Chris Robley

Many songwriters will model themselves as "tortured artists", penning poor, sad songs from a place of pain and pity in hopes of sharing "their story." Portland, Oregon-based singer-songwriter Chris Robley isn't one of them.

Known amongst his friends as "the Stephen King of Indie Pop", Chris writes songs out of pure obsession and intrigue with the dark side of human relationships. This is certainly demonstrated on his sophomore full-length, "The Drunken Dance of Modern Man In Love" (Cutthroat Pop Records), an album chock-full of clever pop, experimental folk, dark rock, and Robley's sympathetic lyrical tales of down trodden, heart-wrenching American life.

Chris doesn't have a nasty drug habit. He wasn't beaten or abandoned as a child. And he hasn't been through one throwaway relationship after another, as he will frankly tell you.

My songs are dark, sure," admits Robley, "but I'm still just this well-adjusted, happily married, stable, and gainfully employed 20-something songwriter."

"Like most pop music, these songs are about one person in relation to another, one idea in relation to another. I just tried to frame these relationships in subject matter just outside of the usual pop music fare".

The darkness of The Drunken Dance of Modern Man In Love is gathered from Robley's snapshot observations on daily life and the ways in which people navigate through or around complicated relationships.

"The album's title comes from a lyric in the song, 'Little Love Affairs'," explains Robley. "It refers to those clumsy interactions between people that make it so much easier for us to default to just staying strangers rather than actually engaging. It's really an album about the undignified process of living as a personality amongst personalities, how things naturally come to ruin."

The road to recording The Drunken Dance of Modern Man In Love wasn't an easy one.

After releasing his critically lauded debut full-length, 2005's "This Is The" (Cutthroat Pop), Robley hit the road with his band, touring and exiting the "Portland bubble", as he calls it, while ferociously writing a batch of new songs. Upon returning, he quickly entered two different studios to begin work on a new album.

One studio, Mike Coykendall's (M. Ward, Richmond Fontaine) Blue Room Studios, a 16-track analog home studio, found Robley disappointed with the songs' performances, feeling they were undercooked and boxed in. While the other studio, Rob Stroup's (who plays in Robley's side project band, The Sort Ofs) 8 Ball Studios, a Pro Tools set-up, left him questioning whether the songs were too polished and precise.

"The schizophrenia of bouncing between two studios, two producers, two opinions, and two completely opposite methods of recording was making me go a bit crazy," recalls Robley. "I lost perspective entirely on those tracks, though I still really believed in the tunes and knew I could make it all come together eventually".

The problem: in the year it took to record these two sets of tunes, Robley had been experimenting with a whole new batch of songs altogether, allowing himself to delve deep into the questionable narrator style, something he had explored in previous efforts, but never followed to its fullest potential. This is the "Raymond Carver meets Randy Newman" songwriting approach that defines The Drunken Dance of Modern Man In Love.

Without hesitation, Robley put the 8 Ball Studios and Blue Room recordings on the shelf (and hopes to re-visit, finish, and release it sometime in the future), and entered Portland's renowned Type Foundry with Adam Selzer (M. Ward, The Decemberists, Norfolk and Western) at the helm to record what would become "The Drunken Dance of Modern Man In Love".

"I wasn't entirely enthused about the idea of jumping right back into those older songs and salvaging the recordings right away. Especially after having listened to them a billion times," Robley says of the decision.

"I had to make something new, something quick, something alive, something energetic and fresh, something that represented where my head was at in that moment," he furthers. "So I took my new batch of tunes to Type Foundry and recorded them very fast, tracking and mixing them altogether in about two weeks."

The race-pace recording process (in comparison to the kind of magnifying glass scrutinizing he'd been doing for the past year) helped preserve the frenetic energy of Robley's poetic story-songs. The record came out even better than he had hoped. Sonically, it has more breathing room than his debut, providing the necessary space in which Robley's detailed vignettes could play themselves out. The characters he sings about, the dark tales that paint pictures of broken romance, the inner idiosyncrasies that keep us going despite the world falling apart around us, and the avoidable but twisted situations we find both solace and pain in, all give the record a depth and edge he strived for.

An album about human interaction, fueled by the musical interplay of Northwest luminaries such as Adam Selzer (M. Ward, Norfolk and Western), Paul Brainard (Richmond Fontaine, Fernando), John Stewart (The Sort Ofs), Arthur Parker (Trash Can Joe), Benny Morrison (March Fourth Marching Band), Amanda Lawrence (Loch Lomond), Steve Keeley, James Gregg, and Mike Danner, Robley pulled no punches in allowing his friends to come in and help shape the record. They each left their stamp, too, as this eclectic collection of organic tunes travels from distressed atonal string quartets, dissonant mariachi shuffles, and lo-fi Beatles-pop, to steel-tinged sad-bastard folk, playful parlor music, and wall-of-sound washes of reverb and rhythm.

Despite the wide range of styles, Robley was able to give "The Drunken Dance of Modern Man in Love" a cohesive feel through his attention to melody, movement, and the sentiments of sympathy and sadness woven throughout.

Here was his slice of American life set to tape. The dark tales that, though from the narrator's stand point permeated every aspect of life, certainly didn't dominate his, but gave the listener something to wrap themselves into like the best suspense and drama novels.

"I really feel like I was able to tell more vivid, and detailed stories on this album," Robley beams with excitement. "The subject matter of flawed humanity suggested a much more organic sound than my previous album. So there are hardly any drum machines, no sequencing at all. It's just strings, pedal steel, trumpets, sleigh bells, timpani a real pop orchestration. That was exciting to me, to bring in other folks whose playing I already totally love, whereas my last album was tracked almost entirely by myself in a kind of isolated setting. I love the interaction on 'Drunken Dance'".

"It's a step in a different direction for me," he continues, "and I'm very excited about it. I'm much more comfortable with subtlety this time around. With my first record, and my other band, The Sort Ofs, I was obsessed with making every moment as thrilling and potent as possible. But this record breathes a little more. It plays with tension and release. Plus, its much more organic and natural sounding. Adam did some really daring mixes, too, which are these brave little hard-panned 60's-style collages of rapidly moving sounds."