I’m going back and adding my stories from LoneStarMusic Magazine. This was the cover story of the August/September issue. It loses a little in the intro without the multiple pictures of Charlie’s one facial expression, but you can see that version by clicking this link. Onward to the text.

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Charlie doesn’t say ‘cheese’.

For pictures or any other reason.

Take a look at Charlie Robison’s promo pics through the course of the seven albums he’s released, beginning with 1995’s Bandera and reaching to his newest effort, Beautiful Day. You’ll notice they all have one thing in common. Charlie doesn’t smile. In fact the facial expression is eerily similar in most of them, almost as if he had a mask he put on when he played the role of “Charlie Robison”.

It’s not that he’s unhappy. In fact, as we meet at one of Charlie’s favorite hangouts, the Liberty Bar in San Antonio (it’s a fun, party place loaded with good food, but it stands just a bit crooked when you look it in the eye), he’s upbeat for a person who has just spent the better part of six hours rehashing his divorce to Dixie Chick Emily Erwin over and over again to reporters from all over the country. But that’s the penance you pay when the PR kit for your new record dubs it “the divorce album”.

I first met Charlie a little more than a decade ago in Nashville at a gold record party for the Dixie Chicks. It was the Chicks first big night in Nashville being treated like royalty (literally – they were carried into the party on a palanquin by six large men), and it was the first big night out on the town for Charlie and Emily – tuxes, limos, the whole nine yards. Charlie tells me he and Emily have more pictures from that night than from any other time they were together. It was obvious how much they were in love that evening and I ashamedly remember hollering “get a room” at them in the limo.

It’s oddly fitting that I’m sitting down with Charlie now ten years later to recount his various stops along the way and to talk about “the divorce album”. While the record isn’t exactly the flip side to the night I witnessed so long ago, it’s definitely a document that chronicles the end of that bliss.

As he orders a salad and I order chips and queso along with a vodka and soda (in the spirit of our first meeting), he’s excited to tell me that the short calls he had scheduled earlier in the day with the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe both ran over an hour. I have an entire hour scheduled with Charlie so I ask the waitress to make the drink a double and start to roll tape.

LoneStarMusic Magazine: I have to admit I didn’t realize you sang backing vocals on Gravity. How did that come about?

Charlie Robison: Austin’s a small musical community and Bruce and I had this little pseudo bluegrass band at the time called the Weepers. We did this happy hour thing at the Continental Club with these three and four part harmonies. Alejandro used to come down there and listen to it, and Stephen Bruton [ed. note: Stephen Bruton produced Alejandro’s landmark album, Gravity]. They asked if we’d do harmonies on the record. We just did it on that one track, “More Miles Than Money” [ed. note: Though many people refer to the song by that title, it’s actually called “Last To Know”]. It was fun.

LSMM: Was that the first record you were a part of?

CR: I had done some demo stuff, in hopes of getting a record deal, and I’d done some stuff with Two Hoots & A Holler, but that was a little bit before Bandera. It was all pretty close to each other.

LSMM: Can you recount what all transpired between Bandera and putting out Life of the Party three years later?

CR: It was a nightmare, but the best thing that could have happened to me as it turns out. As soon as Bandera came it out, it got all of this attention really fast. Within a month Warner Brothers Nashville called and said, “People’ll be at your showcase. We want to come down and see you.” So they did. I ended up signing this great big record deal with Warner Brothers Nashville and signed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell. But there was no timeframe on when they had to put a record out. As a result I didn’t really tour Bandera; didn’t promote it or anything like that. I went straight from releasing the record to signing a deal with Warner Brothers. Basically they kept me for like, two years, doing nothing. It was always, “No, this isn’t quite right. This isn’t quite right.” I was under contract and I was terribly unhappy. They kept wanting me to go more and more mainstream the whole time. And I was like, “Listen to Bandera, there’s nothing mainstream about that record at all. Why did you sign me?” I think they signed me more for the picture on the cover than anything.

LSMM: They thought “Oooh, country guy with long hair”. This was the same time that Little Texas was really big on their label?

CR: Yeah. Little Texas. The label told me, “We want you to be edgy.” I had to tell them, “You don’t talk about being ‘edgy’.” Then they’d say, “Keep dressing edgy. Let’s go down to the wardrobe department and figure out what ‘edgy’ things we have.” And I had to ask, “How, exactly, is that ‘edgy’?”

