‘LIFE IN EASY STEPS’ The Debut Album by Robert Vincent
aaamusic | On 20, Jan 2013
If there’s a lot of half-finished, semi-fulfilled, vaguely unsatisfying music around these days – songs that say nothing to you about your life – then maybe it’s because the people who make it haven’t lived much of a life themselves.
Not so in the case of Robert Vincent, the searingly honest Liverpool singer-songwriter whose mix of folk, rock and country is like a Mersey Van Morrison or a Scouse Springsteen.
Born in 1981, in Crosby, North Liverpool, into a house that rang to the sounds of Johnny Cash, The Beatles and Pink Floyd, Robert knew before he was five years old that he wanted to be a musician. When he became a father at 17 he had to balance the hard graft of life in a working band with the responsibility of providing for a family. He’s seen setbacks and false dawns, he’s come near to success only to have it snatched away, but he’s never lost his faith in his music. And now that faith is coming good.
“I’ve done the whole thing of trying to be what people want me to be,” Rob explains in his warm and good-
humoured Scouse drawl, “And in the end I just thought I’ve had enough of this. The songs I’ve written now, some of them sound like Johnny Cash and some of them like 50s rock’n’roll – but they’re what *I* wanted to write. And the funny thing is, the more honest I am the better people like it.”
The results started with his first two EP releases, “The Bomb” and “My Pill”, as well as his raw and righteous current single, “Riot’s Cry”, which has been picking up airplay across the BBC from the likes of Janice Long, Radcliffe & Maconie, as well as sessions and interviews on 5Live and BBC London.
The debut album, “Life In Easy Steps”, released in January 2013, is preceded by the album’s title track as it’s lead single. Rob explains, “Once I had the song “Life In Easy Steps”, I knew I had the link to every other song I had been writing up until then for this album. It came from frustration of yet more hurdles, closed doors and dead ends, personally and professionally. The constant dirge of dealing with hollow and lethargic people had come full circle and I was at breaking point. I had started to write a poem that had a line “With a book called, life in easy steps”. It came from the realisation that the perfect existence we all search for is unachievable. What motivates and drives us, is in fact those very frustrations. I feel we are forever writing that “book“. The more I put in, little by little, for me. The easier and clearer life becomes.’’
Rob left school at 16 to dabble in local bands, growing mildly frustrated that his mates only wanted to play standards and not write their own songs. A job as a roadie for a covers band earned him a few quid and a chance to get up and sing a couple of numbers – ‘All Right Now’ and the inevitable ‘Wish You Were Here’. “You’ll give anything to get up and have a go at that age,” Rob recalls.
Then his girlfriend became pregnant. “It was a massive, massive thing to happen when you’re so young,” he admits.
For a while, music had to take second fiddle to providing for the baby. He worked in catering jobs and even as an estate agent – but there was always a band too.
One of them, a group called Boa, won Rob the chance to represent Liverpool at a festival marking 50 Years of Rock’n’Roll in Memphis in 2004 and to record at Sun Studios, Sam Phillips’s fabled birthplace of Rock’n’Roll. But just as Boa seemed about to happen the band fell apart. “After that,” Rob says, “I thought, I’m doing my own thing from now on.”
By 2007, Rob promised himself he’d never be left high and dry again. His band Night Parade recorded a debut album but management wrangles kept it from being released. More setbacks, but yet more refusal to give in. Rob was now in the rhythm of writing his own songs and more convinced than ever that he knew what he was doing – and why he was doing it. He’d also started working with one Pete Smith, Grammy award winning co-producer of Sting’s debut album, “Dream Of The Blue Turtles”. Together they recorded “Life In Easy Steps” in Brighton.
The years of hard work put grit and insight in these songs by an artist who’s still barely in his thirties. “When you’ve worked in a band for years and the rug gets pulled, it can feel like you’re left with nothing”, he thinks. “But that’s not really the case. You’ve got all that experience, that practice. It toughens you up and focuses you. You find you can write about people as they are – the good and the bad.”
So Rob Vincent’s songs are compassionate and perceptive. There’s a wild evocation of the fact that every life is lived in the eye of a storm on the blues-blazing “Riot’s Cry”, and forgiveness for former friends who’ve let you down in “How Do You Sleep”. There’s an elegy for the wasted opportunities of a dead relationship, where your partner can’t change, in the plangent, Lennon-esque “Second Chance”.
And he’s not frightened of getting a little cosmic either. The intimate, gently strummed “Light Of The Stars” takes that familiar spine-chilling moment when you look up into the vastness of the night sky and realise your insignificance, and then flips it. We might be tiny, the song says, but what matters is what we are to one another. “I’ll be here in the light of the stars,” sings Rob, and in the end that’s all that matters.
“Having a kid so young gave me a way of looking at how people act towards each other, especially with children,” he explains. “There’s a song on the album called “Heaven Knows” that wonders if maybe we were happier when we had more social boundaries, not fewer. I’m not religious but you wonder if some things – not everything, but some things – might have been a bit better in the days when we all went to church on a Sunday, dealt with all the grief and misery of the week, and came out feeling better. I think people are missing those boundaries.”
“Life In Easy Steps” is the album that Rob has spent years working towards, an album which has finally allowed Rob to express himself creatively and tell the story of his life and hardships up until now. “There’s no smoke and mirrors about it,” Rob says with a smile. “It’s like a good old fashioned country record. Sing what you mean – and sing it like you mean it.”
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“Life In Easy Steps” is released on January 28th, 2013 on DB Industries and includes a limited edition bonus CD with highlights from Robert’s earlier releases.
For more information, please visit www.robertvincentmusic.com
