Cincinnati Entertainment Award Nominee
2008 Album of the Year: Summer's Here
2008 Artist: Folk/Americana
Summer's Here
Online at
hard copy - villagerecords.com, CD Baby
digital - rhapsody.com, emusic.com, iTunes
In Cincinnati
at Shake It Records and Everybody Records
In Dayton
at Gem City Records
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
"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, City Beat
(http://citybeat.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A145255)
"Better than the chili" -The Wheel's Still In Spin
(http://www.thewheelsstillinspin.com/2008/04/better-than-t-3
.html)
"Stunning" - Mike Breen, Cincinnati City Beat
http://blogs.citybeat.com/spill_it/
Summer's Here
Jeff Scott Roberson - vocals, acoustic and electric guitar
Reggie Young - lead guitar
Dave Hungate - acoustic guitar
Catherine Marx - piano, organ, string synth
Bob Babbitt - bass
Ed Greene - drums, percussion
Kenzie Wetz - violin, vocals
Liz Chauncey - vocals
Ed Pettersen - vocals
Produced by Ed Pettersen
Mix by Bob Ohlsson
Chief Engineer Bob Ohlsson
Mastered by Bob Ohlsson, Georgetown Masters, Nashville, Tn.
Recorded at
The Castle, Nashville, Tn. - Rich Feaster, engineer
Java Jive Studio, Nashville, Tn. - Dave Martin, engineer
Ultrasuede Studio, Cincinnati, Oh. - John Curley, engineer
BIO
"Jeff Roberson's songwriting embodies
the soulful pocket of twangy folk rock that inexplicably materialized in Southwest Ohio."
Ezra Waller, Cincinnati City Beat Magazine
So here it is. My first solo record in 20 years. The first time around was 'Hard Folk', released on the Ultrasuede Records label, the short lived and long forgotten Cincinnati imprint that gave the world 'Big Top Halloween' by The Afghan Whigs, The Liquid Hippo's 'Shellac The Bozac' and the angry folk music of my misspent 20's; lost years spent shouting folk music on street corners from Austin to Boston, dodging objects in rock clubs and slumming through America's cities. Good times! About 1992 I started a band, Len's Lounge, we made 4 CD's, a few singles, a bunch of comps and that band still lives on like an old dog that won’t die.
I can't tell you how thrilled I am to hitting 50 and writing some of the best material of my life. That the music business is in the toilet is not helping my expectations much, but hey, timing's never been my thing. “Summer’s Here†is produced by Ed Pettersen (Song of America, Freedy Johnston/My Favorite Waste of Time), a guy I kept running into around the clubs of North Carolina and Tennessee, and features 9 great songs recorded live with 5 classic session players from the studio scenes of Detroit, Memphis, Los Angeles and Nashville, tracked, mixed and mastered by 1 music industry legend.
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 "Fuck you", and here we are 20 years later on the brink of my second solo effort. 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, most of which suck. But here's some of the good shit - a little bit a folk, a little bit a country and a little bit a soul, songs from living and learning and traveling and dying.
