New songs for modern missional worship, rich in Christian teaching and contextualized in modern culture. Contemporary hymns, psalms, songs of lament and praise written by members of the Louisville, KY-based Sojourn Community.
Part Two of the Dirt Poor Robins interview, more Mp3’s
We continue an interview with Neil Robins, a key member of the Sojourn worship band and recording team, and member of Dirt Poor Robins, conducted by Scott Slucher for sojournmusic.com:
SM: Is there an emotional or spiritual arc to the story - going from dark to light, lost to found? It seems that the songs at the back end are more hopeful.Â
NR: I think that the best chance you have of changing is when you reach the end of your rope. I’ve noticed it about myself. You may do the same things wrong over-and-over again and even feel bad about them sometimes. But then, as soon as the feeling bad about them goes away, you go right back to your same behaviors. Sometimes people get far enough to the end of the rope that they scare themselves to life. With one of the characters, that actually happens, and they become free of the Grind Pitcher. But not all of the characters do.
Me:Â Which song are you referring to?Â
NR: Where it turns the corner is a song called “Light My Darkness.” It’s right near the end, the second to the last. And then, the following song is sort of this tongue-in-cheek, kind of overly happy ending called “Love Again.” It starts off with whistling and hand claps and, you know, things that are typically associated with good times and having a party. And the song is this sort of sarcastic dialogue between the Grind Pitcher, who’s frustrated, and the characters who made it out. There’s a lot of unanswered questions in between how it gets there, but we kind of leave it up to peoples’ interpretation. I don’t like to over-explain it because I want people to kind of find it for themselves. It makes it more fun that way. But that’s the overarching idea of the story - that there’s people trapped, and one experiences someone who can help them out.Â
Hear Dirt Poor Robins on “Love Again�
SM:Â How would you complete the statement, “If you like X, then you’ll like Dirt Poor Robins”?
NR: We’ve tried to ask that to people, and we get all different kinds of answers. We have people who are our grandparents age that actually enjoy the music because they enjoy Kate’s voice and the fact that it’s pulling from classical stuff. And then there were other people who just liked the guitar playing. I think someone who’s a core fan is the kind of person who likes movies like Moulin Rouge and something that’s a little more over-the-top and artsy at the same time, a movie like Across The Universe, which was a lot of different bands doing Beatles covers. People who are drawn to sort of elaborate, over-the-top…something that might be annoying to someone who’s just trying to make music part of their background. I think a lot of good music actually does get under someone’s skin, somewhere.Â
SM: “Great Vacation” reminded me of Elvis Costello’s song “God’s Comic,” from Spike. Who are some of the artists who have influenced you and Kate?
NR: Well, Kate grew up listening to Karen Carpenter because of her mom’s influence. You can actually hear that in Kate’s voice, a Julie Andrews, Karen Carpenter ability to really form a vowel in a beautiful way. She’s listened to oldies with her dad. She’s started exploring out more into female singer-songwriters, like Indigo Girls and Tori Amos. There’s a lot of things that go into her influence, but that’s a big part of it. And show tunes. She was always in shows in high school, and I think that that’s a big influence in her, especially the theatrical side.  Â
For me personally, my dad was on the radio, growing up, and he would bring home albums, and the first album he ever brought home to me was Queen’s News Of The World. My brother’s also a musician, and the album that Adam got from him that same day - we were able to pick - Adam picked a Kiss album - Love Gun. My brother’s always been into the marketing side of music, and Kiss was really a marketing engine more than they were a band. With Queen, News Of The World had some of their biggest rock hits like “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You,” but also, Freddie Mercury always had this theatrical element. I felt like I really connected with that album. Everything that has drawn me to music has been really studied from that one album: the classical elements, theatrical elements, strong rock elements. They were really trying to make you feel something. Queen got under a lot people’s skin and also won a lot of fans. That’s really been a big influence on me.
SM:Â When you started playing guitar, what were the first songs you learned to play?
