Singing The Licks

It's barely nine months since northern NSW-born guitar wizard Joe Robinson released his third album, and first to showcase his vocal talents, Let Me Introduce You. Now, he's back in Australia from his now home in Nashville to not only kick out the jams at a few festivals, but also launch a new EP, Toe Jam.

“I wrote them quite a bit after the album was released,” the still only 21-year-old-yet-already-veteran-guitarist explains of the four songs on Toe Jam. “I was not a hundred per cent happy with how the album came out and kind of wanted to write a fresh batch of songs, so this EP is the result of just locking myself away in the studio and doing what I felt like doing. I was doing quite a lot of shows and I wanted to write some songs that I knew would work in a live set, some with kind of heavier, deeper grooves. I was playing a few festivals in America and wanted to have it be a little bit more high-energy than the acoustic stuff I'd done in the past.”

Picking up the guitar at the tender age of 12, Robinson basically learned to play by seeking out YouTube clips of guitarists that would intrigue him – the guys in Steely Dan, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler and so on – but it was meeting the Emmanuel brothers that really kicked things off, the acoustic specialist Tommy Emmanuel particularly becoming a mentor. By age 13, Robinson was opening for him not only here but in the US, and by 16 he had cut his first album, 2007's Birdseed, already three years into his touring career.

He eventually cut his second album, 2009's solo acoustic Time Jumpin' in the US, however, the bigger jump came with this year's Let Me Introduce You, where he stepped away from being strictly an instrumental artist and finally showcased a voice as flexible and melodic as anything he can play on guitar.

“It's funny because I always intended to sing,” Robinson states. “Even when I was first learning the guitar, I thought if you play the guitar you should sing too. But I guess I got kind of carried away with studying the guitar and I became obsessed somewhat. To be honest, it took me a while to figure out how to sing – I mean, I'm still figuring it out – but I think it's an important thing for me to develop because I feel I have more to say than just putting my guitar music out there.

“It took me a while,” he chuckles, “to figure out how to sing and play a lot of this stuff. There's a song on the EP, Piece Of The Puzzle, and the chorus has these licks going on while I sing. It really took me hours to figure out how to do that, but I felt a sense of accomplishment once I'd figured it out.”

Lyrically too, the EP proved to be something of a reaction to the way he'd written songs for the album. “A lot of [the lyrics] come from personal experiences. I had written a whole lot of songs that maybe were kind of story-based and sometimes I'd bent the truth to make the story more compelling, you know, and with the EP I didn't really want to do that. I really wanted to be honest with myself. That's where the initial concept came from – honest lyrics and deeper grooves that I thought would work live.”

Joe Robinson will be playing the following shows: