By Jim Barber
A much admired, deeply respected, and endlessly convivial staple of the Kingston, Canada music scene, Rob Watkins is what you’d call a songwriter’s songwriter. His vocation and purpose in life is to write songs – to meld together words, melodies, chords and various instruments, including his voice, and create an aural vehicle through which to share stories, to process emotion, to entertain, to enlighten, to elucidate and to create a legacy of art that brings meaning. Prolific and profound at the same time, Watkins regularly posts songs, snippets of songs, rough ideas and completed soundscapes on his social media accounts, giving those who see and enjoy them a glimpse into his mind, his spirit and his process.
And he also shares his creativity in the more traditional milieu of the album, including the old-school-is-new-school-again physical method.
Sunshine is his most recent release, an independent album consisting of 10 songs recorded in a holistic, stripped down and very intimate manner, – creating a vibe that evokes scenes of a small coffee house, a quiet bar lounge, or even a front porch or living room. It’s one of his talents to be able to craft songs for any occasion, any venue and any emotional atmosphere, as he has run the gamut from hard rock, to Americana to folk throughout his 50 plus years penning his own tunes.
His previous album, 40 Watt Glow, released in 2023, was a more elaborate operation both from a writing and a production standpoint, as it involved many guests, more sophisticated arrangements and production. Sunshine is light on frills, light in tone, but arguably just as compelling a collection of music. There is depth in the sparseness, and a lightness that belies the seeming darkness of much of the world around us.
“40 Watt Glow was kind of my apex, I guess you might call it. For that one, I just got to work with all the people I had dreamed of working with over the years, one of which was Kim Berly of The Stampeders on drums, and a lot of people from the local scene here who I admired, so it was just a kind of vast array of people from around Kingston that I’d wanted to work with. But Sunshine is all me. I did all the instruments, and I don’t mean to sound big-headed about that. It was very deliberate. The studio that I work with, with my songwriting partner Tom Harpell, he’s got a studio in his house, this little 10 x 10 room and we have a small Tascam recorder,” Watkins said over the phone from his home near Kingston, where he lives with his wife of 35-plus years, Trish.
“We’ve been recording together as a duo under the moniker Watkins Harp for the past 15 or so years now. So, I had this group of songs, and they really weren’t having anything to do with our duo. These were just songs that I’d gathered, you know, like any songwriter. And I had a specific direction with this album. I wanted it to be not so melancholy as the other stuff I put out. I want it to be a more upbeat, more positive message. Hence the title, Sunshine. It just felt like it was time for me to express myself that way. I just want to put a happier, lighter, light-hearted array of songs together and that’s what this is. Musically I think it’s a combination of some Roots Americana with a little British Invasion style melodies,” he said.
Watkins is of a generation to remember that particular cultural invasion in the mid-1960s, particularly The Beatles, although he was precociously young to understand their artistic significance and cultural impact. He just knew they were good and made music that spoke to him – and to pretty much everyone he knew. The skills of observation that serve him so well now as a songwriter were there even as a kid, and what he saw when John, Paul, George and Ringo appeared in black and white on the big screen of his local theatre left a lasting mark – and lit a fire inside his spirit – a blaze that burns as brightly today as it ever has.
“The Beatles, they’re the biggest influence on me. I was basically raised on them and their music. My brother was seven years older than me, so when the Beatles hit, he was in his early teens and I was about four or five. So I was kind of weaned on that music and I loved it. And a vivid memory for me was my parents once gave my brother some money so we could go and see the movie Help at a local theatre where we lived in Montreal at the time. When we got there, it was just a mob, a sea of kids. That’s all it was, young teenagers and such. And even before the film was flickering on the screen, the place is going nuts – everybody’s screaming. All I remember about the movie was the visuals. You couldn’t hear a thing for the kids screaming, and this is in a movie theatre,” he said.
