Please listen to my SOLO EP.
It is a cycle of songs devoted to transformation, and asks for a path to a new sort of kindness. This album is co-produced by rock icon Kip Winger and features guest performances by Ottmar Liebert, Moira Smiley, Jon Gagan, Jerry Weimer, Tawanda Suessbrich-Joaquim, Calvin Hazen, Char Rothschild, Dana Winograd, and Yuko Shimokawa.
“I feel the summons to music in the same part of my heart that feels the seasons; the long light, the deep-seated aloneness in our culture, and its longing for company. Call it quirky. Call it New Mexico. I’ll try to play something for both those lineages, and I’ll hope to heal myself and others along the way.”
Singing songs of his own making, and accompanying them with instruments such as the West African kora, guitar, drums, and percussion, Robby Rothschild draws from the dual wells of tradition and personal expression. Known for his work with his brother, Char, in the duo Round Mountain, as well as his recent international tours as percussionist for Kip Winger and Ottmar Liebert, Robby’s solo work represents a furthering of his search into musical wilderness, and a deepening of rawness and vulnerability such as true wilderness and a path of loss brings to all of us.
Music has called him in many directions, including to Mali, West Africa, whose music infused and possessed him, and to conservatory, where he achieved a master’s in composition. His pursuit of the sound emerging in his ears continues to guide him today.
Writings
Memory
The days keep on pushing one over the other, as seagulls do, waves delivering even as undertow erodes the beach beneath. I believe and the grist goes on, and the memory cleans itself from leaves, from barnacles, from the thing itself, eventually from the fossil-shape...
What else
What else could love be but grappling — depraved or lucid - with our angels? In youth, mostly recognizable by the agitation in its wake, we sometimes mistake this disarray for the active ingredient. But perhaps with time, a refinement of strength passes across hands...
Give onto
Let us give onto the water. If the reflections have distorted our image away from recognition, let us make use of the disguise to deliver a gift in secret. Let the peened-over edges of our darkened exterior fade, as subtly as we became aware of them. Let the zip ties...
As far as I can see it
As far as I can see it, there's nothing wrong with waking up. It should be a group effort, not shriveling itself into factions or teams. Teams will forcibly remain asleep while they grapple with each other or fondle themselves. It shouldn't be a brand or a crutch or a...
A mirror to its light
What sees the honest sun now through the murk, what sees she I mean they I mean it -- with cyclones and downpour and downfall on every circuit, small hope-sparks to offset the clamor, to illuminate? To change, define? To ornament in circles as they, as we, circle the...
Salmon, come upriver
Something has to be understood. We are, all of us, older. Salmon, come upriver. Something must be withstood. Some hands must be thrown skyward. Everyone afraid of the same thing: let us meet it, somehow, with our power. In the ground itself, not in our telling of it,...