"tonight I want to see the coast"
"Coast" by Robert Francis and The End Times feels like Polaroid memories that make you glad you were born at all despite the hard times, the regrets and the soaring moments of happiness with cracks and all. Goddamn beautiful.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
Robert Francis was just 19 years old when he kickstarted his career with 2007's One By One, an album whose lushly-layered folk songs — all of them written, produced, and performed by the L.A. native, who played nearly every instrument himself — pointed to a songwriter whose evocative songwriting belied his young age. More than a dozen years later, Francis remains every bit the roots-music mainstay that his debut promised. He's a prolific performer. An international chart-topper. A road warrior who writes songs inspired not only by his own life, but also the lives of those he's encountered along the way.
It was during a cross-country drive from Nashville to Los Angeles that Francis began crafting the rock & roll anthems that fill Vol. 1, the newest release from Robert Francis + The End Times via Aeronaut Records. He'd been living in Tennessee for months, having left California after the death of his father, classical music producer Robert Commagère. Nashville felt like a new world, different in so many ways from his native Southern California, and Francis put that new inspiration to good use, recording the Americana-influenced album Amaretto during a series of raw, analog tracking sessions in his basement. Trailblazers like Ry Cooder, Marty Stuart, and Terry Evans lent their talents to Amaretto, resulting in an album whose inspired, off-the-cuff performances recalled works like Bob Dylan's New Morning. Still, Francis found himself stonewalled by music industry executives who considered the record too difficult to market, and Amaretto wound up sitting on the shelf for two years.
He was frustrated. Perhaps that's why he found himself behind the wheel of his '87 Dodge D-150 in March 2019, driving back home to his longtime stomping grounds on the West Coast. When a line of heavy thunderstorms blocked his path in Arkansas, he spent a handful of evenings in a hotel room, where he wrote songs like "Coast," "Down the Line," and "What It's Like." Several days later, in a similar hotel in Santa Fe, he finished "Somewhere Trains" and "Built to Last." Within 24 hours of returning home and visiting his mother — the same mother who'd grown up in rural Mexico, later encouraging her son (who was seven at the time) to learn guitar so he could strum the traditional ranchera songs of her childhood — he'd worked up enough material for an album.
Vol. 1 may have been written in isolation, but its 10 songs — full of guitar solos, bombastic percussion, harmonies, and the amplified chemistry of his End Times bandmates — are the work of a fully-formed band. Accompanied by guitarist Drew Phillips, bassist Shane Smith, drummer Brad Cummings, harmony vocalist Cori Elliott, and multiple guests, Francis booked several weeks of recording time at Total Annihilation, a punk-rock studio in L.A.'s Lincoln Heights neighborhood. There, he produced the bulk of the album himself, with all the musicians playing together in the same room. Several months later, while visiting Nashville to perform at the Americana Music Festival, the band cut two additional tracks with producer Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Hurray for the Riff Raff) at the iconic Bomb Shelter studio.
"I'd been doing a lot of listening to the records I grew up with, from the Replacements to the Gin Blossoms," Francis says of the album's rock-inspired sound. "I was going down memory lane and falling in love with that kind of music all over again, without letting my insecurities get in the way. I wasn't wondering if the new songs sounded too country, too rock, or too Americana. I was just embracing this form of heart-on-sleeve, nostalgia-driven rock & roll."
Album highlights like "Somewhere Trains" and "Coast" are shot skyward by cinematic choruses and blazing guitar solos — the latter a result of Francis' childhood music lessons with family friends (and iconic guitarists) Ry Cooder and John Frusciante — while "Boy Like That" rides a cool, unhurried groove, with Francis delivering the song from the perspective of an ex-girlfriend. The acoustic guitars and harmony-laced vocals of "House Cat" bring the album to an understated close, but Vol. 1 makes no attempt to hide its rock & roll roots. Like Before Nightfall — the album that found Francis partnering with Atlantic Records and scoring a worldwide hit with "Junebug," which topped the charts in France and cracked the Top 10 across Europe — this is a record that brims the electric energy of a proper band.
"I've had many different bands over the years," says Francis, whose nine albums touch upon everything from 1950s jazz to richly-textured alt-country. "I've learned that you can play with some of the most incredible musicians in the world, but there's something about playing with your best friends — with a band of people who are bonded together, and who genuinely feel it— that yields the best music. I had that kind of brotherhood with Before Nightfall, and I stumbled into that camaraderie once again. These people are like my family. We really believe in each other, and our relationship extends far beyond working together, and you can hear that connection in the music."
Robert Francis + The End Times' Vol. 1 is an album built for highway driving. It's a soundtrack for the road, filled with songs that evoke the rush of open windows and the glow of sun beaming through the windshield. Perhaps most importantly, it's a reminder that Francis — who, while still in his early 30s, has already released a career's worth of material — remains in discovery mode, happy to revisit and reinvent the sounds that once blasted from the dashboard radios of his youth. A prolific writer, he's got more volumes of music in store… but Vol. 1 is still a destination worth stopping for.
note: From time to time we will post up a "Listen To" Post. These are tracks that, while might not have engendered a full review ie Post, we do like what we are hearing and want to share in some way. Sometimes that will be as a stark, short post here or on our socials but our intent as always is to help artists gain exposure. Art to us is a conversation of ideas... converse.
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