“One day, not long after, I distinctly remember sitting in my backyard with a group of friends and I had this music rolling around in my head, and I just instinctively knew that I hadn’t heard it anywhere before. Where’d it come from? It must have come from me, it’s something that I composed, this music. Fast forward to when I was a teenager, about 14 or 15, my English teacher got me into writing poetry. He knew that I loved music and writing music, and he said, ‘have you ever thought of marrying the two, because really that’s what a song is. You write either a story or a poem or a sonnet and you put it to music.’ That’s when the freakin’ light bulb went off. But again the inspiration came from The Beatles and also Hank Williams, absolutely. The first song that I ever really tuned into was actually Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets. I heard that and I literally fell backwards and was like, what is this?!’”
Over more than five decades of crafting his own songs, there’s obviously been an evolution in content, style and process. For Watkins, it’s not so much that he’s made radical changes in what he does and how he does it, but in the mindset that he has now compared to 10, 20, even 30 or more years ago. The heart is starting to rule the mind, and along with that, adventurism has replaced any trepidation.
“I do what feels right to me. And I am also very curious, you know, especially with other songwriters. That’s the first question I will ask if I know someone does what I do. There’s that instant connection and I always want to know how they do it. We’re all different. We all have different M.O.s I guess, and its whatever works for you. And believe me, it’s taken me years to hone that skill to finally arrive at this place where I can say, ‘okay, I’m not so insecure anymore. I am not afraid to just put stuff out there, or post it online.’ I like doing it because it’s feedback for me. It’s not feeding my ego, it’s gathering feedback. It’s me saying, ‘there’s something in this. There’s something in this music or in these lyrics, there’s something that I kind of like. What do you think?’” he said.
“I’m not playing as much as I used to and I don’t have the opportunities to get the material out there to a live audience as much as I used to. The new group I’m in, The Maduros, when it originally started, we said it was going to be like 90 per cent originals and the rest covers. And the guys said, ‘well, I guess we won’t be playing that much. We’ve got a lot of new covers, and we want to be able to play in the bars.’ And I said okay, but my caveat was I still get the throw a couple of originals in the set just to appease me. So what we do is we go into the gig, we play the cover tunes, the audience likes, then we throw those originals in and see what the reaction is first, and then if people like them we say, ‘oh, by the way, that’s an original.’ So there’s no pressure on us and there’s no pressure on them. And, again, it’s a good way to gauge if people like a song. And if they do, check that one off and that’s going to go on the next album or whatever. But you have to get some kind of feedback. And God bless my wife. I mean, for 35 years she’s listened to a lot of crap from me. But because she doesn’t play an instrument, she’s not a musician, she’s my audience. She represents the people in the audience when she’s the one who says, ‘hey, that’s pretty good,’ or ‘I think you’ve got something there.’ Because every song I write and I bring to her, I’m like, ‘listen, it’s a hit,’ and she says, ‘yeah, you know you said that about the other 90 songs.’”
It’s that openness and willingness to be vulnerable, not just to his wife, but to random social media folks or live audiences that marks the most significant area of progress for Watkins as a creator. As many folks often find out, opening oneself up is actually more freeing to the psyche than always been on guard.
“I’m way more confident than I was even 15 years ago. I think it’s that I learned that it’s okay to be vulnerable. And as a songwriter, I think you have to be. I’m also more introspective now. Again, I’m not afraid to show my vulnerability, to say I’m an insecure guy and I get jealous or I’m fearful of this or that, or worried about getting old – whatever it might be. So, in that respect I’m more comfortable in my skin now and I can say these things without worrying about what someone else says. Look, critique is critique. If someone writes that my album was mediocre at best and blah, blah, blah, well of course it hurts, but it’s a critic’s job to critique, good or bad. Tom and I have been extremely lucky over the course of about 12 or 13 years of putting out albums as Watkins Harp. They’ve been very successful in Europe and we’ve done a lot, so the accolades are great. But there’s going to be a time when we put out an album and those same people are going to say it sucks. It’s going to happen, and I’m okay with that. Not everything I do is going to be successful or whatever that means. When I listen back to my songs from 30, 40 years ago, I can tell I wasn’t writing songs for myself. I was trying to impress people. I was trying to write and sing what they wanted to hear, play the music they wanted to hear. I just wasn’t very truthful. So those songs sound very distant to me now. The ones I’m writing now are much more authentic and real and honest,” he said, adding that as well as his approach and mindset regarding songwriting evolving over time, so has his definition of what it means to be ‘successful.’
