I know this guy longer than anybody else online as far as music goes.  He and I played a part in building this other huge music community.  We are kindred spirits in some senses, were both always interested in songwriting and soul music.  Bob Elliott is one of the more independent thinkers I've ever known, he is somewhat immune to peer pressure, marches to his own beat, as they say.  I was around to hear the first songs he put online, and have heard his recent stuff, I think I've witnessed much of his development as an artist.  Have watched him grow in confidence as his music blossomed into this organic sound that is only his.   Simple but contagious melodies over a vast rhythmic soundscape with lush harmonies and other musical treats on top of that, these are songs to be experienced as you listen.  Lyrically Bob flows in and out of consciousness with a sort of automatic writing style, he's definitely honed into the muse quite regularly.   He's very open and lacking in pretense, I'm proud to know him and proud of the songs he comes up with.

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Scott:  Let's start with a broad one.  Why do you love music?  What's the first song you heard in your youth that you loved?

 
Bob:  I can tell you many reasons I love music, but they are all kind of after the fact. I mean love of music is built in a level beneath reason. Like why do we like food? You have reasons, but your appetite is deeper than those.

It's always been. Like first music I loved, well as far as my memory goes back: Itsy Bitsy Spider, or Mom's radio playing 'Downtown.' Sesame Street stuff, 60s radio of my childhood was packed. I was always into it.

Scott:  okay take us into your songwriting.  How many different processes do you use and what's your go-to method?

 
Bob:   I like working with poems I already wrote or notes I’ve taken. I like having some phrases and thoughts and rhymes. Like, I may start making music and then get the folder of everything wordy I’ve ever written, and I use things freely. Sometimes I will write a whole new lyric to a song, I used to do that much more, but in this age I am fond of using my notes and poems. They can easily get changed to fit and added to and subtracted and even combined. I don’t make music to fit a poem, I just go get the poems once I start making music.

Traditional tight rhyme forms are fascinating to me, just standard poetry type stuff like:

first and third lines rhyme together, and second and fourth lines rhyme together

Alliteration or inner rhymes, near rhymes and general word sound etc. all that sort of thing causes my thoughts to wander into wilder places, so the form changes content.

I believe in a lot of form, musical and lyrical, and I believe in a wildness.

I am thinking of heavy rhythmic music when I think of the drums and bass: hip-hop, reggae, soul from the Stevie, Al Green, Sly Stone, Marvin and James era. Whatever is just the hardest core attention to that groove, that interplay between bass and drummer and open spaces. I love and obsess over.

But I’m also a solo acoustic kind of person, and that seems to assert itself plenty.

I love chordology like is found in standards and Broadway tunes and Stevie Wonder and Beatles…all the well done trip chord patterns put me in a trance, and I have been understanding how to work those chords more now, so I’m sounding more like I always wanted lately.

Also, I study over Bacharach and Mancini type stuff where many instruments are used to create much space.

But the greatest guide of my songwriting, the core key thing is to find that which makes me sound like I can sing. Learning to write that kind of thing is the art.

Scott:  You and I go way back.  If you can put yourself where you were at the turn of the century when we first met, how is your outlook on making music different now than it was then?

Bob:  Still the same game. Work real hard to carve out time to get creative. I have better equipment and have learned things. Love it even more. I find I am redoing material from back then, and I can make it way better today, so I guess things are improving. I have had a lot of people like my music live and also recorded since that time period, so that’s really helped. Back then I had not connected as solidly. Still wish I could do it all day every day.

 

Scott:  Musical heroes, do you have any?  Who comes in at #1?

Bob:   I have 100, none is number one. I love the work of creative people. Here are some:

Beatles, Marvin, Stevie, Sly, Al Green, Hank Williams, Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach, Wu Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Young, Stones, Marley, Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Monk, Davis, Coltrane, Elliott Smith, Dylan, Ellington, Hendrix, Joni, Janis, a host of standards writers, a host of early blues guys like Blind Blake and Johnson, Fela, Bennett…

tons more and also respect a lot of other type music though I might not listen to it as much, I do listen.

 

Scott:  How much can you tell us about what your song Endless is about?

Bob:   He calls me endless
He calls me endless
He calls me endless
But I don’t feel endless

The animal twists around the earth in my bones
The ocean’s in my veins
And I breathe the wind into my lungs

Down along the banks of the river of life
Where David killed Goliath with an anti tank 45

Cain brought the harvest for the lord to eat
But Abel killed a lamb right at Jesus’ feet

He calls me endless…

Shouting from a box up at Main and Lincoln
He knows what we have done
and he knows what we’re thinkin’
in the face of the sun
and in the places we’re drinkin’
with our cold steel guns
and our souls all sinkin’

We were born from rocks, and dust, and from the mud
Cain he killed his brother Abel
In a case of bad blood

Cain brought the harvest for the lord to eat
But Abel killed a lamb right at Jesus’ feet
Said the General to the Joker,
“Do you remember when?
We brought ‘em in as boys and took ‘em out as men?”
I was part of the dirt, I was part of the stone
part of the water and the water wave tone

I have always come to get your visions
Standing on the corner no one ever listens

But he calls me endless…

I planted my seed in a woman of worth
I was there at the birth and
Now they’re out walking the earth


Well, the chorus came to me in a dream, and then the music haunted me for a couple years while I figured out what it all meant.

