When one hails from Liverpool, one naturally acquires an auspicious birthright. A British seafaring port of great consequence, the city was also home to the greatest band in history, that being the Beatles, of course. Whether intended or not, there’s a legacy that’s naturally attached to any artist that calls the city home, and an unshakeable sense that indeed, there’s a lot to live up to.
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If singer/songwriter Robert Vincent is the least bit intimidated by that association, suffice it to day he doesn’t let on.
“There tends to be a lot of music going on in the city, and growing up, I found it a very natural craft,” Vincent remarks when asked about the possibility of tapping into that city’s tradition. “It always seemed to be something I wanted to do. People are always asking why Liverpool is the way it is when it comes to the music, and it has a lot to do with the influx of the Irish over the years, because Liverpool is 75 percent Irish. They brought a certain musical influence, and then of course there was the Beatles — that’s pretty obvious — but there was also country music and jazz and blues due to the fact that we’re a port town. The seafarers would go to New York and bring those records back with them. It gave the city a combination of influences. My father listened to a lot of country music; he was more interested in that than what was going on over here. He listened to Charlie Rich, Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, and a lot of that music informs where I’m coming from as well.”
With the release of his third album, In This Town, he paints a musical portrait of a world more or less torn asunder by one crisis after another — Brexit, the effect of Trump’s new world order and the general miasma that seems to have deflated the spirits and sensibilities of civilized people everywhere. Overseen by Ethan Johns, an award winning producer, solo artist and son of famed recording genius Glyn Johns, it ranks as Vincent’s most ambitious effort yet, a spellbinding soiree into a universal psyche. His third album thus far, it follows on the heels of his 2013 debut Life In Easy Steps and his sophomore set, 2018’s I’ll Make the Most of My Sins.
“I think it’s unavoidable,” Vincent says of the emotions he stirs up in song. “They seem to be universal. You’re very interested in what’s going on over here and we’re interested in the things going on in your country as well. We can’t help but be entrenched in one another’s concerns, because one way or another, they affect both sides. It colors people’s opinions, and I couldn’t help but be affected by it all because I spend a lot of time in America, and I love America and all it stands for. It makes you want to write about all these things that are going in. It was a natural process to make these songs politically aligned to what’s going on. That set the whole vibe of the record.”
Vincent’s two first albums garnered a wealth of critical kudos, including the inaugural Emerging Artist Award from the distinguished British broadcaster Bob Harris and any number of proclamations declaring him an important new voice in U.K. Americana.
“I try not to not to think of that,” Vincent says when the accolades are brought up. “A lot of work went into it even before the first album came out. I remember thinking even back then that if I’m not out there playing and building a foundation for where I want to be in five or six years’ time, then it’s not going to happen. It was all about that really. I had been playing those songs around 2011, and we started recording them in 2011 and 2012. We released a couple of EPs before the first album, so it was really two year’s worth of work before the album came out. These days, if you don’t do the groundwork, you’re just going to get swallowed up in everything else that’s going on. I have a very day-to-day work ethic and I try to do as much as possible.”
That said, it can be a narrow divide between the dramatic and the didactic, an issue Vincent could conceivably contend with. “I think there’s a certain amount of ambiguity in these songs that allows people to take whatever they want to from the songs and from the lyrics as well,” he suggests. “The first song on the album ‘This Town,’ could be a love song from the town you’re from. People who hear it might think about their own town, or even the world as a whole. It’s almost as if we all live in one town because we’re linked in so many ways. The world feels so much smaller these days. A song like ‘Kids Don’t Dig God Anymore’ doesn’t necessarily have to do with religious-based faith, but rather the loss of faith in a lot of things. There are a lot of things I’m trying to say, but I’m trying to say them in a way that allows people to make their own interpretations. I’m not knocking anyone’s beliefs. But whatever we believe in, we have to come together on a human level at some point.”
Little wonder then that Vincent is in fact an activist of sorts, one who says he’s eager to connect with a cause he believes in. “I think it’s time musicians started stepping up and singing about the things that are going on,” he suggests. “I think there’s far too much music in the world that doesn’t say anything. It has more about the individual than the collective. When someone like Bob Dylan was writing songs, he was writing them for the people. Woody Guthrie was writing songs for the people. Now it’s all about the individual. It’s about the artist making themselves rich. They only seem to be interested in how many listens they’re getting on Spotify, or how many Facebook followers they have than what the songs are actually saying to people. Also, some of these songs are giving the wrong message — insisting that all that’s important is how many things you’ve got. It’s all materialistic. The one thing people need to be now is less materialistic and to be consuming less products. If not, it’s all going to end badly.”
Vincent himself tends to be a prolific writer, one reason why everyday circumstance always tend to intrude on his songs. “If some of these songs had been written three or four years ago, they wouldn’t be as relevant to the time,” he contends. “I think it’s important to write as much as you possibly can and stay in the moment with the writing. Even if you’re writing isn’t very good, you’ve just got to keep writing. Something will come out that’s relevant to what’s going on around. I always try to be as prolific as I can.”