“Well, 30, 40 years ago, it was all about getting a record contract, signing with a record company, especially a major label. That was the goal. And for me, if I didn’t achieve that, I must be a failure. I remember turning 40 and I was so down because I thought, damn, here I am a 40-year-old guy, with kids and an unsuccessful marriage, and I looked at myself as a failure because I hadn’t achieved that brass ring. I never got signed, so I’m not successful. Now, we did get a chance. Tom and I were signed to a smaller label in England, Revolver Records, and that was more of a distribution deal. But hey, we still got signed to a label. I was 59, and Tom was 60 something, so a couple of old geezers. So we finally got it. We got the dream. There’s the brass ring; it’s in our hands. We’re signed now. They’re going to do all this work for us. Well, it’s like most other things, once you achieve it and you get there you’re thinking, ‘huh, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.’ No, to me, success, it’s more about me. I know it sounds selfish, but success to me is what makes me happy. So success isn’t me having to make creative compromises and not being myself and selling a million records, or having millions of downloads or being played on the radio. Don’t get me wrong, all that stuff is great, because Watkins Harp is being played on the radio and we’re on television and all that kind of stuff. It’s nice, but it doesn’t define my life anymore. In my experience, once you get even a small taste of it, you just realize it’s not what it’s all cracked up to be. It really isn’t.”
So based on what we’ve been talking about above, the shifts in approach, the willingness to bare his proverbial soul, to allow himself to be open to critique, to harness the writing spirit that’s already there, the process has matured alongside the person that is Rob Watkins. Part of that process is to walk into a new album project open to what and where the muse takes him in terms of a possible overall theme or tone to the record.
“It’s kind of like a painter sitting down at their easel with a blank canvas. You have a vision in your head, maybe, or an idea. And you just start to paint. For me, as the songs start to gather, and when I’m about five or six songs into it, I do generally say to myself that they’re leaning more or less in one way. But I can’t honestly say that I put any more thought into it than that. I don’t operate that way. I just gather the tunes, and then assemble them as I sort of see fit. When it comes to songwriting, when I sit down to write, I might have an idea or a germ of an idea in my head. But 99 per cent of the time, I just let whatever it is that needs to come out, come out. I don’t force it anymore, because those are the songs where I say, ‘okay, I’m going to write a song about so and so,’ they’re usually shit. They’re just absolute crap. But the ones that I write, and sometimes I’ll write three or four songs a day, and they’re all duds, and I might go through a week like that, but it’s an exercise for me. Then once in a blue moon, something will come, and it’s always from out of left field, and I’ll think, ‘I didn’t see that coming. I wrote it so fast.’ It was like the song was pre-written for me. Those are the special ones that I gravitate to and the ones that usually get released,” he explained.
“Most of it is inspiration. As I said, I’m very tuned in right now, and I know that there’s something else out there kind of guiding me. Here’s a funny thing. I got a chance to meet Bryan Adams back in the fall. I went to one of his concerts and went backstage and stuff. And one of the questions that I asked him was, ‘how do you write a song?’ And before he answered I said, ‘is it more of a spiritual thing? Do you feel like the heavens have opened up and they’ve given you this divine wisdom.’ He goes, ‘no, I just sit with my guitar and start riffing. ‘Summer of ‘69’ – boom! I was just riffing on a couple of chords, next thing I knew, I had a song.’ And I got it, because that’s always been my M.O. Ninety per cent of the time I do write the music first and then the lyrics come on top of that. I’m just sitting down, banging out chords and something just kind of clicks in you. He’s probably one of the world’s best songwriters so it was interesting to hear his spin on that. His take is that he just lets it come to him. It’s going to happen, or it’s not. And it’s true.