NR: I didn’t have any guitar players around me, so when I was twelve, I just started learning old Eddie Van Halen stuff. I thought that’s what you had to do to play guitar, so I started learning Van Halen and a lot of the rock legends of the 80’s. The funny thing was, I think it actually set my expectations higher, because I think some people have a guitar player around them that influences them to start, and then they have the comparison point of someone who’s not a professional. Well, I didn’t have that. Everyone in my family played piano or drums or bass. Musicians extended through my family. Lots of great singers. As a guitarist, the only thing I could compare myself to was the people I had on tape, and I gravitated toward the best players, and so I think the good part of that was that I was very hard on myself and developed faster as a result because I wasn’t just better than somebody in my grade. I didn’t know anybody in my grade at school playing guitar. I wasn’t just trying to compete with people on that level. I was trying to be professional from the beginning.Â
SM:Â Do you remember when you thought I can do this for a living?
NR: I think it was even before I played. It was funny because I was playing piano, and I had a tennis racket in my house, and I remember picking it up like a guitar, and I’m like, this feels way cooler than sitting at a piano.  I can definitely do this. And there were stopping points along the way. One of them was (when) I was thirteen and we were recording our first album - the band I was in. I went to the studio to record, and we had no idea what a recording studio experience would be like. You watch movies and you see people stepping into the studio and everybody at the same time just sort of recording, and then they’re done. So we practiced, thinking that was what was going to happen. We just played and played and played our songs until there was no messing them up. And then we came into the studio and played and just nailed everything. I mean it probably wouldn’t sound great to me now, but at the time we really met our expectations. It was awesome. And the guy who ran the studio, one of the things where I felt like it was a success, kept hiring me to come back and play on his own music. I was just barely a teenager. So that’s where I was like hey, I can do this. I’m making cash right now. Making cash, buying gear, buying video games [laughs] - whatever you buy with cash at that point.Â
SM:Â Does what you read influence your music?
NR:Â Absolutely.
SM:Â What kind of stuff were you reading at the time that you started working on The Cage?
NR: We started doing some background research on carnival sideshows, so that there would be authenticity to the concept, so we weren’t just rolling our idea of it. We wanted to draw from things: real language, real types of performers. There’s actually a lot of biblical references in the songs - especially with some of the darker, more mysterious passages of Job and Isaiah. Some characters use them improperly and some characters use them properly. A lot of Shakespeare references. I wasn’t reading Shakespeare currently, but I had a lot of it in me. There’s three or four spots where there’s actual lines pulled from Hamlet.
SM:Â I think that contributes to the epic scope - pulling from all those sources.
NR: And on top of that, I think a lot of the influence comes from just soul-searching. A lot of times, if there’s a character who’s talking down at someone, it’s really something in our selves. You mentioned “Great Vacation.” That song is really sort of poking at myself. Basically, the person is judging me for things that I say and do. Also, at the same time, I’m poking fun of the fact that I can be judgmental. So, it’s sort of like I was playing both characters when I wrote it. I think music’s more interesting when it has layers.Â
Hear Dirt Poor Robins on “Great Vacation�
Kate’s got songs on there where she’s doing the same sort of thing. She has a wonderful ability to put herself into a character that she’s not and understand what it’s like to be that person and express it in language. In the most unconscious way, she can write something very deep and not even know why she wrote it, but it’s very true at the same time.Â
SM:Â Can you think of an example of that?
NR: Gee, there’s a couple of examples, like “Light Is The World.” The interesting part about that song is that Kate uses all these interesting repeating rhyme schemes, and she wouldn’t even have a name for something like that. She just does it intuitively and instinctively. The character goes through some things Kate understands and some things that she doesn’t. But she nails them perfectly, especially if you read the liner notes. Kate wrote these poetic character descriptions. The way she can turn around and give you insight into someone in just four words is really amazing to me. I wish I had that ability. She’s instinctively deep.
SM: How do you guys work together? What’s your process like?