Early on, Massachusetts-based singer Robert Norris spent time playing and writing original music with some local artists, but he gave all that up in the ‘90s. “I basically ran out of steam and decided to get on with my life,” Norris said in a 2010 interview, just around the time he started singing again. Norris began working with both a Boston-area studio and a group of professional studio musicians with whom he communicated and collaborated online. The resulting recordings have been released as New Old Songs, a collection of 18 tunes written by Norris over his career, reimagined and slickly executed. The album shows the two equally earnest sides of the singer—the piano-led crooner blues of songs like album-opener
“The Way We Used to Be” and the guitar-driven blues-rock that dominates the record with songs like “The Heat,” “Do What You Gotta Do” and “The Last Woman.”