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
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