Here is part three of an interview conducted by Scott Slucher with Neil Robins: Sojourn musician, producer, songwriter, and member of Astonish Entertainment recording artist Dirt Poor Robins:

SM:  How do you guys work together?  What’s your process like?

NR:  We do a lot of stuff where I’ve written the song or I’ve got a melody or most of the melody, or an idea for the chorus lyrically, or the concept of the song.  I’ll hand it off to her, and she’ll write the lyrics.  There’s songs where she’ll sit down at the piano and write it entirely, and then I’ll sit down with her and we’ll change things.  She doesn’t have the musical background as I do, so I hopefully try to come in and add some depth, musically, with the chords and choices for the arrangement.  I’ll do that, and then some of the stuff I wrote all by myself.  The same with her.  If you look through the album cover, you see which songs are which.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell, for an outside person, if it’s a her song or a me song, because we have very similar styles and we influence each other a lot.  Kate’s really influenced me as a lyricist more than anybody.  I think I’ve influenced her sense of melody. 

I think one of the hard parts, as a songwriter and an artist, is creating from the heart, but then being able to take what you created from your heart and hold it out at a distance and look at it objectively.  We help each other do that.  We hold it out and we don’t get defensive when someone doesn’t like something, because we know that we’re doing this together and we really want to make something great.  We really spend the time evaluating the song, and then when it comes to recording it and performing it, we bring it back to our heart.  In that way, we can put ourselves back into the music.

Hear Dirt Poor Robins on “The Hollywood Songâ€? from The Cage

SM:  Once you get a song to where you feel like it’s close and you’re holding it up for scrutiny, what are you looking for?

NR:  One is the composition of the song.  Is it an understandable journey from beginning to ending?  Like musically, how the song is formed: the number of verses, choruses, if there’s a bridge - where those parts fall.  Does it need an instrumental section to kind of break it up?  Those sort of questions are compositional.  Then, there’s the functional side of the music and the way the melody is happening in this song.  Is it sung too low or too high?  Is there something missing from this song that you’re waiting to hear that’s not there?  Those sort of functional elements.  And then lyrically, we look for spots where maybe we gave up, like where we didn’t really push far enough to come up with the best lyric for that spot.  We look for spots where it feels wasted.  We try to cut those sections and really dig until we find something good for that.  And the fourth thing is, does this song work if I just grab the guitar or just on the piano?  Does it work like that, because if it doesn’t, you’re writing a different kind of song where the arrangement has to support the song a lot.  Then, do we have an arrangement that would support that song?  Also, does it fit the sound of what we’re doing?  We like songs that sound alike without ripping each other off.  There’s an aspect of choosing colors and tones and rhythms and things we would do or not do.  There are certain things we don’t do on purpose, certain changes we don’t use - something that would sound bluesy, we stay far away from that as a band.  Something that sounds overly jazzy.  We’re very happy to pull from elements that sound like a film score, melodically, or classical music or just straight rock. 

SM:  What are your hopes for the record The Cage?

NR:  This is our first major release that people can buy, like, anywhere in the world, so I just want to make a few fans and hopefully the record hits a few people, touches them.  I mean, I think there’s some good stuff on there to live by and some interesting stuff, as far as entertainment goes.  I feel like we’ve created something that adds value to our culture. 

SM:  Do you hope that listeners will take up the questions posed and challenge themselves?

NR:  It’s hard to anticipate that for someone else.  There’s so many different people with so many different backgrounds.  We all really want the same thing in life - we want to feel valuable and be valued, and when that doesn’t happen, things start to go wrong.  For some people, they might just hear a song and it feels like them.  You know?  I’ve had songs where it hits me where I’m at, and it helps.  I don’t know why it helps, but music has a way of bringing stuff to the surface we didn’t know was there.  And that’s a great thing.  If someone starts to dig through the mysteries of the theologies that we present on the album, I think that will be beneficial to them.  But I can’t anticipate what someone would respond with.  If I have hopes for them they’re various.  You know?   

SM: First, buy the record.

NR:  [laughs] Yeah.  Buy the record.  Hope number one. 

SM:  You’ve got a lot of side projects.  What was it like working on Sojourn’s Before The Throne?

NR:  That was fun because I think they were trying something new, trying to make a live-in-the-studio album.  They got a lot of people they thought were strong players and threw some microphones at them and hit “record.”  It’s not always the way to make the greatest sounding record, but again, that doesn’t bother me so much.  It does capture a certain energy, and I get to play piano on a lot of tracks and bass on some and  guitar on others.  And that was a lot of fun for me because I’m normally in a situation where I’m producing something, but there, I’m trying just to add.  And I love that.  I love listening to what other good musicians are doing and trying to add to the song.  So that was a fun experience for me.  And on the back side I was able to help out on the mix side of things, fixing some of the problems that come up when you throw a lot of people in the room and make them record fast.  So that was a fun process.  What I really liked about the album, and all the Sojourn albums so far, is the theology in them.  I feel it’s strong and it’s deep and it’s not superficial and it’s not staying in this realm of emotional responses to singing.  The songs pose difficult questions that are posed in the Bible, and that a lot of contemporary Christian music stays away from.  Some of the songs are dark.  Some of the songs are very bright.  All of them are heartfelt to me.  I think that’s the best thing that Sojourn has going for its music program is the spirituality of it, and the wisdom that’s involved in how music should function in church.  My hope as a producer is to help them make every record sound better.  I think there’s enough support on the theological side of the music with Mike Cosper and a lot of people involved, so I certainly take my hands off that area.  I don’t feel like I have anything to offer in that department, as much as they’ve already put into it.  I just take my role as how do I make this sound as great as possible? 

The Christmas CD was fun because I was getting to record albums like I wouldn’t (normally) record them.  This one has a little more production on it, but there was no pre-production.  Pre-production is where you test the songs out, you can check out the composition of the song and you come up with ideas for how you might record it.  This was done so quickly because (it was like) - oh my goodness we don’t have a Christmas CD anymore and Christmas is coming, so let’s just sprint through it!  And so a lot of it is basically just sitting down with a singer and letting him go with a guitar and figuring out what you’re going to do on top of it later.  It was cool because it makes you do some stuff you wouldn’t have done (otherwise).  So, it was fun, and I loved getting to hang out with the people that were involved.

SM:  What was the gem on the Christmas album, the aha! moment, the happy accident?

NR:  Gee, there was more of that than stuff we planned, I think.  My favorite thing I helped on was actually the first track - “Joy To The World.”  Jamie had done a really nice arrangement - Jamie Barnes - just him and the guitar.  (He) sat down and started playing the guitar part, and I was like, I hear something, so I pulled him over to the piano.  I didn’t have it all down into the computer, recorded, but we had the whole arrangement done after he had played it through like two or three times for me.  And that was fun because we recorded him, and then I started laying things down, one at a time, on top of him.  It was one of those (things) where it kind of happened in a flash, where you get the whole idea for what the song should do.  We put it together, and I really feel like it came out like what we were aiming for. 

Hear Jamie with Neil on “Joy to the Worldâ€? from Sojourn’s Advent Songs CD

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Next week we’ll post an archived discussion on worship by Matthew Smith of Indelible Grace from the SBTS Institute for Christian Worship. 

And remember that the Sojourn worship band will be playing on WFPK’s “Kentucky Homefront” radio program next Wednesday (January 16) on 91.9 FM in Louisville, streamed throughout the world on their website, www.wfpk.org. 

Also remember that the Before the Throne songs “We are Listening” and “All I Have is Yours” are both in rotation on Pilgrim Radio, a network of stations in the western United States, streaming to the world at pilgrimradio.com 

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