With her new album, Traveling Mercies, singer-songwriter Emily Scott Robinson offers a complex, thoughtful portrait of a true itinerant artist, one who carries the lessons of her past while searching for a hopeful future. She and her husband live full time in a motorhome and spend long stretches on the road, turning chance encounters with strangers into stirring folk meditations on the human condition. The album will be released February 22, 2019.
Traveling Mercies was produced by Neilson Hubbard, a Nashville mainstay who produced, among many other projects, Mary Gauthier’s 2018 Americana Music Honors and Awards Album of the Year nominee Rifles and Rosary Beads. Robinson and Hubbard recorded the album at East Nashville’s Skinny Elephant Studio. Traveling Mercies features a stacked lineup of guest musicians, including Will Kimbrough (Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell), Sam Howard (Ben Sollee, Aoife O’Donovan), Eamon McLoughlin (Emmylou Harris, the Grand Ole Opry), the Wild Ponies’ Telisha Williams, and harmony vocalists Grace Pettis and Robby Hecht.
Though this is Robinson’s first studio release, it’s by no means her first introduction to the songwriting community. In 2015, she won American Songwriter‘s May/June lyric contest for “Marriage Ain’t the End of Being Lonely.” She followed that with a Kerrville New Folk Winner trophy in 2016 and a Wildflower Performing Songwriter Contest win in 2017. AmericanaFest announced Robinson as an Official Showcasing Artist for the 2018 lineup this September.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the new video for the song “Borrowed Rooms and Old Wood Floors”. The somber and reflective tune shows that while she may be young, Robinson is an old soul when it comes to her songwriting. Her perspective feels worn from a lifetime of experience she seems to possess, and she channels it to tell a story that feels like an old country tune. While it might be easy to picture Robinson backed by a lonesome and twangy pedal steel on a tune like this, her minimal acoustic treatment serves the song well and adds a sense of intimacy.
In her own words, Robinson has this to say about the song:
“This song is about how lonely it feels to be a perpetual guest in other people’s homes. When I’m out on the road for a long time staying in guest rooms and on couches, I feel rootless and ungrounded. A lot of my friends have 9-5 jobs and mortgages and babies and health insurance and I’m playing new stages every night and sleeping late and living on coffee and trying to make it in the music business. My friends think it’s very romantic, all this freedom I have, but sometimes I find that all I want is the house and the stability they have.”
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Photo credit: Neilson Hubbard
