Artist: Emily Scott Robinson
Album: Traveling Mercies
Label: Self-released
Release Date: 9/10/18
For the past several years, North Carolina-born Emily and her Bulgarian-born husband Rous, have been traveling in what appears on their website to be a very nice motor home, back and forth across America’s fruitful plains, purple mountains and all the rest. Troubadouring here, there and everywhere at festivals, clubs, house concerts, all the while gathering fans of Emily’s song writing and performing.
A short time ago, they rolled into East Nashville for a few days to commit a dozen of Emily’s songs to disk with Americana producer Neilson Hubbard and a sextet of musicians and vocalists that includes Will Kimbrough, Sam Howard and Eamon McLoughlin. The result is a collection of hope, heartbreak, dysfunction and darkness, with touches of light that always seem to come from her very pleasing and articulate voice, that leaves none of her lyrics misunderstood.
The set opens with the uptempo, breezy, rolling “Westward Bound,” with riffs that put you in mind of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Alberta Bound’ or John Hartford’s evergreen “Gentle On My Mind,” while Emily sings about hopes and dreams as they travel the America the Interstates left behind.
Don’t get too comfortable pilgrim, ’cause Rous (whom I assume does the driving, while Emily writes about what she sees and feels, hangs a hard left into “Ghost In Every Town” that opens with minor chords and “a country store where you can only pay in cash, for a Powerball and a gallon worth of gas” —and that’s the happiest lines of that tune. That’s followed by “Delta Line,” that I bet Emmy Lou Harris would love for its sadness. Several of Emmy’s musicians are on these sessions, btw. Things bounce back with “Better With Time,” a love song to Rous and their marriage. The “Pie Song” is the most different both musically, and with lyrics that are 180 degrees away from the melody and feel. Pie in your face is then quickly over shadowed by true drama, in her story of “The Dress” which sadly she actually lived through. I would hope that the following two tracks are works she had to make up.
Emily once held a job as a social worker for immigrants and in her closing “Traveling Mercies” sings of her hopes in this current dark political and social upheaval many of us are dealing with. Perhaps not as close to home as it is for her. Husband Rousian CHaracherev, is still a Green card holder in a country that now has far too much black ice that doesn’t seem to want to melt.
—Ken Spooner
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