Category: Uncategorized

I keep coming back to a question I cannot shake. When did we stop listening to songs and start worshipping singers?

We have trained ourselves to care about everything an artist does except the art. What he thinks. What he says. His favorite color. Where he goes to church. What he had for breakfast. We can recite a singer’s opinions on a dozen subjects he knows no more about than we do, and we let those opinions decide if his music gets to live in our house.

The first example that comes to mind is Willie Nelson. Willie’s art is seminal, culture-changing, immeasurably influential, transcending genre. Yet Willie does what Willie does, so every time he makes a statement about politics or weed or religion, fans who see it different get angry, say they will not listen anymore, talk boycott, blah blah blah. Who cares? Who cares where Willie goes to church or who he wants you to vote for or if he wants bong rips for breakfast? “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” is still “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.”

I do not enter this as Willie’s fellow sufferer. I enter as his opposite number. He is the giant on the mountain whose every remark gets audited by people holding his records hostage. Down here at the working level is a man who was offered the same little pulpit every stage hands a singer between songs, and who quietly declined it. Not from fear. Not from shame. From mission. I am a shelter for folks against all that, three hours at a time.

I just will not play culture war. I won’t. All the songs for all the people. Period.

You have criticized me for not taking a public stance. This is the stance. I vote my conscience and I shut up about it. I cannot muster the pretense it would take to think anyone should listen to my opinion on, well, anything really. The work is the work.

The song belongs to whoever needs it. I am just the fellow holding the guitar while it finds them. Who cares who I voted for, and who cares what Willie Nelson had for breakfast?

People assume things about a man with a guitar.

They assume he is chasing something. The big stage. The tour bus. His name up in lights somewhere, with a line out the door. I have had folks ask me, kind as they could, why we never “made it.” Like there is a finish line out there with my name on it, and I just have not run hard enough to reach it yet.

Here is the truth, and it took me half a lifetime to learn how to say it plain.

I never wanted to be rich or famous. I just don’t care about those things. They don’t drive me. All I want is sustainability. I want to never have to do anything other than sing these songs.

I know what the other road costs, because I paid it. I hauled hay. I dug ditches. I sat chained to office desks and surrendered my body, my mind, and time I will never get back, grinding to keep all the stuff I had bought with money I didn’t have to impress people who didn’t care about me. That is not a metaphor. That was my life, for a lot of years.

So Danielle and I did something people called crazy. We sold the stuff. All of it. We came down to South Texas and paid cash for a simple little life, and we have been living what I call a musical minimalist lifestyle ever since. Six and a half years now.

We are never going to be rich. But we’re free. Our days belong to us. I wake up in a place I love, next to the girl I have loved since high school, and I earn our living standing beside her, singing songs I wrote, for people who came out to hear them. We’re fed by the very thing we love to do. We’ve never been happier.

It’s the phone still ringing next spring. It’s a room full of folks on South Padre Island who heard us last year, and the year before that, and came back. It’s Danielle’s harmony right where it has always been, and a couple of new songs finding their way into the world a few at a time. Fame is a firework. Loud, bright, gone before you look up twice. I’m building a kitchen fire, the kind a family cooks on every day of its life.

We work hard, but we’re not trying to build an empire. We’re building something smaller, and better. A life that holds. Enough shows. Enough songs. Enough bread on the table, earned the honest way, one stage at a time.

The rainbow I’m chasing ends at my front door. What’s on the other side of it is all the treasure I need.

— Robby

The gospel as it came to me as a kid was simple math. God’s good. You’re bad. Try harder.

And I tried. Lord knows I tried. But trying was the whole problem, because every time I fell short, and I always fell short, the message I heard wasn’t “come closer.” It was “do better.” After enough years of that, a boy stops reaching for God and starts hiding from Him. That version of the gospel never let me know Jesus. It only taught me to perform for Him.

Here’s what I’ve come to know. God is so good that He loved me right where I was. Not where I was supposed to be.

Where I was.