LSMM: I suppose that was your first taste of Nashville cheese.

CR: And the thing was, I saw that coming, but it was like I was the first guy from the Texas Music scene that got signed to a major label deal and I felt, “How can I turn this down?” If it had been four years later I would have turned it down in a second.

So we had reached the end of two years and it had taken that long just to get eight songs recorded. We had finished mixing the eight song and I thought, “We’re getting close to the end of it.” I didn’t really like it. I didn’t hate it, but….. okay, I came close to hating it.

I had this A&R person at the label that I was really close to, had known them for two years, hanging out and everything like that. I got home that night and checked my messages, and got “Hey Charlie, this is Paige Levy. Just wanted to tell you that we don’t think things are working out, so good luck to you.”

LSMM: They dropped you by leaving you a voicemail?

CR: Voicemail. Right. It was one of those things where you were planning on breaking up with a girl. You’re all set up to break up with her in a week and then the next day she breaks up with you. You’re thinking, “What’s wrong with me?” while another part of you is thinking, “I didn’t want to be here in the first place.” I wondered why I was feeling so down about getting dropped.

Two weeks later Blake Chancey came down and said they were starting an alternative portion of Sony Nashville called Lucky Dog. They signed [Charlie’s brother] Bruce, Jack [Ingram], and I pretty much all at the same time.

LSMM: It’s been right at ten years since the Unleashed Live tour and recording.

CR: It was the winter of ’99 so that’s just about right, We did Texas last on that tour. We did something like sixty dates all over the place. By the time we got to Gruene Hall [where the Unleashed Live album was recorded] everyone was so worn out. We were playing literally every night on that tour. It was a fun tour, it was a blast, but it was really grueling.

LSMM: Looking back at that tour and the whole Lucky Dog experiment – Jack has now had some success going the Nashville route, and Bruce is enjoying success as a songwriter – do you feel you’re where you wanted to be looking back?

CR: I definitely feel, in looking back, that I wouldn’t have made any decision any differently. The Warner Brothers thing taught me about how to approach Sony for however many years I recorded for them.

I never wanted to be mainstream. The Chicks were really starting to hit big right when Emily and I started dating. We got married and I enjoyed it for her, but I never wished it was me.

I watched Robert [Earl Keen] and Lyle [Lovett] and people like that continue to build a career and make really good records and realize that they were still able to tour and keep their crowd without having radio success, without having to put out “singles”. So I knew that was possible. I’d realized from doing the Warner Brothers thing, I don’t care how much money they spend on nice hotel rooms and all this other meaningless shit, if I have to record that kind of music all the time or continually argue about it, it’s just not worth it.

LSMM: As part of the Warner deal, and Warner/Chappell specifically – did they put you in a room with writer after writer after writer to try and piece together a “hit”?

CR: They paired me with every writer in Nashville at the time that was having any kind of success. That was always just miserable. With the exception of things like “Barlight”, my songs are so specific to me that I never really expected to get cuts. I decided I was going to make, you know, albums.

When I grew up, whether it was the Eagles or Bad Company or Elton John or whoever, they put out strong records from track one through track twelve. They didn’t write two songs to be singles and the rest as filler.

LSMM: I was amazed at the one songwriters award show I attended in Nashville, going up to accept it was always four writers and eight publishing guys for one song.

CR: And it’s always the star and a bunch of writers. Like Brad Paisley and six other people. You can’t really say that’s your own song.

What really happens in those situations is, these writers, in order to ensure they get cuts, when they have great ideas they won’t write them with just anybody. They hold their best stuff until they get set up with Paisley, or get set up with a Taylor Swift. Then they bring their best hook. They pretty much already know the way the song is going to go. Hell, they may have already finished it, but they’ll give up 25 or 50% of it to get it on a top 10 or a top 5 or even maybe a number one. It’s just smart business, but that’s what it is. It’s business.

So many writers out there will have this great song and they won’t even show it to their publishing company until it’s time for George Strait to make a new record. Or time for Alan Jackson to make a new record.

LSMM: They don’t want some developing act to cut it first.

CR: Exactly. Going back to your original question – Bruce and I’ve had a lot of talks about this lately. It’s not really a bad problem to have, but it makes you think in terms of your career. When I go on radio stations doing interviews it used to be, “Live in the studio today we’ve got the bad boy of country music,” and now I’m “Texas Music legend, Charlie Robison.” I’m like, “Noooooo!” I still want to be the bad boy, I’m not ready to be the “legend”.