Well, I don’t want to get in the way of my subconscious, i have some reasons lines come to me, but I don’t know that I have all the reasons. I’ll try a few:
He calls me endless, like an endless soul, but I don’t feel I am. Then the song tries to talk about what we are.

The animal twists around the earth in my bones
The ocean’s in my veins
And I breathe the wind into my lungs

Gray’s Anatomy book calls the living tissue animal and the bone mineral parts earth. We are animal matter built from earth, our blood is still the same ph as the sea, we are only here as part of the air in and out of us. We are earth creatures.

Down along the banks of the river of life
Where David killed Goliath with an anti tank 45

Cain brought the harvest for the lord to eat
But Abel killed a lamb right at Jesus’ feet


These things are harder to explain, but we are violent.

Shouting from a box up at Main and Lincoln
He knows what we have done
and he knows what we’re thinkin’
in the face of the sun
and in the places we’re drinkin’
with our cold steel guns
and our souls all sinkin’


Like a street preacher on a box out in San Francisco around the gold rush, and human nature. And he would call me endless. He believes my soul is endless.

We were born from rocks, and dust, and from the mud
Cain he killed his brother Abel
In a case of bad blood

This is what we come from, these are things we do, in religion and science these are basics about us.

Said the General to the Joker,
“Do you remember when?
We brought ‘em in as boys and took ‘em out as men?”

This was something I heard a general say, we brought ‘em in as boys and took ‘em out as men

I was part of the dirt, I was part of the stone
part of the water and the water wave tone

The stuff we are made of.


I have always come to get your visions
Standing on the corner no one ever listens

Like listening to the gold rush era street preacher, but also I have come many times to religion and myth for visions, and he calls me endless, but I don’t feel endless



I planted my seed in a woman of worth
I was there at the birth and
Now they’re out walking the earth


This much I know about endless.

 

Scott:  I know this is probably a hard question but what is your favorite or best song you've ever done?  and have you ever released one in the past that you now wish you never had?

Bob:  Best song? Hmmm…just for my own personal tastes I like Endless because it trips me out. like it is more than I know, in a way, so it can give me things I don’t know it will give.

Even Your Tears is probably my best song.

 

Scott:  Have you ever been frustrated with the fact that so much mainstream music is weak while there are many in indieland who shine brighter?

Bob:  I tend to live in the world in my head a great deal, so current music to me is whatever I currently looked into, so I may be obsessing for the first time for awhile over something like the Carter Family, or maybe Bon Iver grabs me for a spell. Eras are mostly irrelevant to the wild music creature down inside and its hungers. So the current state of music isn’t something I ponder much. The current state of music for me is I can hear so much that I never heard and that is very important to someone like me, like major.

I rarely hear indie music that hijacks my mind like the things I’ve listed. This is not a logical thought out thing, just certain work from whatever time period grabs me hard and I listen. If my music never does that to anyone, then I never achieved what I would want to as regards outside people. There are recordings I have done that do grab me that way, I am not the beautiful generous and curious listener many people on this site are. There may come a day when I have more time and I become that person. Right now mostly I can just try to make music that might feed something in someone.

But I am the world’s strongest believer in everyone’s creativity and its power. Some people right here have very deep gifts.

 

Scott:  Do you consider your music soulful?  How important is it that your music is soulful?  When exactly were you the most sure that you bring soulfulness?  :)

 
Bob:   My music is soulful, it gets more so every year.

Scott:  Do you remember buying and learning to use your first multitrack recorder, any anecdotes on that?

 
Bob:   Tascam 240 cassette 4 track. Those are nice. I got good sounds. I’m still only on my second platform: Roland 1680 16 track. Been multi-tracking since about 85 or 84. Well, actually i used to use two tape decks back and forth even before that.

Scott:  (I ask all Spotlighters this) - Have you ever had any experiences of high strangeness involving UFOs, the Supernatural, etc?

Bob:  No, but I find the actual science to be mystical. The universe was once the size of the head of a pin. Everything we do know is beyond trippy to me if you think about what it all really is.

 

Scott:  Do you like political music and how much of that is part of your repetoire would you say?

 
Bob:   I’m not big on anything that comes off as having a point it wants to get across. Those types of things generally fall flat for me. The subconscious is the true creator and receiver of all the beautiful art, and I don’t pretend to know nor want to figure out all that is happening there. So essay type songs seem devoid of subconscious, and why do songwriters think they can impart life lessons anyway? And how boring is it to hear a life lesson more than once?

I love Woody Guthrie.

“As the Water Started to Rise” is my most political song.

Scott:  From your song First Contact..

 

Yes, I know your name
I know your name is "Doom"
‘cause you suck out all the air
when you came into the room

 

Who is that about?  or can you tell us more?

Bob:  First Contact is of the same cloth as Endless. They are about what are we. Do you know that New Zealand had about a million undiscovered people living in the highlands right up until the age of flight? Airplanes with white ghosts came right down in their midst. They killed the ghosts, but the ghosts came back, so they killed them again.

Came down from the sky
Said you meant no harm
with your eyes upon my woman
and your feet upon my farm

Human nature on both sides.

Scott:  Did you ever dream of being a music/rock star?  And if so, what is the current state of that dream?

Bob:  It will never happen; it’s always just around the corner.