“Most of the time, I’m strumming some chords and I sort of repeat them and repeat the pattern and kind of outline the song that way, while I’m humming along. In other words there’s an intro, here’s a couple of verses, there’s going to be a chorus, does it need a bridge, whatever. I literally go through that numerous times because in my head it gives me a chance to say, ‘if I sing it this way, that’s my melody line, that’ll go over that way.’ And then I’ll work out my harmonies at the same time. But this is all happening in my head. Like, I’ll know this needs drums, nope, this needs strings, nope, this song needs whatever it is. That’s my normal pattern – it’s guitar first, work out the structure of the song, come up with the lyrics, which is probably the hardest part for me. As opposed to when I used to fight for lyrics and want to say something cool, now I’m like, ‘why don’t I try speaking from my heart?’ And, boom, the words come out like a shotgun. But it took me years to get to this point and be comfortable just sort of getting into the flow of it.”
Obviously, based on the role that music has played and continues to play in Watkins’ life, he believes in the healing power of the art form, its ability to impact hearts, minds, souls and spirits of not just listeners, but those whose craft, vocation and calling is to create music.
“I think music has always been important to people; it’s this spiritual thing that we don’t even realize is having an impact on us. I mean, the vibrations of notes affect us. I truly believe music has healing powers. I really see that it does have the power to change us, to change our views, to make us feel loved, make us feel wanted. It is relatable – music is that one total common denominator throughout all humanity. Everyone in the world can accept music. That’s the one thing that we have as a planet – there’s not a person or a soul on the face of the earth who can say they hate music of any sort. That has never been said in all of humanity. It’s our connection. That’s what it is. It’s one thing that binds us all together. That’s why it’s so great,” he said.
“I’ve dealt with mental health issues most of my adult life, and it’s really my therapy, because it’s such a powerful outlet. For me it has those healing properties where I can vent and sort of purge myself that way. It’s almost like another side of me, as weird as this may sound, sometimes when I’m sitting down writing a song, it’s almost like there’s the ghost of me sitting across from me in another chair, and I’m able to talk to that other person, that other part of me and just say, ‘here’s what I’m feeling. I’m really down today. I feel shitty.’ And it’s sort of me looking at me where I am able to say that to the other side of me, which helps not only get the feelings out, but also helps me with the song. Music helps me kind of look at the inside of myself, from the outside.”
Watkins’ partner in life and love, wife Trish, as mentioned above, is not only his primary audience, but main inspiration – truly his muse. But it was not from some deeply ethereal, passionate romantic motivation that led to the lead-off track for Sunshine, ‘Get It Done.’ Instead it was from the sort of mundanity of everyday life, but yet still tinged with deep affection.
“We live in an old farmhouse, so the house never had a proper pantry or huge kitchen. And my wife said she always wanted an old farmhouse with a pantry. So the back section to the house or laundry room area is pretty big too. And told her I could build something there in the corner. But as I sort of chipped away at it here and there, she was a little anxious, and really wanted it done. And I was procrastinating and she was literally kind of poking me asking when was I going to get it done. One day when I was just sitting with the guitar I went, ‘hey wait a minute, there’s an idea.’ And that’s basically what the song is about – it’s me building this pantry for her and just trying to get it done in time for her to get her stuff all moved. It’s a very simple song, but that’s exactly how it came about. I just sat down one day and had that line that I ‘got to get it done.’ So I was actually procrastinating about doing the work and the procrastination led me to write a song,” he said, talking admiringly about the love of his life, with whom he’s been for four decades, 35 of them as husband and wife.
“She’s always been in my corner, through thick and thin, through the worst of it. Believe me, I bleed my heart out to her when I’m frustrated or a gig didn’t go well, or I got shafted money, you know. She’s always had my back. She’s always backed me up and fought with me, so that’s pretty rare to find if you can get someone in your corner like that. And yeah, she’s my muse. I write a ton of love songs for her. She’s inspired most of my music. When someone asks me how long I’ve been writing, I say, ‘oh, a mere 50 years.’ And I’ve probably written about 4,000 songs or something like that – I get bored easy. But you know, out of those 4,000, probably 3,000 are written for her.”
