Monthly Archives: March 2025

This touring and subsequent songwriting growth has led to several awards and festival performances, making Robbins a 2021 Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk contest winner, a 2022 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival “Most Wanted to Return” artist, and later a solo mainstage performer at each festival in 2023 and 2024. Robbins has expanded his touring to festivals nationwide, including the Wheatland Festival in Michigan, the Fox Valley Folk Music and Storytelling Festival, and has earned a title as “One of the most promising new songwriters of his generation” — Mike Davies, Fateau Magazine, UK

In early 2023, Robbins was gifted Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations”, a collection of the Roman Emperor’s diaries in the early 100’s AD. The ideas from this book, centered around the concepts of stoicism, seeped into the songs of So Much I Still Don’t See. Much of the album reflects on the inner peace found through stoic philosophy that was discovered in reading this book throughout the past year on the road. 

Another influence on the songwriting of So Much I Still Don’t See is Robbins’ work with the group Music Therapy Retreats. This is the first recording made after starting his work with the organization, which pairs songwriters with veterans to help write their often unheard and inspiring stories into songs. This life changing and life-affirming experience has drawn out deeper emotions and deeper stories in Robbins’ own writing and music, inspired by the open hearts and stories of the veterans he is lucky to work with.

The first single off the album, “What a Little Love Can Do” is a song that captured a moment. Sitting in Nashville after hearing the news of a shooting in the city, Robbins sat alone with his guitar and strummed. Living in the heart of a red state, far away from his New England home, the events of the day made the cracks appear clearer than he’d ever seen them. The first lyrics that appeared in that moment are the first lyrics in the song – “It’s gonna be a long road when we look at where we started, one nation broken hearted, always running from ourselves”. The heaviness of the news of the day, and the news of every day since, has not subsided since this song was written in 2023. 

What led from that lyric was a flow-state writing process. A story of the learning and connections built from Robbins’ travels across the US on tour, driving over 100,000 miles in two years, playing hundreds of shows and meeting thousands of people from very different backgrounds. From Birmingham to Detroit, New Orleans to Los Angeles, Boston to Denver, this song was unknowingly written as the culmination of the lessons learned from these adventures. The depth of connection found when we are physically with one another, when we can talk and laugh and truly see each other, is at the heart of “What a Little Love Can Do”, and the album as a whole. 

The second single and opening track from So Much I Still Don’t See, the sparkling and introspective “Piles of Sand”, was the first song written for the album. The song was written in Nashville and is, like much of the album, written from a place of simplicity and observation. 

He shares, “Walking down a riverside path in Nashville, next to the barbed wire of a prison, watching and feeling gravel being blasted for a high flying condo building across the street was a very inspiring moment. After walking further and seeing a huge pile of gravel soaring high across the street, the first chorus lyric was immediately written down as it appears in the song now: “I thought it was a mountain but it was just a pile of sand towering so high, a nine to five creation”. This line and rhythm was springboard for the rest of the song, steeped in Stoicism, written that afternoon.” 

As the opening track to the album, the sounds of “Piles of Sand” are built around the stark simplicity of a man and his guitar, the perfect sound to kick off the album. Inspired by the James Taylor live album One Man Band, only sparse piano moments are included throughout the song, setting the stage for an album that showcases Robbins’ stunning guitar work and fresh, clear songwriting voice.