Rob Hill
Rob Hill’s Love & Salt Water is a deeply personal collection of songs shaped by a lifelong connection to the ocean, family, and community. In this interview, he discusses creativity, collaboration, and the inspirations behind his latest album.
1. Love & Salt Water feels deeply tied to place, especially your lifelong connection to the ocean—how has living near water shaped not just your songwriting, but your perspective on life itself?
I have emotional connections to some of the places I’ve been, for sure, but I think my connection with water is the stronger and the common thread of it all, more than the connection to a specific place. And Ithink that this is not only not unique to me, but that it’s an innate quality in human beings to be drawn to the ocean, whether we realize it or not. Just visit Facebook and see how many people choose cover photos of beaches and oceans, even if they live in Nebraska. We are made of water, we evolved from the water. Going to the ocean is going home. And that’s coming from someone who’s not a surfer or much of a swimmer, I have never had a boat of my own, and I get sunburned easily. I just am happier and healthier any day I can wake up and see water outside my window.
2. Your journey into music wasn’t exactly traditional, from a self-described “desperation album” to campfire karaoke gigs—how did those unconventional experiences ultimately define your sound and confidence as an artist?
I had a crossroads moment when I chose a different path professionally. But if music is truly in you, you can’t just shut it off, and so it’s always been bubbling up, including as an obsessive compulsion to record an album before I turned 40 as some indication to myself that I was still breathing creatively. It was a midlife crisis album, I guess. Or a midlife awakening, more accurately. Certainly there are times when I wonder where I would be if I had chosen the road less traveled. But that’s curiosity, not regret. I don’t regret that choice at all, and if you met my three amazing daughters you’d understand why.
Campfire karaoke – I think I still own the domain name – was this fun gig I came up with where I and a couple of others would back up singers with vocals and acoustic guitar and piano in live karaoke. This is before all the screens and apps, so we literally had several binders of lyrics and a list of 600 songs that people could choose. So I had to not only remember the songs but be prepared to it in different keys to accommodate the singer’s range and to change up vocal parts accordingly, all on the fly. So that was a period of not only intensive learning but also one where my musicianship had to be turned up and where I had to become comfortable with spontaneity on stage and to expect the unexpected. I wouldn’t say that necessarily made me confident as an artist, but it made me comfortable with my lack of confidence! I’m always afraid of f’ing up. But that fear can be a good thing, because it inspires preparation.
3. The title track balances nostalgia with a clear-eyed view of today’s world—was it challenging to hold onto that sense of joy and refuge while addressing uncertainty and tension?
I don’t recall ever being conscious of purpose or message in writing the song “Love and Salt Water” or producing the album until pretty late in the process, although that seems odd when I look at it from here. I have always believed that you are best at teaching when the lesson is one you are still learning yourself. And so I can look at the album now and see its message pretty clearly, and it turns out its lesson is the one I myself most needed to learn. A clear-eyed view of the world today could send me hurtling into an abyss, and I think a ton of people have experienced and are still experiencing that spiral. It’s real and it’s existential, and for people of conscience, it’s impossible to turn away from it, even though it’s tempting, for those not yet personally hurt by it all, just to protect our own mental health. At the other extreme, it’s easy to fall into hopelessness or to feel like it’s unfair for us to be happy when others are in pain or peril. I have been in all of those places, and none of them feels good. So now I am realizing that in times of uncertainty and chaos and danger, we should of course stand for justice and humanity, but it’s very important to allow ourselves joy and love and beauty and all the things, to borrow my own lyric, that make it “still feel cool to be alive and breathing on this shooting star.”
4. You’ve worked behind the scenes for years before stepping fully into your solo voice—what changed for you between Beach Town and this new record that made this moment feel right?
Really, I would probably still prefer to be standing behind someone or beside someone. It’s a paradox that I really enjoy performing even though I don’t like being the center of attention. Even though “Love & Salt Water” is a “solo project,” it’s the collaboration with talented people in the creative process that is most rewarding for me. When I was writing with and for Brittany Kingery, there was something very liberating about that because suddenly I was sometimes telling the story of someone other than myself. The best writing I did with her – most of which was on her Dream in Blue album – was music that I could not possibly have done myself. And so, when Brittany stepped away from writing and recording, I went back to writing mostly from my own perspective, which also ended up being liberating because it was a change in my creative thinking. And my work with other talented vocalists, including my daughter Emalee, has also expanded my writing and production skill set, and never really felt like being behind the scenes as much as it felt just more comfortable for not having so much light on me! I especially like working with great female singers. In fact, one of the coolest things about this project is that two of my daughters, Emalee and Ruby, sang background vocals on this record, and they and I both got to work a little in the studio with Stephanie Layton, who is a brilliant badass singer and musician from Olympia, Washington, who was good enough to sprinkle some of her magic on this recording.
5. There’s a strong sense of community throughout the album, especially with contributions from your daughters and collaborators—how important is that shared, almost familial energy to the identity of this project?
I definitely approach recording projects in a community-minded way, whether as the artist or a co-producer or part of a support team. To me, it is critical to both the quality of the outcome and the quality of the experience that everyone involved feel confident in the value of their contribution so that everyone from the artist to the producer to the studio musician to the maintenance staff feels free to brainstorm and offer ideas. That has to include comfort with having some bad ideas get shot down without getting hurt feelings, because finding out what doesn’t work is part of the project. Nine bad ideas rejected and one great idea that makes the difference can be an unqualified success, not a 90 percent failure rate!
Most of the productions I have been involved in have been spread out, with me doing my tracks in my studio in Olympia, Washington and contributors working out of Nashville or Austin or elsewhere, and so often I am “in community” with some pretty amazing, accomplished musicians, in this case under the leadership of my producer Brandon Bush in Georgia. I think it’s super cool to look at the credits on this record and compare them to the credits on Megan Moroney’s amazing Cloud 9 and see pretty much the same names in the credits.
What I hope comes across in the actual finished project is in part a substantive statement about the importance of community in our lives, whether the “community” is a planet, a country, a village or a personal relationship. That feels especially true today when forces like social media algorithms, screen addiction and other technologies seem to conspire against community.
6. Musically, the album blends tropical rock, folk, Americana, and even touches of reggae and jazz—how do you approach weaving these influences together without losing the emotional core of your songs?
My left brain wishes I could explain how all of these influences come together and morph into a genre blend or a signature sound. My right brain won’t ask or answer that question. I can trace most of the songs to an influence of origin. I think you can hear Beatles in the title track, James Taylor in “High Side of Low Tide,” and U2 in “London,” for example, and a John Prine shoutout on “Rainbow in my Back Yard.” The reggae and jazz that trickle into my writing and production from time to time are a little more mysterious. Those songs are often the ones that I feel were created through me rather than by me, so I can’t explain them very well. I have always liked reggae and the great songs of the 1940s, when jazz was the pop music of the day, but it still feels like something supernatural to me when a reggae or jazz song comes out of my head.