Fore by Robin O'Brien

From Berklee in Boston, to major label demos in New York, to raising a family and moving from New Jersey to California, Robin has never stopped writing, singing and recording. I bet she never will.

Last year she passed through Chicago and we met for dinner. We hadn’t seen each other for a good ten or fifteen years, back when I played guitar on some of her tapes. That, plus the scotch and water her husband Don was buying put me in a pensive, middle-aged frame of mind. As we talked, I thought about BIG things. Like death (my father had recently died), change (how come I look like Santa Clause when Robin still looks like a model?) and, especially, time—the way beautiful, amazing things can sometimes pass away without a trace, without anyone in the future knowing anything about them.

Like Robin's fantastic 4-track recordings. Some of the best songs and recordings I know, despite the thirty-odd years of major label CDs and LPs in my collection, are Robin's. But they exist on creaky old cassettes that are soon going to magnetic tape heaven. When they do, they'll take the raw tracks of Robin's amazing performances with them. So I asked: “Robin, what happened to all your old Portastudio masters?” She said, “I’ve got them all, somewhere, but the Portastudio’s long gone.” Two weeks later, Robin was back in California and a box arrived. Her note said, “Hey George! I’m a little bit nervous and overwhelmed opening up these boxes of tapes. They are like diaries, except I can’t access them.”

I accessed them, and that’s where FORE came from—four songs sampling Robin’s immense back catalog of work. Digitized, cleaned up, with new guitars and synthesizers in a few places, they highlight Robin’s dense, layered vocals, her harmonic singing (heard near the end of “L.O.V.E. love”) and the simplicity and beauty of her songs. Yes, they are like looking at diaries, but they are less about Robin herself than the passions and the weird logics (“laughing, crying, I remember everything you said”) that everyone collides with some time or other. They make even strangers think, “Oh OK, I’ve heard these before.” You probably haven’t, but Robin and I hope you will enjoy hearing these songs again for the first time.

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