing lyrics to it. But absolutely, the whole point of this record is to look forward and not look backwards and to let go of a lot of s**t. I think at least for me and I think a lot of people on Earth tend to look backwards or try to choose what’s easy or what you know. They don’t want to know what’s around the corner, and I think it’s comforting in that sense. I think we’re designed to be comforted by knowing what we can expect, so in that sense, this world is becoming more and more that way. Our politics are tailored to what we want and there are outlets now for that. “I only watch MSNBC” or “I only watch Fox News” or “I only read The Drudge Report,” you know what I mean? There doesn’t seem to be a general acceptance of what “is.” It seems like there used to be at least a general accepted idea that the world is round and gravity exists. Now it’s like, “is it really round?”

MR: You forgot how we’ve only been around for five thousand years and the dinosaurs came over on Noah’s Ark.

RR: Yeah, but the dinosaurs were vegetarians, so they didn’t eat humans and that’s why we lived. But that’s the thing! If we can’t all agree on some common, basic facts, we’re kind of f**ked. In that same sense, the way that we now consume everything–clothes and hard goods. But we also now consume politics. We consume news stories, we consume drama, we consume music, we consume books. It’s more of an approach from a service industry, so we expect our art now to service us instead of the art to challenge us…any sort of creative endeavor, since we’ve been in existence. If you were in 1600, you would go see a piece of art and you were privileged to go see it. But if you think about what you saw, the visuals were given, and it was always something greater than yourself, always something you could strive to be. It’s what Joseph Campbell talked about, it’s what the amazing people throughout the millennia talked about, something greater than oneself. Art always did that.

MR: But isn’t it the Selfie Era?

RR: Yeah, absolutely. I open an Instagram account and the majority of them are girls taking pictures of themselves, and then you see these dudes taking selfies everywhere, but it’s really interesting where that has gone. It’s an absorption of the self. If you used to be self-absorbed in the past, how many outlets could you deal with that on? Now we’re on a newer level with technology and the amount of absorption that you can have is f**king crazy. Not only can you absorb yourself in yourself, you can absorb all of the influences in life around you to yourself. You can choose the media that you can absorb, you can choose the movies, you can choose your fashion and your friends and it’s this f**king Bizarro World to me.

MR: It’s fun to glamourize and worship yourself!

RR: Absolutely! But on the flip side, and the great thing about life and the world is that everything’s a paradox. As you have that ability, there are people who are rejecting it and actually pulling out and saying, “You know what? I don’t want that.” You think about the resurgence of vinyl, you think about the resurgence of independent film and indie bands releasing records or these kinds of things and there is a movement that is growing and bubbling and it is real and they are great. There are really great bands out there. There are great bands that are out there playing and they don’t really play that game. And there are people who listen to those bands and have more respect. The harder you have to work for something, the more respect you should get. If you can walk into any store in America, hit a Shazam button and the Shazam will tell you exactly what the song is playing and then you can hit another button and all of a sudden, you own that song within three seconds. How can you have respect for that? How is that not disposable?

But if you go to a store and you buy a vinyl and you throw down physical money or a credit card, just the act of that in a living, breathing place where there’s smells, where there’s physical things that you can touch tactilely, your finger prints are on this thing and you see this album with artwork that someone took the time to make and there’s titles of songs and a gatefold. When you go home and you pull the vinyl out and put it on the turntable, something chemically happens in your brain that says, “You are experiencing something,” and you have more respect for it because it took a lot more work to do that. Listening to the record takes more work. You go to put a vinyl on and you listen to it, you’ve got to sit by it because it’s short. One side of a record is fucking short and if you get up and leave and watch TV or whatever by the time you get back your needle’s f**ked because it’s been digging into the end of the side. You have to be vigilant about it. If you’re vigilant about something, you have more respect for you’re going to pay more attention to it. It’s something that I think gives us all a deeper experience. That’s what it’s about. That’s what this record’s about. Something authentic and deep.

MR: And from a lyrical standpoint, you were clearly looking for something bigger to talk about.

RR: Oh yeah, absolutely. Universal themes that have run through humanity since the dawn of time, since people started thinking. We’ve gotten away from those things. And also spirituality, what spirituality means and where I am as a person and where we are as humans, what the f**k are we doing here? Are we literally here to just buy more s**t? It’s because, like I said, it’s so easy to just surround yourself with what’s familiar. That’s the easy way out. It’s easy to become pessimistic. It’s easy to just think, “Oh, everything sucks, everything sucks.” But the world is your perception and if you just turn your perception around and think, “Everything’s cool,” not everything does suck… There are some problems, but it’s not the problem that’s the problem, it’s how you perceive the problem, you know what I mean? In that sense, a little optimism always goes a long way.

