Space Cowboys

Classic swampy Southern blues-rock meets Doobie country rock meets ‘60s sci-fi synth wibbly-wobblyness is probably as close as you’ll get in describing the sound of Chris Robinson Brotherhood. Frontman Chris Robinson has always been a bit out there, as anyone who knows his work in his previous band with brother Rich, The Black Crowes. The odd-collides-with-the-familiar quotient is upped again on the Brotherhood’s third album, Phosphorescent Harvest. Turns out Robinson has a name for that ‘collision’.

“I mean, that was our thing,” Robinson explains from his home in Santa Monica, California. “Adam (MacDougall, keyboards, ex-Black Crowes) and I were really in this before anyone else came on board, and we were kind of discussing a visualisation if you will of a covered wagon, but Herbie Hancock in the [1971 album] Mwandishi era in the back of the covered wagon playing, like, all his synthesisers and shit. So, cool – our band’s a covered wagon but it has a warp drive. I think, again, that’s where we all are as musicians. There’s the roots side of us – we’re equally happy listening to George Jones records or Buck Owens records or Jimmy Driftwood – and then we listen to mid-century avant-garde electronic stuff; I mean, where does it all come from? People are always trying to label what you do, and to me our music should be hippie baroque.” 

The Chris Robinson Brotherhood came together the year after The Black Crowes went into their second “hiatus” in 2010, and released two albums, Big Moon Ritual and its companion, The Magic Door, within four months of each other in 2012. Phosphorescent Harvest is the first to feature songs Robinson has written in collaboration with Brotherhood guitarist Neal Casal. “What a unique opportunity, for any time in your life, to have that kind of wellspring of creativity, but especially in the big cosmic scheme of things. Neal and I had met a while back and we were always into the same stuff and I always loved his guitar playing. So this opportunity came and we both jumped right in there, and I think that’s part of the allure for us, as well as our commitment to this. We’ve stumbled upon some little musical alchemy that just we like, and if we dig it maybe other people will, you know what I mean? Now the next thing is to get everybody else equally involved, ‘cause Adam I think has a lot of things to say with his composition that you’ll start to see, and hopefully that’s the progression you’ll hear in the next few cycles.

“We’re just trying to make, I think, something that we feel is beautiful and something that could blossom at any moment. We can take something super folkie and earthy and turn it around into something really atmospheric and spatial. And if you can do that and keep it melodic and have the poetic imagery be something that people can hang their own feelings on, then good.”