Reviews

Artist:Sam Robbins
Album: Finally Feeling Young
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 11
Website: https://www.samrobbinsmusic.com

Written over the course of two years and recorded variously in Boston and Nashville, this marks the album debut of the tousle-haired rising New Hampshire-born Americana star who, having first come to attention as a contest on The Voice and influenced by classic 70s singer-songwriters, has been likened to Jackson Browne (The Pretender) and Paul Simon (and, I suspect, Janis Ian's Between The Lines is in there too), chronicling his journey from adolescence at the end of his college years into adulthood.

With instrumentation that includes pedal steel, mandolin, cello and ukulele, the album opens with the tender 'What Being In Love Is', a song about wondering how you know you've truly fallen in love when you thought you had so many times before, moving on to the opening drone of 'Nobody's Baby', gradually building the tempo with pulsing drums and guitars which, in contrast, revels in the feeling of not being free rather than wallowing in post-break-up misery ("It hurt when it happened, it did/ But I've got to admit /It feels good to be nobody's baby tonight/It feels good to be breaking the walls she designed"), a wash of backwards synths imparting a touch of psychedelia to its James Taylor sensibilities.

Although again featuring a similar electronic backdrop, 'Remind Me' is the first of the Simon New York loft influences in evidence, another number about being wary of falling in love ("I'm still so young there are so many people that I haven't met… I didn't want to know who you are I didn't want to like it… You don't remind me of my mother/You don't remind me of my last girl/You just remind me that it's a big wide open world"), the reluctance or inability to commit extending to the marching drumbeat and chiming guitars of the vocally treated 38 ("If I told you that I wasn't perfect you'd smile and say 'at least you try'/ When I told you that I always loved you, did you know it was a lie?"), but here veined with the growing feeling of regret at letting things go ("I've seen your new haircut/I've seen your new jeans/I wonder if you still sing those songs you wrote about me/Because they always made me bleed").

It's there too on 'Raining Sideways', another Simon echo, as, written for his father is about the feeling of having to live up to the idea of being "a man" ("I'd get so confused when the coaches would tell me 'Boy, you've gotta get mean'… I wasn't a man like my grandfather I couldn't fight the Korean war") he sings "Now it's raining sideways and I'm missing her face I wonder if you ever felt that way".

Suffused with that same influence and air of wistful reflection, 'Addiction' sees the start of recognising what true love might feel like ("every time I walk downtown I get stuck trying to figure out I get stuck trying to figure out how to make every good thing last. Maybe I'm addicted to what I had …Maybe I'm scared that I won't be the same without her there Maybe I just don't know how to want you/But every girl walking on the street looks the same to me I can't say that I expected that"). It's just in the music and delivery that he echoes Simon, the lines "Maybe I'll end up like a vinyl record with a human heart/I'll pass through a thousand hands till someone buys me as wall art" feel quintessential too.

The slow shuffling Saying Amen with its weeping pedal steel introduces cynicism into the mix ("You've got light blonde hair and skin like mine/Married in 1990, two kids by 95'/Bible by your bed, you swear Jesus knows your name/But don't think he doesn't see what /You post online every day") in a song that speaks of hypocrisy ("You say you love the good book/So why don't you take a good look at yourself/Because there are people going through hell that we can't understand Why don't you care about them?") and calls for understanding in a nation torn by division and hate ("So go on, keep on sayin amen/Amen for my trans friends brave for being alive/Amen for bible and Jesus Christ/Amen for the migrants trying to find a new life/Amen for the White House and the good people still inside").

The album continues to explore a growing sense of what has been lost as he grows older in the spare and simply strummed 'Put it All Together' which, nodding to Willie Nelson ("These blue eyes aren't crying in the rain ") and the tempo ebbing and flowing, backed by pedal steel, he reflects on the emptiness of being alone ("It's when I get up early and the sun streams in Having no one to share it with/It's a wedding in the country probably cost a lot of money Having a suit but no one to wear it with""), both trying to persuade himself he doesn't care but disarmed by those little things ("I don't miss you that much I know/I just miss running to your door when I come home. I miss having someone to write all my songs to"). He has the wonderful ability to capture deep emotions in simple images such as "It's when I get home early just to watch TV/ Hoping to see my phone light up".

His emotional coming of age continues on the minimal piano ballad, an ineffably sad song about reflecting on the often brief incandescence of teenage love, of what you let go or pushed away and the sense of regret that now accompanies those memories ("I remember I held you and whispered your name. A parking lot, two hearts talking in tongues/We were eighteen, I was sure you were the one/I don't know who sleeps with you now/Or if he even knows about/My letters you left under your bed"), again signed off with a crushing blow to the heart in "Don't waste your time on me/I'm just waiting to see how long until I fall back asleep".

Although there's an acoustic reprise of 'Remind Me', the journey ends with the title track, a slow walking, organ backed and slightly gospel tinged number that somehow fuses the idea in both 'Still Crazy After All These Years' and 'My Back Pages' as he softly sings "It seems so strange that up till now/I've lived my life like Summer's countdown/Waiting for the day when everything changes The sky opens and my life rearranges/It's always let me down/I spent sixteen to twenty two trying to be in love Trying to make someone else show me who I was …Now I'm finally feelin young" and a realisation that hitting on ever girl you meet simply because you're now single and thinking you've cracked it "all from getting some girl's number new in my phone" isn't what life is about. It's about finding and holding on to love so that you don't spend your future mourning for the past, and, if you just happen to be one of the most promising new songwriters of your generation, learning "how to put words to the burning". May he stay forever young.

Mike Davies

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