FEBRUARY 2006/INTERVIEW/ERIC ROBERSON AKA ERRO

The idea of approaching Eric Roberson for an interview came to mind as suddenly as a gem of a record that appears in a crate populated by Mantovani and Liberace. It was in such a scenario and amidst some drunken ramblings from record shop staff, that we came across Eric Roberson’s first ever release ‘The Moon’. Dating back to 1994, ‘The Moon’ has been included in Erro’s latest outing ‘The Appetizer’. Black Athena caught up with Nu-soul sensation Eric Roberson while he was taking some time out at his parents’ house in NJ and spoke with him about his upcoming album ‘Left’, his love of music and his favourite basketball team the NY Knicks.


Black Athena: On Listening to the Appetizer we came across a track entitled ‘The Moon’, we were really excited by the thought that a contemporary Soul artist was brave enough to go retro! It then transpired that this was actually something that you’d recorded in the early nineties so what inspired you to showcase it here on Appetizer?

ER: The Appetizer is my third record and it’s a different kind of album, to help celebrate the new record that’s coming later this year – so many of my fans wanted more, and I knew the album wasn’t coming out any time soon, so I wanted to put together a collection of songs to give something to the fans from the last 13 years.
I was actually only 19 when I did the Moon with Warners, but things didn’t work out to do whole album so I went back to college. But I wanted to include it here because it’s a collection of songs covering a whole spectrum of sounds and fields so I wanted The Moon to be alongside some of the newer stuff to showcase the different sounds and feelings you know, like appetizers – some chicken fingers, some dip, some buffalo wings – that’s how I see this album!


What’s the new album going to be called?

The new album is going to be called ‘Left’ – we’ve changed the name a million times but I think I’m pretty happy with that. We’re releasing a live DVD of our show so that will slow things down a bit release wise, but then after that the album should come out around September. The Appetizer has done so well - we’ve just done a distribution deal for it in Japan - and I didn’t think it would do that well, it was just meant to be something for the core fans but it’s done so well it’s actually slowed other stuff down – so now we’re letting people enjoy it for a while and waiting a bit for the next album. I think people will be really impressed with the new album, It’s a great record so the thinking was, you know, let’s try and grab as many fans as we can before that comes out!


You were pretty young when The Moon was released and charted, yet you made the decision to complete your studies rather than getting bowled over by the fame – were you getting good advice from people around you at the time or did you have a plan all along?

Well, The Moon did really well, and that was a great period for me, I was a Sophomore at college, but from that time till now I’ve been signed to majors many times, and you learn pretty quickly that sometimes it doesn’t work out – it’s not usually because of music but because of the politics of the industry. Lots of stuff was going on at Warners at the time of The Moon and we had an album planned to back up The Moon, but it just didn’t work out, and so then I went to another label, and a new president arrived and cleaned out the roster, so it didn’t happen there either so I thought it’s time to go back to college – I needed to regroup in the end and go back and you know I got full scholarship to do Musical theatre as a major at college – I grew up doing both and back then there weren’t courses in production or whatever so it seemed like a good choice and I thought I better start taking it seriously!


Judging purely by your work one would assume that you were musically trained.

Well I actually started in the church, so I was around music from that, and then my father was always playing guitar, everyone was singing all the time at home and then my parents got me a keyboard and friends got keyboards around the same time so that’s was all we did – work on music! We took our equipment to college with us and if we weren’t at a recording studio we were making music in the dorm – so I learnt like that really and I still really want to keep that feeling of being 14 years old and trying to find that song.


Aside from the classic legends of the Soul scene like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye who has been a major influence on your sound?
Which of your early influences still inform your sound?

