Robbie Gil

“I want to burn a straight line to the audience,” explains Gil, talking about his shoot-from-the-hip songwriting and straight-from-the-heart performances. “I don’t put up many walls as far as what I write about. And I really try very hard to give 120 percent of myself every time I play.

“I look at connecting to the audience as an extraordinary thing and that’s my main goal,” he continues. “To connect and to share my experience, my loss and heartbreak, triumph or joy - whatever that emotion is, I want to share it in a communal way.”

While Gil laughs at his early career as a musician as his “Behind The Music” era, those hard-living, hard-partying years weren’t a dead-end when it came to fodder for songwriting. There’s a hard-won depth of both experience and emotion to his tunes, made richer by the hope attained by making it to the other side.

There’s also an honesty and candidness gleaned from the singers and songwriters he grew up on - Springsteen and Petty, Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin, The Who - mixed with the modern sensibilities of artists like Ray LaMontagne and David Gray.

“I believe in singer/songwriters who are trying to say what’s true and what they honestly feel and believe. If it’s real, the audience will get it,” he says. “That’s what I try to do - I try to write things that hit me in the heart. If it hits me in the heart and it’s something that rings true or beautiful, then I know that I’m onto something and that it is going to hit other people that way as well. “

Like Springsteen, Gil firmly believes in the power of giving his all in his live performance – and it shows in this recording. “I’d like people to know that I really do feel that way – that it’s not a put on thing, That I literally physically don’t know how not to give that much,” he smiles “it’s impossible for me to try to mark a show. It doesn’t work. I have to be in the moment of it and I have to give everything I have to the audience. I give the songs as much as I can possibly give them in order to be able to give the audience what I think they deserve, which is nothing short of all of it.