At Work: Kenny Roby
“This record was very, very personal,” Kenny Roby says while discussing his latest solo effort, The Reservoir. “A lot of it needed to seep out of the pressure cooker so it didn’t explode.” It’s been seven years since Roby’s last solo outing, 2013’s Memories and Birds. In between, the North Carolina-bred singer-songwriter renewed his band membership with 6 String Drag—an acclaimed alt-country ensemble who were mainstays on Steve Earle’s E-Squared Records in the ‘90s— for a pair of releases.
Roby enjoyed the reunion, sharing the load of writing and arranging, but he missed the solo scene. At the same time, his personal life was on uneasy footing, thanks to a dissolving marriage and the death of some close friends and members of his family. And, by early 2019, Roby had composed a batch of songs that reflected the upside-down turn his world had taken.
He also had an offer from longtime associate Neal Casal to make a new album. Roby and Casal had known each other for nearly three decades. They’d become comrades and touring partners in Europe in the ‘90s; 6 String Drag even played Casal’s wedding.
Casal related to the existential weight of Roby’s latest musical ruminations, arranging for his friend to migrate to the West Coast to record with a band that he had assembled. Then, tragically, on Aug. 26, 2019, Casal died by suicide.
Besides the obvious shock of his passing, Casal’s death left the project without its producer, though one of the guitarist’s final wishes was for Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools to work with Roby. While performing at a September 2019 tribute concert at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., Roby and Schools finalized their plans for the bassist to helm the album in place of their fallen friend.
Schools, who played with Casal in Hard Working Americans, shifted the locale to Applehead Recording in the Woodstock region of upstate New York. He also brought an A-list lineup of symbiotic players to the October sessions: drummer Tony Leone, multi-instrumentalist Jesse Aycock, bassist Jeff Hill and guitarist John Lee Shannon.
“It was actually healing,” says Roby, who’s since relocated from Raleigh, N.C. to Woodstock. “It felt like a savior stepped in.”
Together, they grieved and made organic music; Roby captured a live vocal take on 13 of the 16 songs. He dropped in subtle references to Casal throughout and penned an exclusive track, “Silver Moon (For Neal),” inspired by that somber evening in Port Chester. The cosmic country eulogy rounds out an often-meditative collection that jockeys between bare confessionals such as “All Trains Lead to Cocaine” and dusty boot kickers like “Hey Angeline.”
“He was the best person for the job, and the people that played on the record were the best people for the job—not just musically, but emotionally,” Roby says of Schools. “Especially in these times, identification is the cure for isolation.”
