Thirteen albums and over 20 years into his solo music career, Eric Roberson has released a book to go with his latest album, Lessons.
Recently, Roberson visited the rolling out office to share some of the lessons he’s learned in love and in his career.
In recent years, independence has been preached throughout the music industry, but it’s something you’ve done for over 20 years now. Why was it important for you to choose that path?
My overall goal was always to grow old doing music. Being a successful songwriter-producer in the industry and watching a lot of records be made that didn’t come out, I realized that was one of the pitfalls in the continuation of my career. I was like, “Wow, I never want to get to a point where someone else had control.” Whether I create it or not because I always challenge everybody to stop, take a minute and ask themselves, what does success mean to you? Does it mean having a Bentley? Does it mean having a certain amount of money? How much money? … When I really thought about it, success is creativity for me, if I could have an idea and transfer the idea into something tangible, then I’ve already won. … Freedom and creativity [are] enormously important to me. I think now like the argument of owning your masters, I’d be very honest [and say] I don’t know if I thought that [was] super important. I understand the importance now. But for me, it was just more about I want to be 90 years old, have an idea, and no one can tell me, “No, you can’t do that right now.”
You have a book of poetry titled Lessons. Tell us about it.
I made an album called Lessons. As we [were] getting ready to advertise, what I was doing was taking your favorite movie, your favorite TV show, the favorite moments of those favorite moments, different world-famous moments of Love Jones, “Martin,” whatever, and I’d write a lesson about that clip [or] that episode. And it really could have been called Layers, because you had to almost kind of remove the first layer, maybe even the second layer to find a lesson out of the story. We thought we were going to [do] 20 lessons, maybe add something, but we ended up doing 100 plus. As we were writing it, I think the conversations that were birthed out of sharing these kinds of thoughts led us to really start to consider [doing] a book [like] this.
The album Lessons came out on April 1. Where can people find the album?
It’s on all streaming platforms. Here in Atlanta, at [record store] Moods Music, which is my brother Darryl [Harris], shout-out to all the people there. You can go to ericrobersonmusic.com and order the book, order the album, order T-shirts, coffee mugs; we’ve got everything over there. It’s a full mall.