LSMM: Given that you’ve had the stereotypical Nashville horror story, do you still go back to Nashville? Do you still have any business there?

CR: I have to go there when I put out a record. There’s still a lot of business there in general and my management and record label are there. It’s like Willie says, “It’s like going to the store.” In terms of the old days, if you grow tomatoes, you still have to take them to the store to get ‘em sold. But it is getting further and further away. I haven’t been to Nashville, other than to play a show, since my last record came out [five years ago].

LSMM: It seems to me, and I could be wrong, but you don’t really count on radio support to sell records.

CR: It’s so funny because there’s so many more stations now that play the kind of music that I’m doing, but radio does not guarantee record sales at all. It’s just a part of the picture. If you count on radio alone for your career, you’re only as good as your latest single.

LSMM: And if you go back, Willie didn’t really become WILLIE until he gave up trying to write hit singles and started making the records that he wanted to make.

CR: Exactly. It wasn’t until Shotgun Willie and Phases & Stages. Records that Nashville didn’t promote they just, “Okay, we’ll put ‘em out.” And it started here. He was playing Floores every Friday night when he put these records out and started gaining this huge crowd in Texas and becoming this iconic figure.

LSMM: When I first heard the title track to your new record, Beautiful Day, I didn’t have the booklet or a lyric sheet, and I could have sworn you were singing “sister says she just needs a little more blow”.

CR: A lot of people have said that, and in fact she even said that and wanted to know what the hell I was talking about. I just got so tired of the over-the-top preparation for all of their appearances and awards shows and all of the make-up artists and stylists and the cultivation of the image and needing just a little more “glow”. I was just the opposite with my image, almost to a fault, really.

LSMM: The new record to me is the Charlie Robison inner-circle, plus a new Charlie.

CR: Charlie [Sexton] and I have been friends since…. shit, since “Beat So Lonely” really. He played on two or three tracks on Life of the Party. When I was writing this record I thought, “Sexton is the only guy that can play this.” Grissom is so unbelievable and I love working with Dave and he’s one of my best friends, but Sexton’s playing is the vibe I really wanted for the record. It could not have made the songs translate any better emotionally and sonically than the way he played them.

LSMM: With you self-producing it and using “your guys”, did that help you prepare for the record knowing what you could get out of them?

CR: With what I wanted to do going into it I knew if it was a bunch of studio musicians, they’d just look at me like I was crazy. But I knew with my guys they would follow me into the fire. I could say, “Just trust me on this.” Like the way we start off “Yellow Blues” and I’m trying to explain the beat and they’re all looking at each other thinking, “What the hell is this?”, but they trusted me and as we layered on some more stuff they were like, “Oh, that does work.”

LSMM: Speaking specifically of that track, relative to the rest of the record, it sounds like the vocals are trying to fight their way out of the mix.

CR: I wasn’t going for that, but if you think about the aggressiveness of the track – the record goes through so many emotions and that is really the “I’m pissed off” song – the lyrics are very aggressive, but not vindictive – I didn’t want anything vindictive on the record – but it’s “I’m upset with you and I’m pissed of about this and I’m pissed off about that” so it was kind of a primal scream of vocals coming out.

LSMM: Going the self-producer route seems to have served this record well. Is that something you’re considering for future records as well?

CR: Most definitely. Blake Chancey is listed as co-producer of Step Right Up, but really I produced that record on my own. But back to this record, when I was writing the songs I knew exactly what I wanted the finished product to sound like, which it hadn’t been that way before. I could hear the finished version in my head and that would have been really, really hard to convey to a co-producer. I also knew that if I had a co-producer it would give me a way to kind of “chicken out” on some of the producing. For example, Lloyd would be much more conservative. Not saying that’s better or worse, but if I were to say, “What do you think about this?” Lloyd would always opt for the safer way.

LSMM: I think Lloyd has gotten some great stuff out of you in the past.

CR: He’s gotten some amazing stuff out of me, but he’s used to running a session very controlled and on this I wanted it to be just the opposite.

LSMM: You were going more for the vibe?

CR: Yeah. If you’ve got this amazing guitar part that Sexton plays or a great vocal that I sang and I don’t feel like I can really beat it, I’ve gotten it there, but I was flat or sharp on this one little part, but the vibe was right – instead of going in there and trying twenty times to get that note right and try to match the feel – if I get that note right I’m probably not going to match the feel – I’ll just tweak that note. I don’t have any problem saying, “Yeah, I got my tits done, but I look good.” I’m no purist when it comes to that.

LSMM: Given the nature of this record, was there anything you wrote for it that was too personal to put on the album?

CR: Really not. When I started writing for this record things were happening really fast. We decided we were going to separate and we were on the fence about whether we were going to try and work things out or get a divorce. Things happened real-time with this record. I was in the studio recording basic tracks, scheduled for five days and after the second day, back at the hotel room we actually decided we were going to get a divorce. So even though the songs were only two or three weeks old they sounded outdated because things were moving so quickly at that time.

All of the songs on this record were written within two or three of when they were cut. At that point if songs were three weeks or a month old it didn’t sound relative anymore to where I was. When you’re in divorce mode, things are changing that fast.

If you’re writing a record where you have a “Loving County” or a “My Hometown”, there’s no immediacy to have to cut the song right away. But with the songs on this record – whether it was a song I wrote or a Gattis song – there was a real immediacy to get down on tape what I was feeling two nights prior. Then my performance and the way I produce it is going to be so fresh as to how I felt when I wrote it. Like I said before, the things I had written a month before had no relevance to me by the time I went to record it. I was so at a different place.

It was kind of good to decide to get a divorce when we did, because it was like, “Okay, this is a good slice of time to take from one and ten tracks.” If we hadn’t had decided to get a divorce then I probably wouldn’t have been able to plug into “Feeling Good Again” or “Beautiful Day”.

LSMM: You’ve mentioned when talking about this record that the songs were more personal and for the first time you wrote them in first-person. Looking back do you feel you may have been playing the role of Charlie Robison more than you realized?

CR: I was definitely writing plays that I could star in. ”Loving County” is written about a different person, but little pieces were taken out of parts of my life. I had gone out with a girl for a long time that was from an oil-rich Texas family. This was befoe I’d had any success at all and I felt like, “I don’t belong in this. I don’t have any money and she’s rich.” I’d worked on the pipeline, and then I got exposed to the people who owned the pipeline ten years later, so that’s kind of where “Loving County” came from. It was all little parts of me that I turned into a play that was about somebody else.

I tried to write stuff that might have been a “Loving County” or something like that, but I thought, “This isn’t going to work. This has to totally be about what is going on right now.” How I finally tapped in to how I was going to write this record – I moved out of the house and I got a loft downtown in San Antonio in the Exchange Building. I’d get home after being out until three o’clock in the morning and I’d sit down and say, “Okay, what happened in the last four or five hours?” and then I wrote exactly what I was going through at that time, and that’s how every single song is.

“Feeling Good Again” is an amalgam of three weeks prior to writing that song, but that’s the only one that wasn’t written actually in the moment.

LSMM: Going to your loft and writing songs about what was happening at the moment – was that something of a revelation for you?

CR: It really was. That’s not to say six months from now I sit down to write a record – I’m going to be touring and dating and whatever – that’s really not that interesting, first person.

When I was living in the Exchange Building – it’s a great little place to live, but I was right across the street from the bus station, so it was this Tom Waits kind of vibe. You’d come home at night and there’s be people sleeping in the entryway of the building. It was downtown San Antonio, you know.

LSMM: A little bit “On the Nickel”?

CR: Yeah, it was a great place to write the record. I was in this hundred-year-old building and if I got hungry at four in the morning, the inside of the bus terminal had the greatest tacos, and I’m looking around thinking, “Damn, so this is who rides the bus.” There was a lot of walking around the streets at eleven o’clock at night when I was in a certain place, writing-wise. I’d go to this greatest little I’m-going-to-get-stabbed dive bar that was three blocks away from my apartment. It was a good little cocoon to be in to tap into all of that kind of shit. There were no neighbors and the kids weren’t around. I felt as close to Tom Waits as I could about trying to paint a picture about where I was at. Before I called it Beautiful Day, I was actually going to call the record A Night at the Exchange. That was the working title of the record.