Wow! Well Stevie and Marvin are definitely up there – but I was a big fan of the group Commissioned when I was growing up, I was a big fan of how they wrote songs and I wanted to be able to write songs they way they did, and move people they way did and then after that, I grew up with Hip Hop and bands like Run DMC and then came Tribe Called Quest – I grew up in a hip hop generation, but when they came out I was like ‘wow’! The way Tribe Called Quest made music really impressed me - this was the music I wanted to listen to. At home though we had everything from rock, to classical, to country, r’n’b, my cd collection is vast.- but to pin it down the three main influences are Stevie, Commissioned and Tribe, that’s the three-headed monster! Then of course you’ve gotta throw a little Slick Rick in there, some Donny Hathaway, and actually if you wanted to put a fourth influence in there I gotta say I love Radiohead – I love everything they’ve ever done. I love to hear people following their passion and I hear conviction when I listen to their songs – when I hear that I gravitate towards it.


Do you go record shopping, do you buy vinyl or cd, new, or old records? What is the latest thing you bought?

I used to all the time, and I was in an antique shop yesterday actually. I have a nice amount of records, but I also have a ton of cds – I have a large music collection, but I don’t shop as much as I used to. I used to be a real vinyl junkie, I used to go to uncles' basements and raid their collections you know?! But recently – well I found a Jackson 5 reel-to-reel yesterday but I don’t actually have a reel-to-reel player to hear it, I also bought some classical stuff to hear the string arrangements. It would be so authentic to have a reel to reel though, you forget how warm the analogue sound is, I would love to find one.



Did you know that Frankie Knuckles used to record tracks on his reel-to-reel and then play the new cuts out live?

That is classy - when you hear the music back in the day when they didn’t have all that technology it blows my mind – it just shows how talented they really are, we don’t have to work so hard these days!


You’ve worked with the major players in the Nu Soul genre (Dwele and Musiq Soul Child) but what are your thoughts on the rest of the up and coming artists trying to break this category – is there anyone you think should be getting more attention?

There’s a few acts coming out now – I’ve been very fortunate to work with a lot of people but the industry is in bad shape at the moment, and it’s having some problems. There’s a ton of people going the independent route making some serious groundbreaking music - there’s an artist called Algebra that’s going to have some stuff out later this year and I worked on her album with her and she did a duet for me, and I’m really impressed with her –she’s an exceptional talent. There’s so many names out there, but you’ve got to find them.
There’s also an artist called V who is an exceptional vocalist and writer and he’s been working with a Touch of Jazz, he was on Elektra for a time and that record never got out, and now he’s just releasing something on BBE, but he’s really amazing. And you know I mention him because I saw myself going down a path like that – when I’m signed I’m always checking out the label’s catalogue because there are real talents that the labels just aren’t supporting (Alicia Keys when she was young for example) and I didn’t want that to happen to me – you need support. There are so many incredible records even from the 70s and 80s that no one has heard and it’s shame, a real shame.


Sol Village, sounds like a brilliant night out! Tell us more about that is it still going? What is the idea behind it?

Yeah we do that every third Wednesday of each month, and it’s a way that we can showcase up and coming talent, put him or her on at a venue where they wouldn’t usually be able to play, and it’s one of the most popular venues for established soul music – when the Roots are in town or Erykah Badu. all of them play this venue, so why not put new talents on that stage and give them that opportunity? We usually manage to get 3 or 4 acts a month on stage and it’s a real fun and exciting night.


In London there is this night called CDR, which is basically a club night where punters bring in their home productions and get them aired in the club. How important do you think is this cultural exchange between the audience and the established artists?

CDR seems like a great idea, a really great idea. It’s extremely important that things like this happen because people need that outlet, when you look at how house or hip hop started out it wasn’t all over the place, it was a small group of people doing what they enjoyed and growing together and that’s the way the new wave of artists are going to have to do it – CDR and Sol village give people the chance to get heard and people are keen to be heard - maybe one of them will explode and people will remember where they came from. I worked with so many people Musiq, Jill Scott – people don’t realise that we were friends, we didn’t have deals, we just had dreams so we had to work together, and we wanted the same thing so it’s not a coincidence. You’ve got a better chance of making it if you’ve got a scene and other people to lean on. I’m all about showcasing new music, I love finding that passion, finding it myself and getting it out there, The more the merrier.


