Where did you track Let Me
Introduce You and how long
did you work on it?
We started tracking in March
last year and ended in October.
It took a while because we did it
in sections. We recorded the bass
and drum tracks over a weekend
in a studio called The Castle, just
outside of Nashville. Then I went
on tour and when I got back to
Nashville, I started recording my
guitar overdubs in various local
studios. Frank Rogers, the pro-
ducer, had to work on another
project at one point, so he was
out for a month. We kind of
piecemealed it until everything
came together.
[Bassist Michael
Rhodes] liked a lot
of the lines I came
up with, which
was cool, though
he felt he needed
to de-literalize
some of the parts
to make it more
of a feel thing and
less of a mechani-
cal performance.
Did you cut your rhythm guitar with the bass and drums?
We recorded as a trio to get really
good drum and bass performances, but we replaced my tracks
later. And before we went into
the studio we had three days of
rehearsals because I wanted us to
feel like a band when we started
recording. I wanted to avoid
learning songs in the studio.
a lot of the lines I came up
with, which was cool, though
he felt he needed to de-literalize
some of the parts to make it
more of a feel thing and less of
a mechanical performance.
Keith Carlock on drums and
Michael Rhodes on bass—
what a rhythm section! How
did you connect with them?
I’ve been a fan of Keith’s drumming for years—all the stuff
he has recorded with Wayne
Krantz, Oz Noy, and the whole
55 Bar community in New
York. He was the guy I dreamed
of having play on my album, so
it was really cool that he said yes
when we reached out. I knew
he’d played with Michael before,
so we asked him to play bass
and he was really excited about
it. Hanging out with those guys
and hearing them play my songs
was like a fantasy come true.
Robinson’s Gretsch Country Gentleman is one of his main stage guitars,
but he mostly played a ’60s Gibson E-335 on Let Me Introduce You.
Photo by Ethan James Photography
I wasn’t nervous about playing
with them—that was the fun part
to me—but I was nervous that
my charts were wrong. I knew
what I wanted on pretty much
all the songs, so articulating that
to Michael and Keith in a way
they could understand was really
important to me. Otherwise I
would have walked away with
something that was different
from what I wanted. But it was
really easy to work with such
high-caliber players. You can
make one little suggestion and
they take it onboard so quickly
and easily. I gave them charts
when we first dug into the music
in those rehearsals, and that’s
when we all got a sense of what
the project would sound like.
Were you intimidated at all?
These guys have played with
James Taylor, Steely Dan, Sting,
Vince Gill, John Mayer, Keith
Urban—the list goes on and on.
Give us an example of the
kind of direction you offered.
Well, it was really quite
detailed. For instance, I knew
the exact feel I wanted on the
hi-hat and often I wrote out the
bass lines. I handed Michael
some notation at one point
and he was like, really? But on
“Lethal Injection,” I had to. It’s
a part—not just chords—so I
had to show him that. He liked
What were some of your
biggest challenges making
this album?
A big part of it for me was learning how to sing and play at the
same time. On the acoustic
songs, I wanted it to sound like a
fingerstyle guitarist accompanying a singer, so I had to learn to
play the guitar with a good feel
and execute the parts I wanted to
hear, yet also sing without thinking about the guitar playing.
I used James Taylor as a
model because I love the way
he plays and sings. His phrasing
is so good on both the guitar
and vocals—the two fit so well
together. I wanted the guitar to
play an integral role in the song,
so I essentially took the same
approach with counterpoint
that I use in my solo acoustic
guitar pieces and applied it
to the context of singing and
interacting with other musicians. My instrumental concept
