Justin Roberts: Kid Rock
Justin Roberts’s concerts don’t start until 11. That’s about the time his fans are ready to ricochet around the mosh pit, bounce off each other like bumper cars, and generally act like children.
Which they are.
Kids love Roberts’s warm voice and witty — sometimes Silversteinesque — songs that chronicle the stuff of childhood: getting glasses, imaginary rhinos, chalk drawings, and training wheels. But even parents sing along to his multilayered lyrics, hearing deeper meanings in the music and catching echoes of James Taylor, Paul Simon, and even the Ramones.
Moonlighting in the Morning
Roberts, who worked as a Montessori teacher while he led the Twin Cities indie-rock band Pimentos for Gus, began writing songs for his preschool students as an alternative to standard nursery rhyme fare. “I was moonlighting in the morning,” he quips.
His music caught on. Encouraged, Roberts made a home recording of his songs as a Christmas gift for close friends — including record producer and college pal Liam Davis. Davis suggested that Roberts record them professionally, “just for the fun of it.”
Roberts and Davis recorded “Great Big Sun” in 1998 and Roberts went to graduate school — religious studies at the University of Chicago — and forgot about the recording. But the low-key, folksy album started attracting notice, mostly by word of mouth. Orders started rolling in. Sesame Street Parents Magazine named it “Best Music Gift of the Year,” and more awards followed.
“During that time, I wrote more kids’ songs and thought maybe I should try doing this as a career,” Roberts recalls. “I was always working a day job while I was trying to do music, and I didn’t find that very satisfying. In 2001 when I put out ‘Yellow Bus,’ I went for it. I started driving around the country and playing anywhere I could. I was amazed. I did well. I made a profit. I could live off it.”
A New Way to Write Songs
For his fifth and newest CD, “Meltdown!,” Roberts wrote lyrics and created simple demos using GarageBand on his PowerBook.
“It kind of happened without any planning,” Roberts says of writing songs in GarageBand. “I’ve always had Macs, but I didn’t sit down thinking I’d try multitracking to write. It was more like, ‘I gotta record a simple demo of this, with me doing acoustic guitar and vocals through one microphone so other people can hear it.’ Then, when I was listening back to make sure the song sounded okay, I’d be like, ‘Oh, it would be great if there was another vocal part doing this. Why don’t I just add this now, so Liam can get the idea of what I’m thinking.’ So GarageBand became this great tool to communicate with Liam and the band.”
Inspiration for the title song on “Meltdown!” — an exuberant homage to temper tantrums — “came from a complete feeling of panic,” Roberts says. “I hadn’t written a song for a while and knew I had to put out a new record. And I wanted to have a new song for a big show that was coming up. Finally, out of all that frustration, I sat down at my Mac and started singing the melody with the words pretty much attached to them.”
For most of his earlier CDs, Roberts would write a song, play it for Davis, and the two would begin recording it together. “Being able to write songs using GarageBand — I just open it up and instantly do simple multitracking — made me write different songs, more complex songs, than I might have done normally.”
Enhancing Melodies
Using GarageBand, Roberts edited and tweaked the words of “Meltdown!” to the melody. “As I was doing that,” he says, “I played the song through and thought the chorus needs a little more happening besides me going ‘meltdown!’ We could have backup singers. So I added another vocal part that sounded a bit like a siren.
“As much as I’d like to be, I’m not Brian Wilson,” Roberts confesses. “A song doesn’t just appear in my head all at once.” But when he listens to his recorded tracks on headphones, counterpoint melodies come to him. “Being able to use GarageBand on the writing level is really helpful,” he says. “As I was listening through the headphones and singing different parts, I was constantly thinking, ‘I’ve never written like this.’ It turned out to be really fun. Only because I was using GarageBand did I end up making up the other vocal parts. We might have figured things out in the studio differently had I not done that.”