You’ve dueted with Jill Scott (‘One Time’ Down to Earth OST) in the past, are there any other ladies of soul that you’re planning on working with?

I’ve been lucky and collaborated with some amazing people already – Marsha for example on the last 2 albums – but to name someone I haven’t worked with yet it’s gotta be Lauryn Hill because she’s just phenomenal. The other one would be this independent artist called Georgia, she’s the one singing on the Platinum Pied Piper’s album, she’s the first female voice you hear on the record and she’s releasing her own records now - she producers her own stuff, and she’s another phenomenal talent, she’s raw pure talent, singing, writing, producing – she covers all the aspects.


The R’n’B scene and nu soul scene although having quite a lot of similarities have ostensibly separate audiences in Europe with the R’n’B successes (Teedra Moses, Amerie, Brandy etc.) garnering perhaps more attention and from a younger crowd – why do you think this is?

For one thing, here it is separate too because the majors aim people like Alicia and Brandy at a certain demographic, a certain age group, under 24 or something like that, and that’s basically extended to other countries – with my record, we want to cover all demographics though, we’re trying to break the mould that you only have to approach one type of person, I would tell everyone we’re like cheeseburgers – and you might like cheeseburgers for another twenty years! It’s all about finding the open demographic for me, there’s room for people who are 15, or people who are 35.


You’ve collaborated with Osunlade on the remixes of ‘Rock wit You’ how did that come about?

He’s an amazing talent and a good friend, we’ve worked on a lot of stuff together we did Merry Go Round for example and he’s just a real musical contributor - he bought me a little more to the house side, and I took him a little more to the soul side. We just listened to a lot of stuff together, came up with a beat and then the track came out of that. I’ve got a.5 year old nephew and when I saw the way he was whooping and jumping when we played the record I was like ‘wow, I’ve got something here!’ - we never tried to write a soul song or a house song we just wanted to do music and that’s what we created.


Did you know he currently resides in the Greek island of Santorini?

Yeah I was just going to say he now lives in Greece and he’s loving it out there – I had an email from him the other day and he’s really happy. He moved to Puerto Rico before that, he said he wanted to move there because he loved it there and then after a month he just went – he’s a person who does things with passion, so it make sense the way he just moves like that.


There seems to be an aesthetic and musical overlap between the deep house sound and contemporary soul (Jazzy Jeff recently compiled a Jazzy Jeff in the house compilation on the house label Defected).

The main connection for me is that both are about breaking rules, we hate conforming to fashion and rules, so when I listen to house I dig the energy, and soul music has the same approach, it makes sense really because I’m not a fan of rules, I’m a fan of music and it all has to feel good whatever the genre, so it’s the same for.. hip hop, soul, house, it’s all coming from the same elements – there is a line obviously because that’s what differentiates the genres but it’s a thin line, because although the genres are different it all comes from the same vein, I mean we all use the same equipment, you give two people a drum machine and a keyboard and you get totally different things because of the two different brains primarily – and that pleases the same and different people. I love it all - I was at the Miami music conference this year and I loved that and whether I’m considered a house head or a soul head I don’t really care cause for me it’s all music.


Artists involved in both genres seem to take great pleasure in exploiting the warm sound of analogue synthesizers, so maybe that’s where the similarity starts?

Yeah, there is that - Osunlade just released a remix of a song of mine and he took that soul thing and it’s come out as a whole other type of track, and if you listen to tracks like Rain On My Parade off my first LP, those songs were written exactly the same way.


2005 saw John Legend really achieve cross over success in the UK – what do you think set him aside from this peers?