MR: Rich, it could have been easier to just create within The Black Crowes, but you went for the solo career. It was because you wanted to say different things than what was going on with the band, right?

RR: Absolutely. Also, my brother is the mouthpiece of The Crowes and what his beliefs aren’t what my beliefs are necessarily. A lot of times when he would do press he would say a lot of things that I didn’t necessarily agree with or weren’t my position. So it’s kind of cool to get away and express myself this way. In The Crowes my expression was music, I wrote the music and Chris wrote the lyrics. Music is a more esoteric expression. There’s nothing that’s concrete in the expression of music. It’s very subconscious and ethereal and different people will get different things out of it. That’s what I love about it, but there’s also another element to that which is lyrical, and there’s also another element to expressing yourself which is being able to come out from this thing that is what it is and has been around for so long that the band is kind of stuck in it. I wanted to pull away from that and start a more free form of expression just for myself. That’s what I hoped to accomplish on the record, and all my records, but as time goes on and as I do more and get more comfortable with it I get to open up and see the light and see positivity.

MR: And it’s a ceaseless sight.

RR: Yeah, exactly.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

RR: I’ve worked with some younger bands producing and writing and the only thing that I try to tell them is whatever you do, do it for the right reason. If you write music that moves you, if you write music that’s authentic and sincere eventually someone will come around and like it, but if you only want to be a celebrity the world’s better off if you just fuck off and go do something else. Figure out another way to be a celebrity. Be on a reality TV show or whatever the f**k it is. The creation and your intention behind the creation is too important to the world. I think that people who create should feel a responsibility in their creating. You can argue whether it’s good, bad… Everyone’s going to have their opinion. Some people are going to like it, some people are going to hate it, but if your intention is true and you’re true to yourself and you write something that’s authentic and means something to you, that intention will move forth in the universe. That’s all that is lacking. If you can do that, then f**k it. Whether you’re playing in front of five people for the rest of your night or five hundred thousand people it’s still righteous because it’s coming from a more righteous place.

MR: Is this what you would have told the fifteen year-old who wrote “She Talks To Angels?”

RR: S**t, I kind of did. That was something that moved me, I wrote it and I was proud of it and it was genuine. That’s how I’ve always done it. I think there are people out there who do that, but I just think if you say, “I’m gonna go start a band,” what everyone seems to do now is focus on social media. “If I do this I’ll get fifty hits,” and then you go back to this whole selfie thing and it’s all about shameless self-promotion. “If I like this guy on Twitter then my band gets out there and the four thousand people this guy has will look at my band.” It’s almost like this weird corporate branding gone wild. It’s cross branding. “Well I like that guy and he likes me and that guy…” what it becomes is, “You do for me and I’ll do for you,” and that’s all it is. You have that and then some bands are great at videos, they have their video faces down, and then the next thing will be the social media faces and their image and the music is last. The music should come first. None of that other s**t matters. If you’re coming from a sincere place and writing music that means something to you that vibration goes out into the universe and that’s what’s righteous. If it’s meant to be the laws of attraction will attract fans to you and the fans that like you will like you because what you’re doing is not full of s**t. It’s not duping anyone, it’s not bulls**t, it’s real. That’s just how I see it.

MR: So you left because of what you had to say, what you had to get out from inside.

RR: Exactly.

MR: What does the future look like for Rich Robinson?

RR: We’re touring, obviously we have a bunch of dates coming up, it’s going to be cool, these shows are going great, the band’s really gelling well together. Joe [Magistro] and I have been playing together for ten years now, and Matt and Ted and Dan who are all in the band. We just started playing together about a month ago but it’s going really well. We’re going to focus on that, we have that going on and then we’re planning on doing another art show in the fall with my brother-in-law. We paint and do that, we’re also working on a sculpture.

MR: Do you take the paint set on the road with you?

RR: No, I work on bigger canvasses and I use oil so they wouldn’t dry. I have to sit still to do that kind of stuff.

MR: Were you always the kid who was creating things?

RR: Yeah, kind of. I would say so. It brings joy. If you follow your joy, you’re good to go.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne