Word: robertson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After that, Robertson kicked back, took it easy in Malibu. While spending time with his wife of 19 years, Dominique, and their three children ("Being home freshened up the atmosphere considerably"), he continued a collaboration with Director Martin Scorsese begun on The Last Waltz concert film. He worked on music for Raging Bull, The Color of Money and The King of Comedy, for which he wrote his first song in five years. Called Between Trains, it was a spooky, heart-torn memorial for a Viet Nam vet, a friend who died too soon, and it was also a reminder...
Until now. At the age of 44, Robertson has shaken the dust off and made his first solo album. Two Band colleagues show up on two cuts for the sake of old times. There are also hefty contributions from U2, Peter Gabriel and the BoDeans, and stylistic echoes as diverse as Tom Waits and David Byrne. But Robbie Robertson is unmistakably his work. He says it best himself on the last cut, Testimony: "Bear witness, I'm wailing like the wind/ Come bear witness, the half-breed rides again." So step right up and welcome him home...
Until 1985, Robertson, "blessed with the opportunity to shut up when I have nothing to say," was . . . well, counting his blessings. "I wanted to feel like I couldn't wait to make music, rather than regarding it as a chore," he says. "I knew that if I spoke with all my heart, it would be better for everyone." The writing started tentatively at first ("It was like getting used to the water again"), but, after a time, sounds he heard and stories he suddenly had to tell "came into the open. It was a good feeling. Then I was gone...
...songwriting took less than a year. There are nine new tunes on this album and enough material left over to give Robertson a strong head start on the next one. The recording took another full year. Together with Producer ; Daniel Lanois, who worked with U2 on The Joshua Tree, Robertson came up with a silky, soaring sound that is ethereal and sporting at the same time, just what you might hear from a roadhouse located down an off ramp just south of the pearly gates...
...working the Band vein here, but he is still writing in the American grain. Born in Canada to a Mohawk mother and a Jewish father, Robertson talks about American mythology, about leaving home in Ronnie Hawkins' barbed-wire rock band and touring rural America, about going "down South, where the music and folklore had enormous impact on me." All those great early Band songs (The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Shape I'm In, Up on Cripple Creek) were Robertson's way of measuring and transmuting all that experience. The material on this record just deepens...