Album Review: Charlie Robison – Beautiful Day
1. It’s easy for an outsider to write a song about falling in or out of love. Usually, someone who is in either state has it written all over them, with a traditional state of cliched behaviors that make it easy for a writer to observe and make a few lines rhyme. It takes an insider to be able to write about the gray area between, when a heart vacillates between love, hate, regret, and self-disgust. Charlie Robison’s Beautiful Day makes a masterpiece of this “gray area”, not so much a divorce record as a record that explores the bewildered human heart.
2. This record is littered with Robison’s insider perspective. Every optimistic leaning has a silver lining — like the opening title track, which soaks in the great weather…in a far away Los Angeles, or the deceptively upbeat “Feelin’ Good Again”, where Robison goes back and forth between surrounding himself with things that are supposed to make him happy and wondering what happened to the things that used to do the trick. The bouncy “Nothing Better To Do” and the smoldering, Keith Gattis-penned “Down Again” both explore the cycle of self-loathing that surfaces with a broken relationship, segueing into another Gattis tune, “Reconsider”, where he ponders what he might be able to pull off to win her back.
3. Robison wisely avoids making this record completely autobiographical by wrapping it with enough fiction to make it universal. On the fiddle-driven “If the Rain Don’t Stop Today”, Robison’s character looks forward to a night on the town to leave behind the incessant dreariness that has plagued him all summer. He also intertwines his story with the closer, a cover of Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street”. From the story of a couple who find joy in different things and can’t keep their relationship together, Robison pulls out a feeling of resilience:
“Some guys, they just give up livin’
And start dyin’ little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up
And go racing in the street”
4. I have seen a lot of press on this record asking Robison about his divorce. Seems to me that if the interviewers gave Beautiful Day a good listen, they would see that Charlie put all there is to say on the subject right there on the record.
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