Emily Scott Robinson – Traveling Mercies
Out 22 February 2019
Sharing her RV motorhome with her husband in which she travels America performing shows, it’s fairly inevitable that Robinson’s debut album, produced by Neilson Hubbard and featuring Robby Hecht and Grace Pettis on harmonies, would have some reference to her itinerant lifestyle.
And this it does with the opening Westward Bound, conjuring thoughts of Gentle On My Mind in its guitar lines, she sings about packing the suitcase and hitting the highway to reconnect with herself (“turns out I’m not a city girl”), the song goes on to mention the West Texas diner waitresses who know all their regulars by name and how they drink their coffee, the little churches painted white and the America the interstate left behind. Likewise, there’s the good-time freedom of the road feel of the march beat White Hot Country Mess where she talks of knowing “where the gas is cheap, truckstops where it’s safe to sleep” and how, “in cowboy boots and a thrift store dress”, she’s “paying my dues out on the road” singing the songs she wrote. And then there’s Better With Time, a love song about how she and her husband got together, their wedding and first home together and how, like wine, being together gets better with the passing years.
But this isn’t some sunny travelogue album that sees hope and a simpler, friendly life on the horizon and the picture is quickly upended with the sparsely strummed Ghost In Every Town, a reminder of how the interstate has also destroyed lives and communities, reducing them to “a country store where you can only pay in cash, for a Powerball and a gallon worth of gas”, “the kind of bar where you go to disappear”, “the can of frozen food that passes for a meal” and “the kind of desperate that forces you to kneel.”
Emotional distances, broken relationships and scarred dreams populate her songs, Delta Line bringing together two damaged lives, a mother whose dreams are broken by the sound of the train from Memphis sparking memories of losing her eldest to the war, a young woman who has to have a civil wedding because she got pregnant and the preacher won’t defile the church, her postnatal depression and domestic abuse. An equally downbeat note is struck on Borrowed Rooms and Old Wood Floors, a simply strummed reflection on rootlessness (“you don’t ask where home is any more”) that goes beyond the life of a travelling musician that is its ostensible impetus.
She can be playful, though. Trotting a bass line laid down by Telisha Williams, Pie Song has a Dolly Parton quality to it as what starts out with recipe tips and ingredients turn out to be a reminder that it won’t taste sweet “if you’re cooking for a man who doesn’t love you.”
However, again while melodically evocative of Parton (think Bargain Store as run through a Ghost Riders filter), set in the Old West, Shoshone Rose, returns to the dark side as it tells of the titular Native-American, “the only woman standing with her head unbowed” , waging her own private bloody war to fulfil her vow to “drive the white man out.” It’s followed in turn by Run which could be a continuation of the young girl’s story in Delta Line as it revisits the subject of domestic abuse and dreams of married bliss turned sour, the victim finally leaving as things escalate.
The centrepiece, however, is The Dress, a song which, in a similar vein to Tori Amos’ Me And A Gun, comes from the experience of violation, it’s easy rolling acoustic arrangement belying how coming across a white dress brings back memories of wearing it on the night when, aged 22, she was raped after being drugged in a bar, never reporting and sinking into a period of depression. Like the Amos track, it’s harrowing but cathartic.
After all this, you’ll be relieved to know the final tracks leave on a relatively upbeat note. The sprightly picked Overalls, featuring Eamon McLaughlin on fiddle, may tell of a WWII survivor wanting to go home to die with his family around him rather being “hooked up to a hundred wires” in a hospital bed, but he talks of them raising a glass to his “rich long life” rather than dressing in black and weeping, of letting him go and of being reunited with his fallen comrades.
It closes with the title track, Will Kimbrough on mandolin, a slow waltz that draws on her previous life as a crisis counsellor and social worker for immigrants for a benediction for those on the road, either from choice or necessity, as she sings “these days have been dark, it feels like our world is coming apart” but finds hope and healing in the random acts of kindness of a shared humanity. Compassion, empathy and truth should be your travelling companions, this album invites you to walk hand in hand.
https://soundcloud.com/emilyscottrobinson/westward-bound-1
US Tour Dates
2/9 – Hotel Cafe – Los Angeles, CA* [SOLD OUT]
2/13 – 2/17 – Folk Alliance Montreal
2/24 – City Winery – New York, NY*
3/1 – White Eagle Saloon – Portland, OR
3/2 – Songwriter Series – Bend, OR
3/9 – City Winery – Chicago, IL* [SOLD OUT]
3/24 – City Winery Lounge (Album Release) – Nashville, TN
3/26 – Cat’s Cradle Back Room – Carrboro, NC
3/28 – Petra’s – Charlotte, NC
3/29 – The Crown at Carolina Theater – Greensboro, NC
3/30 – Isis Music Hall – Asheville, NC
3/31 – The Lounge at Isis Music Hall – Asheville, NC
4/1 – WDVX – Knoxville, TN
4/5 – Back Door Coffeehouse – Hattiesburg, MS
4/11 – Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe – Galveston, TX
4/12 – Anderson Fair – Houston, TX
* w/ Ron Pope
https://www.emilyscottrobinson.com/