"What a Little Love Can Do" felt like the perfect kickoff to my third album, So Much I Still Don't See. The song was written from a moment, like most of the songs on the album. I had spent most of the year on the road, and had just made it back to Nashville from a long run of shows when I heard that there had been a shooting near my house. I was home alone all day after an amazing trip, visiting places that felt so different from where I had grown up in Portsmouth, NH, and I started strumming. The song just flowed from there, and I think that's where the simple, direct nature of the lyrics and message came from- just trying to be in the moment and capture my feelings in a very divided world.

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. The unassuming opening lyric, “I’m standing in the sunlight in a public park in Tennessee/ and I know the soft earth below has always made room for me” sets up the song, which blossoms into a humble but strong meditation on the passing of time and the small moment in which each of our lives take place.

This song was written, again like many of the songs on So Much I Still Don’t See, in and about a moment. 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 a 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.

The third single from So Much I Still Don’t See, the Chet Atkins-inspired, upbeat “The Real Thing”, is the second track on the album and an example of the varied energy across the collection of ten songs. “The Real Thing” began with a lyrical groove – driving out of a certain American city on tour, thousands of miles from home, with a 12 hour drive ahead, the spark of inspiration hit. The groove of the first line, “I’m sailing smooth highway under soft suburb lights/ where an Applebee’s oversees every corner” led to the rest of “The Real Thing” being written all in one night at a hotel in the middle of nowhere, USA. The song is a lighter take on the existential questions present throughout the album. Diving into questions of environmentalism, man’s place in the world, and the writer’s place in the world, “The Real Thing” is the upbeat kickoff to the soft, cutting, inquisitive “So Much I Still Don’t See”.

Sonically, “The Real Thing” is a tribute to one of Robbins’s main influences on guitar, the great fingerstyle player Chet Atkins. With Chet’s signature thumping thumb technique, Robbins built a sonic palette that utilized this classic sound but twisted it with his own modern take. The thumping, western-style groove emulates the vibe of the lyrics – the quintessentially American feeling of driving fast down a dusty highway, to get to anywhere but where you are.