Nobody’s good enough to go to heaven. Nobody ever has been. That’s not bad news. That’s the doorway.

Jesus said heaven belongs to the poor in spirit. I used to think that meant the sad, or the humble in some polished churchy way. I don’t think that anymore. Poor in spirit means broke.

Poor in spirit means you’re broken and you know it.

It’s the human who finally gets to their knees and says, I need You. I can’t do this. I have run out of me.

I have been that person. In some ways I still am, every single day.

Brennan Manning had a word for people like us: ragamuffins. And he had one message for them: God loves you as you are, not as you should be. I wish somebody had told that boy I was.

Heaven belongs to the poor in spirit, and friend, I am poor in spirit. If you are too, here’s what I want you to know about Jesus: He loves you as you are, not as you should be.

Nobody is as they should be.

Four years ago, I was a 350-pound alcoholic, my body wrecked by constant inflammation and serious chronic health issues. I couldn’t sleep without a CPAP machine. Walking across the room left me gasping. Three or four mornings a week, I’d wake up with crushing chest pain. Even on meds, my blood pressure stayed out

Everything changed on 4/22/22. I sat beside an ICU bed, holding the hand of the person I love most: Danielle, my high school sweetheart, mother of our kids, wife of three decades, constant companion, best friend—my everything. She had begun having seizures, the doctors made it clear to me that this problem was created by lifestyle and I knew my reckless living had played a major role in bringing her to that point. The thought of losing her shattered me in a way my own decline never had. I broke down sobbing, realizing I’d led her here, and begged God for a chance to lead her out. In that desperate moment, I had nothing but iron resolve—no plan, just the determination to change.

(Out of deep respect for Danielle’s privacy—she’s sensitive about her health experiences and wants to share her own miraculous turnaround when she’s ready—I’ll keep the details of her situation hers to tell.)

That night, I poured every bottle of liquor in the house down the drain. Desperate for direction, I found a book called Unfuck Yourself. The raw title spoke to me—I was certainly fucked. It exposed all my self-sabotage and drove home a truth: motivation is worthless because it fades. Discipline is what lasts.

I started walking every single day. I hated it, but I forced myself. Rain? I got soaked. Cold? Bundled up. Too hot or exhausted? Went anyway.

In the discomfort, I found the magic: it had been hiding in the work I’d always avoided. “Making myself go” slowly became “wanting to go,” then “needing to go.”

As for food…

I was overwhelmed by endless fads (keto? low-fat? Paleo?), I simplified: eat real food. Nothing from boxes, bags, or windows. Just simple, single-ingredient stuff—meat, fruit, vegetables, beans, eggs, rice. Food made of actual food.

I didn’t “go on a diet” (I’d failed at that too many times). I built a healthy lifestyle, not to drop a few pounds, but to survive and thrive. I worked quietly—no announcements. About a year in, down 100 pounds, people started noticing: “Have you lost weight?” I’d just smile: “Maybe so?”

The Toughest Battle: Sobriety on Stage…

Quitting drinking terrified me most. We live and work in bars. I’m paid to be the life of the party. Drinks are always free. In 20 years, I’d never played a gig sober. The idea paralyzed me.

But if I was serious about unfucking myself, the booze had to go. Those first “no thank you’s” were brutal—especially onstage, sober and scared, staring down a fan holding out a shot of tequila. Saying no felt impossible… until it didn’t.

I not only adapted—I leveled up as a musician. I sobered up and learned to play. With a clear head, I could read the room’s energy like never before. Feeling good now beats feeling drunk every time…and I’m still the life of the party.

Four Years Later: The Results Speak for Themselves

Today, I’m 170 pounds. Four years ago, I couldn’t cross a room without gasping; this summer, I hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls.

I’m off all medications. My blood pressure is perfect. Inflammation is gone. After recent tests, my doctor estimated my metabolic age at 35—I’ve added 15 years to my life. The day I first slept without the machine felt like release from prison. Simple things I thought were gone forever—camping on the beach, napping on the couch—are back.

