Bobby Pinson 'Man Like Me' album

Kick yourself for stumblin' but never leave your feet / Lie awake with your mistakes and find peace piece by piece / Pray that you wake up as who you want to be / That's how you make a man like me

Born of triumph and tragedy, Bobby Pinson’s songs embody the power and integrity to take them across the width of today’s musical landscape. Political statements, personal mantras, real-life situations, and the examination of the human condition all find a place in Bobby’s diverse material. When the panhandle Texan sings of who he is, where he’s been, and at what cost, his photographic voice rings with gritty truth. “I’ve been wrong enough to know what right is,” says Pinson of his life that’s so vividly depicted in the music that he affectionately calls “Gutter and Grace.”

“A John Deere tractor with an airplane engine” best describes Bobby’s explosive mixture of country roots, rock ‘n’ roll energy and down-to-earth lyrics that springs from his heart.

Bobby’s the son of a high school football coach and an elementary school teacher who “grew up fifty miles past the middle of nowhere in the land of wind and dirt where football was life, Dad was boss, and Christ was King.” Raised in a string of small Texas towns, the perennial new kid learned that you immediately had to find a connection with somebody, while at the same time having almost a blatant disregard for what they thought. “You had to figure out what mattered to them, and at the same time, have a real strong sense of what mattered to you,” says Pinson. “I think that’s why my music is what it is.”

“I lived in these towns without radio. The one trucker station we could get faded in and out, then off at midnight. I wasn’t allowed to go to any concerts and I never bought many records. Not that I was deprived, I just did other things. I’d sing around the house and play my Dad’s guitar, but my musical influences didn’t really come until later in my life.”

Pinson credits artist songwriter greats Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen, and Steve Earle with influencing that high school boy who is thirteen years into a career that’s just now surfaced. Though he attributes his “first three chords” to his dad and his early interest in songwriting to his grandpa, Pinson’s first fascination with rhyme was found on the pages of famed children’s poet, Shel Silverstein.

Bobby started reading Silverstein’s poetry and prose in elementary school. He competed in the Texas Universal Interscholastic League (UIL) storytelling and writing contests. “Like in the third grade, they would pick three kids out of each school, get them in a classroom and read them a story. They would call your name and you would have to tell that story back in three minutes. The child with the most descriptive story and most animated performance won. As you get older, it’s poetry, prose, extemporaneous speaking, then dramatic interpretation - where you take a piece and play out all the characters - you’re reading, but you’re also acting it out with your voice. That’s where I learned I was pretty naturally animated. Over the years, I have incorporated those storytelling skills into my singing style and stage presence. ”

Bobby started writing songs the summer he graduated from high school, though he admits he got off to a rough start. “I sent one of my songs to one of those places I saw in a magazine just before I went into the Army. The only piece of mail I got during basic training was a letter from that magazine rejecting my song.”

“I spent my last year in the Army closing down Fort Ord. I would sing at each battalion’s closing ceremony as they relocated one by one to Fort Lewis, Washington. I was one of the last hundred soldiers on Fort Ord. My band would come on post and we’d rehearse in an old abandoned mess hall. And we sounded like it.”

After three years in the U.S. Army, Bobby paid the first of his dues playing clubs and fairs across the country. In 1996, Pinson moved to Music City with a “sack full of songs that weren’t worth packin’.” The pursuit of his artist aspirations proved to be fruitless in the beginning. For the next three years, Bobby delivered everything from pizzas to the Yellow Pages, worked as a banquet server and bought and sold junk at yard sales and auctions to survive.

In 1999, Bobby signed with Sony/ATV Music as a staff songwriter. In 2000, he signed to what is now known as Stage Three Music. Bobby’s songs found their way onto albums by LeAnn Rimes, Tracy Lawrence, Blake Shelton, Marty Stuart, Van Zant, and more. Though songwriting steadily became his Nashville toehold, Pinson’s artist aspirations were alive and well.

In 2002, Pinson started playing artist/writer showcases around Nashville. Though there were no record label eyebrows raised in the beginning, the “Bobby Pinson buzz” was spreading fast among the underbelly of Music Row.

Producer Joe Scaife heard him at one of these shows and, excited about what he heard, began to work with Bobby. It was the “pre-Gretchen Wilson” Scaife who was interested in Pinson’s raw ruggedness. Four million Gretchen records later, Scaife got his shot with Pinson when RCA’s Renee Bell asked, “Joe, what else ya got?” After nine years and some 30 outside cuts, Pinson and Scaife teamed to produce Bobby’s debut album, Man Like Me.

“My music is passionate and honest and is carved from pieces of my life. Not that everything is literally true, but the feelings are true, and the emotions and experiences are real, even if they’re not mine. I put myself into the character of that small town guy who’s made it out, or the one who hasn’t.

“I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned without saying, ‘Here’s what ya gotta do.’ I’ve never come from that spot. My parents didn’t come from that spot with me. It was like they were telling me, ‘you'll figure it out, but if you want a hint, here it is.’ That's what I try to do with my songs. I'm just a guy who's been ‘the idiot’ who doesn't mind saying so for a good cause. I think people will hear ‘the idiot’ long before they'll listen to the man on the soapbox.

“Some people have called me an ‘outlaw.’ Boy, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash would get a good laugh out of that. I just think for myself and speak my mind. With that often comes the ‘outlaw’ tag, but I'm just honest and real and not askin' anyone for permission to do what I do. If that scares the Hell out of somebody, then so be it!”