Because I ended up writing all of these redemptive songs and whenever the record was mixed I was in this pretty good place. “Okay, I’ve got my life ahead of me,” as opposed to where I was when I was writing at first. “Beautiful Day” is not like a story of what was going on, it’s not a vindictive song in any way. It’s kind of poking fun at someone, well, at Emily. I knew she was feeling bad too, but she was spending most of her time in Los Angeles, and I was living downtown in San Antonio. It seemed a little bit… escapism. You can tell that she probably wasn’t, but it sure seemed that way. In my mind’s eye I could see her cruising down the 405, hanging out where we had a house rented when they were doing their last record. I was poking fun at her escapism.

LSMM: You’ve mentioned that Emily was cool and understood, as an artist herself, you needing to write about this.

CR: If the show was on the other foot – I was in downtime between records and she was making a record, then she probably would have written stuff similar to what I was writing. I don’t see how she couldn’t. Especially with the record they’d just finished, it was completely relevant to where they were in their career. “Not Ready To Make Nice” and every song on the record, really.

I gave her the first five roughs and told her, “I just want to let you know what this is sounding like.” I didn’t want to blindside anybody. She said, “It’s good. I like it.”

LSMM: Are you ready for the potential flipside of the coin?

CR: She’ll be writing from her point of view, definitely. I’ll be totally fine with it. I’d be disappointed if she didn’t. What we went through – it’s the worst place you could be personally, but it’s the best place you could be artistically. I’ll sit down to write the next record in a year or something like that and I’ll need to go get divorced again so I can have something to write about [Laughs].

LSMM: Speaking of, being a single dad and a musician out on the road – how is it?

CR: It’s great right now. With a record coming out and it being the summer, I’d usually be on the road constantly right now, but I have this summer with the kids so I’m cramming everything I can. Basically the day they go back to school, I leave. I’m on the road three or four days a week between now and then, and the rest of the time we’re down at my place in Rockport. They love hunting and fishing and all of the stuff that is “Daddy time”.

Once school starts, I’m always working on the weekends so I don’t have that quality time to spend with them. We don’t have any kind of custody agreement. Emily comes over to the house and we have dinner together three times a week. And we still have dinner with our friends together. It’s not the usual divorce in any way.

LSMM: The divorce you went through as a kid shows up in both you and Bruce’s writing and seems to have been a significant event. Were you conscious of that as you and Emily went through your divorce?

CR: She came from the same exact place, so we were definitely on the same page as far as, “Okay, we both know we’re not going to see eye-to-eye on everything,” but we still…. We didn’t have two different lawyers, we did everything sitting at the kitchen either at my house or her house.

LSMM: Do you find it ironic that the bad situation you went through as a kid prepared you to make a much better situation for your kids through the split?

CR: It’s overused, but if you don’t use experiences like that, same way I used my Warner Brothers experience, if you don’t use that as a positive then you’re just wasting it. If Emily and I were feuding right now and kept that going for the next twenty years, to me that would be analogous to the guy who was beaten as a kid and decides to beat his kids too. That would be how much sense that would make.

We both came from these awful break-ups where the parents just hated each other and there was this constant push-pull, and we decided it was going to stop here. Both of us decided that’s not going to be how this is from day one.

There are so many things personally about my raising my children that I’ve done just the opposite of my parents. Like the Seinfeld episode – “If I do the exact opposite of what my parents did, which was totally wrong, then the exact opposite would have to be totally right.”

LSMM: For most people, divorce is total hell as is, but at least they can do it in private. Your divorce played out in public, which had to have made it even worse.

CR: It didn’t feel like it played out in public. Our good friends didn’t even know we’d gotten a divorce until it had gotten in the papers. It’s not like there’s TMZ guys at the San Antonio courthouse. We were able to stay under the radar a little bit. Only our complete inner circle of friends and family had any idea of what was going on. When we finalized it we called people and said, “Hey, we got a divorce”, and their response was, “What?” I think we did it as well as you can possibly do something like that.

LSMM: How do you balance the single dad vs. bad boy of country music these days?

CR: If I’m playing in Austin, used to be I would spend the night in Austin and go out and “stuff”, but now with the kids I’m straight back home after the show.

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Both Charlie and I made a little more small talk after the last question and said our goodbyes, but just before he left Charlie grabbed one of the chips left in the basket and by-passed the qeuso entirely – choosing instead to butter the tortilla chip and eat it that way. Straight through to the end, there would be no cheese for Charlie.