Tim Robbins Plays Music?

Inexplicably released in the U.K. more than half a year ago, Tim Robbins’s (yes, the actor) folkie debut album will be released in the U.S. on July 19. I could find no reason for the long delay between release dates (other than maybe the label’s fears that it would not sell well—perhaps maybe that’s just me hypothesizing), but, ignoring that for now, next month will see us blessed with yet another incarnation of the infamous “crossover” artist.

I should hurry to add that not all crossover artists are bad news; successful artists operating in multiple perspectives across the artistic spectrum are not at all uncommon. In (relatively) recent memory, Steve Martin (actor/musician/novelist), Zooey Deschanel (actress/musician), Woody Allen (comedy/jazz clarinet/director), and Will Smith (rapper/actor) have all found success on multiple artistic fronts.

But, rather notoriously, we tend to remember the failures when we think of the crossovers between pursuits—or the even more lackluster attempts to translate mere fame into artistry. (Think Shaquille O’Neal, Paris Hilton, and Kevin Federline.) The hard truth is that sometimes crossovers leave us with cultural excrement like Britney Spears’s film Crossover, not valid artistic statements.

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Tim Robbins’s case, however, is an interesting one. Seemingly, nothing should prevent Robbins from becoming another crossover success story. His father, Gil, was a member of country group the Highwaymen and Robbins himself has admittedly fiddled with guitar and songwriting his entire life. So why should it go wrong?

The Guardian’s Will Hodgkinson writes: “The problem with famous actors becoming singers is the head-start they get. Most singer-songwriters worthy of a following spend years honing their craft with endless gigs before hostile audiences, writing thousands of songs before getting a handful deserving of a place on a debut album. Tim Robbins, performing before a disproportionately enthusiastic crowd with a group of top-table musicians, is this problem made flesh.”

While I don’t know that “thousands” is a realistic number of songs (no popular music artist I know of has written that many [maybe Neil Young…]), I must agree with Hodgkinson’s vision of musicians “honing their craft” in front of unfavorable audience members. When people think of famous artists, they often gloss over the years struggling in obscurity.

Many artists struggle in that obscurity their entire lives; success is a mix of talent and serendipity—something which we are always leery to admit. Harrison Ford gave up acting and took up carpentering to pay the bills. Hired to install cabinents in the home of director George Lucas, Ford was cast in a supporting role in Lucas’s 1973 film American Graffiti; you know the story from there.

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Robbins’s story may be framed by another story—possibly an apocryphal one—that I learned in an interview with singer-songwriter Tony Lucca. Lucca and I were speaking about the recent phenomenon of singers and artists being signed directly onto major labels off of YouTube or MySpace, sometimes without any formal musical experience either on the stage or in the studio. Lucca told the story of a major label executive surfing his way across YouTube looking for promising new talent and finding a kid with a guitar and a great voice with an original song. The executive found the contact information and cold-called him, signing him for a record deal over the phone. Invited into the label’s offices, the kid sat down with his guitar, surrounded by a board of the label’s executives and began to sweat profusely. As the silence grew more and more uncomfortable, the kid started to get the shakes. Nervous himself, the executive who’d signed him looked around and asked him if everything was all right. The kid replied, “It’s just…just…I’ve never played in front of anyone before.”

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So, unsurprisingly, it seems that Robbins’s inexperience on the [musical] stage is the root of the album’s problems. Andrew Mueller of the BBC correctly notes, “the most glaring problem is the most fundamental, which is that Robbins can’t sing…[and]… he’s unable to infuse these songs with anything but pained bellows and dreary mumbles: symptoms, possibly, of a lack of confidence, but rather a trial to listen to.”

Is it bad? Not necessarily. It reminds me of early James McMurtry, who had (and still, to some extent) a terrible singing voice. But while McMurtry infused his voice with warmth and feeling, Robbins is just mumbling to himself.

See more:

BBC review: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/x3cg

The Guardian review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/01/tim-robbins-rogues-gallery-band