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February 5, 2004
Well Well Well:
Rob Morsberger's Serious Piano Pop
It's a fair question to ask a musical artist to pick groups or performers whose work is somewhat analogous to what he or she is producing, but I have to admit that when Rob Morsberger, singer-songwriter and frontman of the Robert Secret Group, told me over coffee at the Black Cow in Croton-On-Hudson, where he resides, that he thought his music was 'Beatleesque", I gulped hard.
After all, the Beatles represent a myriad of pop and rock styles, so what exactly was Morsberger comparing himself to- the Fab Four of "A Hard Day's Night" or Eleanor Rigby" or "I Am the Walrus"? Equally vexing, instead of stating that his songs were akin to, say, Paul Simon's or Patti Smith's, Morsberger had gone straight to the Pantheon, of all places, and put his work alongside that of the gods. What nerve!
Listening to Morsberger's two albums, though, bears out the idea some, and when pressed to elaborate on the comparison later on, he refined his "Beatlesque" appellation to John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney's simpler, unadorned productions, where the piano merely receives rhythmic support. "I like the raw-sounding stuff," he said, noting that what he's really after is the bare-bones approach Lennon achieved on his first solo album, Plastic Ono Band.
"If anything, I loved Lennon's courage as an artist," said Morsberger, "and he's been a source of inspiration to me. I'm much less knowledgeable about the Beatles than a lot of people, but they're a touchstone in pop music even in what you hear today."
The Robert Secret Group was born in New York City during the summer of 1995, several years after Morsberger had been plying his tunecraft on a more modest level. Having been able to attract some of Gotham's top studio and side musicians to help fill out his work over the years, the keyboardist finally clicked in a quartet that included guitarist Jon Herington, bassist Paul Ossola and drummer Robin Gould. "Finding musicians who were excited about playing my songs made all the difference," said Morsberger, who took on the stage moniker of "Robert Secret" to fit in with the murky clubland scene the band began to travel in.
Just as the RSG was getting off the ground, however, its members were recruited by post-new wave troubadour Dan Zanes to tour behind his Mitchell Froom-produced roots effort, Cool Down Time. Other tours and studio gigs followed (Herington, now on the road with Bette Midler, has backed Steely Dan on their last two global jaunts), so it wasn't until 1999 that the Robert Secret Group released its debut album, Waiting For Wood.
Lifting off with its bouncy title track, Waiting For Wood features Morsberger's reedy vocals and top-notch musicianship from the band, and in the end most of the performances are reminiscent of Roger McGuinn's solo work, Elton John, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Randy Newman and Elvis Costello's mature popcraft. Significantly, the songs are all from a confident, knowing pen: the music ranges from lilting melodies ("Trouble and Love") and declarative folk-rockers ("Crammond Island"), while the lyrics are stamped with intuitions and subtle truths.
Morsberger reconvened the band again the following year (Gould, temporarily unavailable, was replaced by Abe Speller) to cut Relativity Blues, and while the album is very much a group effort, Morsberger has stripped down the arrangements and put more of the focus on his singing and piano playing. The result is the kind of sophisticated pop record that's almost an endangered species these days, less pretentious and bloated than what Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright are passing off these days but noteworthy for its superb craftsmanship.
Relativity Blues, as the title suggests, brings some knotty science into the questions of peace, love and understanding, which, Morsberger noted, is actually foreshadowed on "The End of Physics," the last song on Waiting for Wood. Morsberger embraces the creation of album-length collections of songs that hang together thematically, or even just by proximity- a notion, of course, lost to the mostly younger music fans who download individual tunes off the Internet- so he looks at Relativity Blues, an album full of self-proclained "break up" numbers that begins with a quiet ode called "The Last Song," as a statement that captures a particular state-of-mind at a particular time.
"I think a record can aspire to something comparable to what a novel can accomplish," said Morsberger, "and I believe pop music can be a vehicle for serious expression. Use of the vernacular to present sophisticated ideas is how you get through to people and achieve some depth of meaning."
"It's a funny album, too," said Morsberger of Relativity Blues, "in that absurdity and humor often come together." The title track, which details how Einstein's brain was discovered in a Kansas doctor's office over forty years after the great scientist's death, pushes forward poignancies that are, yes, laughable, but stand for something else, maybe? Morsberger's songwriting, an activity that he absolutely enjoys, he said, is deft and allusive enough to keep you thinking past the riffs and choruses.
The son of a renowned painter, Morsberger spent his teens in the United Kingdom. Classically trained as a bassoonist, he knew at 14 that he wanted to be a musician and a songwriter, and thus began taking piano lessons to accomplish his goals. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he moved to New York and began to find studio work. In the past ten years he has accumulated plenty of soundtrack credits for PBS specials and documentary films, and presently he is working on the music for a four-hour long Nova series on the origins of the universe as well as songs to accompany ESL video workshops.
Morsberger has written a good number of songs since the release of Relativity Blues, and he plans to get the RSG back in the studio this April to cut a new album. In the meantime, he's playing old favorites and previewing his newer compositions, such as "It's Only a Song," which reflect the satisfying happiness of home and hearth, he said. A pleasant sense of innocence and genuine surprise concerning the ways of the world pervades much of Morsberger's music-attributable, you could say, to the large amount of time he spends with his two sons and stepdaughter-and in this regard he's definately "Beatlesque."
The Robert Secret Group will perform on Friday, February 20 at One Station Plaza, 38 N. Division St, Peekskill, NY. The show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10; free admission for kids and seniors. For more info call (914) 736-1053.
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