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Bruce Robison is one of the newest and
biggest stars in the Texas songwriting firmament. His
songs have been recorded by artists including the Dixie
Chicks ("Travelin' Soldier"), Faith Hill & Tim McGraw
("Angry All the Time") and George Strait ("Desperately"
and his current hit single, "Wrapped"). Although these
acts have taken his work to the top of the charts, no
one interprets a Bruce Robison song like the writer
himself. With a voice as unadorned and unaffected as his
home state's wide-open spaces, Robison has a laid-back
vocal knack for easing the listener into a song's
emotional core.
Growing up in the small Hill Country town of Bandera,
Robison and his brother Charlie, another successful
singer-songwriter, started playing music in their
garage, eventually graduating to playing local dances
and rodeos. In the early '90s, they made the move to
Austin and dove headlong into that city's vibrant
singer/songwriter scene, falling in with a creative
crowd that included frequent co-writer Monte Warden and
Kelly Willis, who later became Bruce’s wife.
"Doug
Sahm was a big influence on me," Robison says. "He was
somebody who busted out of Texas, and I knew his hits
when I was growing up. I was lucky in that the kind of
country I heard at first – from Willie and Waylon and
those guys, to Gram and Emmylou and over to Doug – was
changing what people thought about country music. Doug
always represented that to me and was a classic example
of someone who was unclassifiable."
Robison's self-titled, indie-label debut
was released in 1996, and the singer/songwriter was soon
making regular trips to Nashville. A publishing deal and
a major label record contract quickly followed. After
two critically acclaimed albums – 1998's Wrapped and
1999's Long
Way From
Anywhere –
failed to catch fire on radio, Robison, collecting
royalties from lucrative cuts with Strait and Lee Ann
Womack, returned to Austin and indie life, releasing Country
Sunshine in
2001. In the five years between that release and 2006’s Eleven
Stories,
Robison and Willis got busy. Four bouncing babies later,
a bleary eyed Robison is still perfecting the process of
putting all of it, somehow, into a song.
Committed to the Austin independent music scene, Robison
established Premium Recording Service, a
state-of-the-art studio, in 2005. "The music that comes
out of Austin and out of Texas is really amazing, and we
need to make better recordings, so that's the origin of
Premium," he says. To me, the music is at the frontier
now. It seems like the '50s again, and nobody really
knows how it's going to sort out. I'm really excited to
be a part of figuring out where it's headed … we'll see
how it shakes out."
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