I remember him touring around New York, releasing stuff on his own so I’ve followed him for years and I’m proud of where he is, the interesting thing is that it shows that if you give a person of his talent the outlet to release his music it will be accepted ridiculously, and it can be incredible. John Legend doesn’t really appeal to what today’s r’n’b audience is – I mean he’s sitting at a grand piano! That’s not a keyboard, that’s not a Rhodes it’s a grand piano! He’s older as well, he’s not dancing all around the place and he’s talking about grown up issues – so it shows that, not to say less of his talent at all, but I think if a lot of people were pushed like he was and given that real chance, or if you have someone like Kanye West being your cheerleader and telling people to listen up, you’d see a lot of talents being able to do that I think. If you just went by the music we might never have heard them and he totally deserves his success, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that, there’s a ton of Anthony Hamiltons, of John Legends, of Erykah Badus out there who are just not being heard and that’s the tragedy.


We recently watched an eighties documentary about Sun Ra and the Arkestra and were fascinated to hear a member of the Arkestra say: ‘we don’t need a social life we have music.’ What is music to you?

Music is life – I relate to that completely because I spent four or five years pretty much in the studio, trying to discover more ways to make music, and to figure it all out so. it’s not a surprise to me at all that someone could say that. Music is a basic response, it can be anything that does it for you – your play station, your woman even, just something that brings you a level of fulfilment, simply by being and that’s what it’s like doing the music you want to do – I can live in that zone, making music all the time, it’s a very comforting zone. And when you listen to the music that those guys (Sun Ra etc..) were coming up with it’s not surprising that that was how they were working!


How does it feel when a great track has been mixed down and you hear it in its full form, when you hear the drums, the melody in that perfect co-existence?

You know, even before that stage, when you’re singing the harmonies and working it out, when the feeling of that surrounds you that’s just one of the best feelings I’ve ever felt – I’ve never had a drink of alcohol, and never taken a drug, but music has been my drug – I’ve definitely been in that zone, when you finish a song at 3am you can still listen to it a thousand times, it gives you an incredible high and then when you see an audience enjoying it, I enjoy it the same way all over again. It feels really good. I enjoy the feeling of creating, but also the feeling of people getting it, it makes me feel completely ‘wow’.


What should we expect from your new album? What does it sound like? Any particular directions - any particular sounds synths or styles that we should expect?

It’s similar in style to the previous record, but it has another outlet - I tell everyone I’m trying do what’s honest, I’m trying to honestly express what I felt at the time. I was on the road and I’d be in London then come back home for a day or two and work on a track, then I’d be in California and come back and work on a track and so gradually, gradually I came to making it and before I knew it I had twelve tracks I loved, and then I had fifteen and loved them to.. I never really sat down and thought about the album, I’d just get home and work on tunes, and one becomes two and luckily they all sounded really good.
One song called ‘I believe in love’ is something I worked on with Ashanti’s little brother – then there’s the duet with Algebra and there’s another duet that I can’t talk about yet as it’s not finalised but I’ll be really, really happy if that comes off. It’s really all about very, very cool and very wild music!


The final question or rather a request: Would you ever consider making an eighties soul record in the future?

I would probably really love to do that! But for me the main thing is if you’re gonna do it you’ve gotta do it right, you have to overcome that obstacle because you’d have to research everything that was out there, everything.
If you knew me you’d see that I’m rapping all the time, but I’m not putting out a rap record because I respect it too much because you’ve got to do it so right and if I do it I want people saying 'I could have sworn that record came out in ‘85’ – it has to be that good, so yeah I’ll try but I’ll need time!


OK, one more actually - Do you watch basketball?

All the time, my team are not that good at the moment though, I support the New York Knicks, I grew up a big fan, a die-hard Knicks fan. But anyway they are improving; we’re slowly trying to get the team back. Maybe they need three more years’ time. The Pistons, from Detroit are just too strong a team at the moment.
But I was actually more of a football player myself, you could put me in a basketball team and I wouldn’t embarrass you – you wouldn’t leave me open, but you wouldn’t worry too much about me either - but I liked the American football thing more, put the helmet on, the shoulder pads and just hit somebody! I love anything competitive!