No gym membership. No shots, pills, or surgery. Just discipline. Discipline is my superpower.

The Bigger Message: The Magic Is in the Work You’re Avoiding.

Everyone searches for a shortcut or magic pill. The real magic is inside you—unlocked by doing the things you don’t want to do. The obstacle is the way. Run straight at the hard, scary things. There’s no growth without those challenges.

When you master yourself by forcing action through discomfort, you can master your entire life.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this one, so I’ll just start at the beginning.

Here’s the journey.

Back in 2020, after we lost our daughter Taylor, Danielle started having seizures. Everything fine one minute, then bam! Suddenly her brain betrays her, she falls to the floor and starts to seize. No warning, no pattern we could find. It took us four years to find a doctor that could even properly diagnose it: medication-resistant epilepsy, which is a clinical way of saying the medicines never really did the job. The profound grief of losing Taylor actually restructured Danielle’s brain and left this behind in it’s wake. Several times the seizures began looping (Status epilepticus), one right on top of another with no break. Which meant intubation, and a couple of times we came near to losing her. If you’ve ever watched someone you love seize and there’s not a thing you can do about it, you know what that does to a person. It’s a living nightmare that felt like it was waiting around every corner. I’ve sat through it more times than I can count, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

Earlier this year, through a series of events we can only attribute to him, God led us to a neurologist in Edinburg, Dr. Estophan, who told us there might be a way to fix it. A surgery that could give Danielle a seizure-free life. I have to tell you that at every step of this grueling journey, God has been there, reminding us that His plan is not to harm us but to give us hope and a future. And He’s proving it at every turn.

Getting cleared for it was its own ordeal. Just picture what our life looked like going in: years of watching everything Danielle put in her mouth, a never-ending schedule of pills that had to be taken at exact times, planning every situation around sleep, avoiding places and environments that were too visually stimulating. Spending every ounce of mental energy, every single day, trying to stay above seizure threshold…and struggling to keep all that stress, pressure, and fear under our hats so we could continue our duties as “ambassadors of fun.”

Then we walked into that hospital terrified, mentally exhausted and did the exact opposite of all of it, on purpose: six days tied to a bed, no meds, sleep deprivation, strobe lights, having seizures on purpose. It was terrifying. The big fear was that one of those seizures would turn dangerous.

But she got through it. Every seizure they needed, all the data they needed, and not one of them turned dangerous. I’m not going to dress that part up. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, and I was just sitting in the chair. Yet through all of it, there was a peace there that could only come from Him.

But here’s the news I’ve been waiting to share: the team went through everything they collected, and Danielle doesn’t need an implanted device after all. Going into this, we’d been told an implanted device in her brain was the only hope she had of ever being seizure-free. Think about that prospect — a gadget in your skull, with a battery that has to be changed. Terrifying. God’s plan didn’t include that. All the earlier testing had indicated the seizures were coming from both sides of her brain. During those six days, they found out that wasn’t the case. There’s one problem spot, and they think they can fix it with a single surgery. No hardware in her head for the rest of her life. What comes next is either an ablation or a lobectomy, and we sit down with the surgeon on October 5th to decide which one. There’s one more test beforehand, and then we finish this thing.

We’re in the homestretch, and the outcome keeps getting brighter.

While all of this has been going on, this island has carried us. The benefit at the Coral Reef, the musicians who gave their time, Jeff Hopson and everybody who gave to the GoFundMe — you took a weight off us so Danielle could focus on healing instead of worrying. And the crew in Oakdale, California’s cowboy capital, who threw a party and rallied folks from all over the Central Valley behind us. I don’t have fancy words for any of that. Thank you just doesn’t cover it, but it’s what I’ve got.

We are so grateful for the love we’ve been shown through this trial…and we are so excited to get back on stage and share some songs, and some solidarity, with the people who loved us through it. That’s what’s waiting at the end of the homestretch.

I’ll keep writing here as there’s news to share. We’re almost home.

— Robby