Another stand-out track on the album, and one that appealed to the author of this article, a longtime former small-town community journalist, a wry and witty take on the Warholian notion of fame, ‘Home Town News.’
“That came to me just as I was falling asleep one night. And it was just before I knew I was going to go and see Bryan Adams and meet him, which was a big deal for me. I know I wrote that song to kind of push to him. Although he doesn’t work with other songwriters, he doesn’t take other songs, I knew he wouldn’t take it. Still, it was one of those songs where I said, ‘I can hear him singing this,’ and sing it way better than me. It was loosely based on my experience of being kind of big news for a short while [he went the late-1980s version of viral for claiming to have eaten 10,000 boxes of Kraft dinner, getting interviewed by major media outlets and even getting an invitation to be on David Letterman’s show] and then gets easily forgotten, and he makes excuses for being forgotten,” he said, as we moved on to the song ‘Toxic’ which is about a fellow local musician who had a day job that was so awful at times that it was impacting every facet of her life and health.
“It was written for this friend of mine and she had a really important, really high-profile job. I hadn’t heard from her for quite a while and then sort of out of the blue she shot me this message and said, ‘I’m really sorry I haven’t been in touch, and I apologize for that, but I’ve been going through this stuff at work.’ And I was sad to hear what happened. As she explained it to me, one of the things she said was that the environment just became so toxic. We went back and forth for about 20 minutes and that word ‘toxic’ just kept rolling around in my brain and once we signed off Messenger I immediately wrote the song. It just came out. Fifteen minutes later I realized I had it, I had the song. And then I hastily grabbed my guitar, had the words sitting in front of me, recorded it, and sent her that as a message. I said, ‘I just wrote you this song. What do you think?’ She’s like, ‘oh f***! Are you the AI of songwriters? That’s amazing, we were just talking about this.’ I told her the conversation really struck a chord in me and I felt bad for her. I thought, god damn, a great job like that, she’s making loads of money, but she was just so unhappy. And that was the thing about it, I think she felt at the time it was really interfering with her marriage. And I thought that was f***ing horrible. Like, no one should go through that, and if it’s affecting your health, your happiness, your marriage and your sanity, there’s no amount of money that’s worth it.
“The main message behind the song is that when things get that bad, and you’re that vulnerable, you gotta bail. That’s the whole message: it’s not worth it. Tomorrow’s another day, something new will come along. You will survive. That’s the number one thing. You will survive this toxic situation whatever it may be, but you gotta bail. You gotta get out of it. So whether that’s physical abuse, verbal abuse, your job, whatever it is, and it’s a hard step to take, but you have to put that foot forward and move on.”
One of the more evocative songs on Sunshine, and one that kind of came out of nowhere inspiration wise, is the second last track the sweetly sentimental ‘Priscilla.’
“That’s written for Priscilla Presley [former wife of Elvis and mother of the late Lisa Marie]. She was on the show Tamron Hall and she’s got to be like 80 or something now [she turns 81 on May 24] So I’m watching her and thinking, ‘wow, her skin is pulled so tight on her face, it’s gonna snap. She’s always been a beautiful woman and she just released another book, a second sort of autobiography [Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis.] And on the show she was telling stories, not so much about the Elvis thing, but just the stuff that she’s had happen to her. So this was after Lisa Marie died, plus her grandson [Benjamin Keough] had committed suicide, and even though she’s this big celebrity, she’s a human being at the end of the day, and she’s gone through so much stuff. And I thought, you know, good or bad, whatever you want to say about her, I though she’s a really strong woman. That was what came through in that interview. I thought, boy if you sort of slice through everything, she’s a very, very strong woman to have gone through what she’s gone through and come out the other side, and having to do it all in the public eye, which is a hard thing to deal with.”
For more information on Sunshine, Watkins-Harp and more, visit https://watkinsharp.bandcamp.com/album/sunshine-2.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
