Album Notes

Robyn Ludwick’s maiden name happens to be Robison, but the fact that her two older brothers are renowned Texas singer-songwriters didn’t lure her into following their footsteps. Besides, when she trekked off to the University of Texas in Austin, there wasn’t much of a musical path to follow –except perhaps her marriage to Austin musician John Ludwick. Bruce and Charlie were not yet household names in Nashville – or even their native Bandera. “We were all three shacking up with one another in various South Austin rentals, trading shifts working the door at the Continental Club…singing and playing music on our Goodwill couch – I long for those days”, she added.

Around the same time Charlie and Bruce started their own bands, sensible Robyn enrolled in the gender-lopsided School of Engineering, which was darned happy to have her, and mapped out a safe, secure career route.

“I wanted to do something where I would be able to support my family because I knew my husband would always be in the arts and he would be the person staying home with the kids,” she explains as her family chows down at a pizza shop. Then she got laid off – just after she turned 30 and had her first child. That trio of intense experiences triggered her latent songwriting gene, which manifested itself in tunes she describes as “tender and tough; Southern poetry with dirt floors and electric guitars.”

“It just pretty much poured out at that point. I guess it was time, you know,” Ludwick says.

It was time. The family moved to Wimberley, outside Austin, “I cashed in my 401k and after about 6 months we survived on music and laughter-oh yeah, and beans” – i.e., struggling but happy – as she made her own leap into the music business.

Ludwick’s first album, For So Long, released in 2005, was named a top 10 album of the year by the Austin Chronicle and influential Austin public radio station KUT-FM and went to No. 1 on the Euro Americana Music Chart. It earned her a raved-about SXSW 2006 showcase (sponsored by No Depression, the Americana magazine) and a slot at the ’06 Austin City Limits Music Festival.

She’s now at work on the follow-up Too Much Desire, another set of soulful originals to be released in February 2008. With influences from Jackson Browne to Emmylou Harris, a voice that bears slight comparisons to a young Lucinda Williams or Stevie Nicks, and a musical sensibility that’s been characterized as “sharp, drenched in hardscrabble Southwestern country …beautifully impure, covered in blood, bone, and marrow.”

The reviews for her last album, produced by former Bad Liver Danny Barnes, were enormously impressive, but she says this is the album that could help her break into “the next tier” of Americana artists. Husband/Bassist John Ludwick and multi-instrumentalist Mike Hardwick take the lead on this record, while key Austin musicians Michael Ramos, Rich Brotherton, Andrew Nafziger, and Eddie Cantu, are featured throughout, with guest vocal appearances by Eliza Gilkyson and Charlie and Bruce Robison.