Album Notes

awards:
Cincinnati Entertainment Award Nominee
2008 Album of the Year: Summer's Here
2008 Artist: Folk/Americana

reviews:
"Roberson has been making solid, meaningful Country/Folk music around these parts for well over two decades. A respectable legacy on its own, but with the release of Summer's Here earlier this year he's truly transcended. Every song on the lushly produced album haunts you without asking permission or forgiveness, and challenges you to decide whether you will draw the shades and curse the light or embrace the season's warmth." - Ezra Waller, Midpoint Music Festival Guide

"Between Roberson's amazing songcraft and the session masters' intuitive feel for the material, Summer's Here is a triumph of Folk passion, Country groove and Soul intensity -- the polished Americana/Soul of "Forlorn and Forgotten," the Memphis Soul-and-strings swing of "Love and Death," a cover of Fred Neil's "A Little Bit of Rain" and the Dylan-esque talking Folk/Blues opus "Heartland." - Brian Baker, Cincinnati City Beat

"Better than the chili" - The Wheel's Still In Spin

"Stunning" - Mike Breen, Cincinnati City Beat

For 14 years I’ve fronted the much-respected Cincinnati, Ohio country-rock outfit Len’s Lounge. Prior to that I was an itinerant folk singer hitting coffeehouses, punk rock clubs and town squares across the Midwest and up and down the east coast. With hard work and no luck I earned the tag line "the most hated man in folk music" and was justly characterized as foul mouthed, hard playing, incorrigible and generally uncompromising. In 1988 I released a solo cassette tape, ’Hard Folk’, took it down to South by Southwest, was roundly ignored, except by Guy Clark who said "F#ck you", and here we are, 20 years later. Suffice to say, I’ve mellowed a bit over the last two decades - have a great family, tend to an organic garden and written a couple hundred songs. Here’s some of the good stuff - a little bit folk, a little bit country and a little bit soul - songs from living and learning and traveling and dying.

This music is what happens when you take a perennially obscure southwestern Ohio singer and songwriter, give him a fresh producer, a legendary studio engineer and put him in a room with seasoned session musicians. Recorded live in 2 sessions in Nashville, ‘Summer’s Here’ represents record making the way it used to be: all the thrills and chills of seasoned masters feeding off each other, very little frills in the way of overdubs and certainly no modern digital tricks of pitch tuning and time correction.

Summer’s Here features some of the most sought after session musicians of the last 40 years: legendary session guitarist, member of the great Memphis Boys house band at American Studios and recent Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Reggie Young on lead guitar, Motown Funk Brother Bob Babbitt on bass, LA session great Ed Green on drums, first call Nashville and former Toto bassist David Hungate on acoustic guitar, 20 year Nashville session vet Catherine Marx on piano and organ, and a 21 year old fiddle player from Oklahoma named Kenzie Wetz. This band realized a dream once discussed over coffee between Tom Dowd and Bob Ohlsson shortly before Tom’s death a few years back - a dream of reinvigorating the concept of a house band. Together with producer Ed Pettersen, Bob assembled these musicians and Ed started using them as his ‘house band’ on all the sessions Ed and Bob were doing together, and here are a couple of thsoe sessions.

Put it on. Turn it up. Enjoy!