Pinson's “lived-in” vocals paint the real life pictures of pain, regret, God, the devil, and the girls that make you believe in both. His songs are colored with wit, stained with whiskey and framed with hard won “wisdom by default.” Bobby Pinson’s music is that oil on canvas portrait of who you were, who you are, and who you want to be, that you wish you could hang on your wall and look at everyday on your way out the door.

Song by Song

1. “I’m Fine Either Way” (Bobby Pinson/Jeremy Spillman)
I’ve always said that: “I’m fine either way.” It’s like saying, “Whatever.” I wrote this song reflecting on several different situations in my life where I was faced with standing my ground regardless of consequence. I was never known as a troublemaker, but it was never my nature to just say, “OK, let’s just get along” no matter what. I’d say, “OK, I’d to get along, but we don’t have to.” I think having moved so many times from town to town, I learned over the years how to readjust, while at the same time never losing sight of who I was and what I stood for. I’ve taken a couple of award-winning “butt-whoopins,” but I’ve never been famous for backing down. Fortunately, I’ve calmed down over the years, but I’ve always looked at it like “I hope you’ll like me-maybe you won’t, I’M FINE EITHER WAY.”

2. “Nothin’ Happens In This Town” (Bobby Pinson/Jeremy Spillman)
This song is kind of like “Shadows of the Heartland” on alcohol—it’s the rebel kid, three years later. (Same setting, but with louder music and higher auto-insurance.) I was never the high school party animal that would drive twenty miles to a wet county and hope he found someone old enough to buy him beer, but I rode some roads with those who did. I never hung out of the passenger side window and took aim at the city limit sign, but I lived in a town with the population of two thousand, two hundred and twenty-two and two “twenty-two” bullet holes. There are a lot of great people who have come from small towns, there are a lot of great people that stayed there. I think they’ll all tell you that the charm of a small town is the stuff that goes on when there’s nothing going on.

3. “One More Believer” (Bobby Pinson/Jim McBride)
A crooked road doesn’t seem crooked when you’re on it. It’s not until you get to a high point in your life where you can turn and look back on those questionable miles you traveled and realize how far you strayed from the straight and narrow. I’d had a couple years there where if “It Happened” in a bar on Music Row, I either knew about it or caused it. It was usually B. I walked out of a club one night and there, in the middle of the street, I met a woman who made me not care if I ever stepped foot in one of those places again. It turned into a “real long hello,” then I married her. This song is me standing on a hill, closing my eyes, taking a deep breath and saying, “Thank you, God, for seeing me even when I wasn’t worth looking at.”

4. “Don’t Ask Me How I Know” (Bobby Pinson, Bart Butler, Brett Jones)
That nine year old’s Evel Knievelscar that’s still on my thirty-two-year-old ankle found its place among the many scars and sketches of “Don’t Ask Me How I Know.” I was three years old when my Momma drove thirteen miles back into town and gave me three pennies to pay for that piece of bubble gum that I had eternally borrowed from the check-out counter. I try to write songs that are true to life, based not only on personal experience, but mere observation. I’m just the conduit for the emotion. I’m fortunate not to have lived every situation in this song, but to disclose what’s true and what’s not, well, that would be “letting out the magic.”

5. “Man Like Me” (Bobby Pinson/Kris Bergsnes/Charlie Moore)
If I could only put one song on my album it would be “Man Like Me.” I came up with the very first line, and then I rattled it off, almost like a chant. I remember that it felt like the song was giving instructions, and I stopped and said, “one thing I want to make sure is that when we’re doing this, we’re not preaching.” The last verse of the song -“kick yourself for stumbling but never leave your feet, lie awake with your mistakes and find peace piece by piece” - is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written.

6. “Started a Band” (Bobby Pinson/Matt Rossi)
During those years of trying to get a record deal and failing miserably, I was told several times that I should start a band and try to get a record deal that way. One small problem: I wasn’t a band. I was one guy who wrote songs and sang them. It was that simple. I finally got tired of the useless advice and I wrote “Started a Band” as a joke. No artist in their right mind would sing the last verse of this song, so I sang it! If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

7. “Ford Fairlane” (Bobby Pinson/Kris Bergsnes)
The oddest thing about this song is that there is no Ford Fairlane. My very first truck was a “Tooth” yellow ‘67 International pickup with a dead squirrel in the heater box and all the leaf springs missing on one side. I was writing with Kris Bergsnes, and describing that truck, and I came out with that line: “dust on the dashboard, rust on the back door, wouldn’t take a million dollars for.” And I was trying to get the “or” rhyme, so I said “that old four-door Ford Fairlane,” because it had that rhyme and all those “f”s in it. The next thing you know, that Ford Fairlane became that ‘67 International pickup, and then it became a kind of love story after that—a love for anything, a favorite car, a guitar, somebody’s favorite fishing pole. And that’s how we approached it: this song isn’t about a car any more than Rocky was about boxing.

8. “Shadows of the Heartland” (Bobby Pinson/Kris Bergsnes)
That’s probably the closest song to me in terms of actual experience. I grew up in the panhandle of Texas, where it’s so flat you could sit on your roof and watch your dog run away for four days. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and now it’s like I can’t wait to write a song that would afford me the right to move back. My wife and I will probably live in Nashville forever, but home will always be there. My family lived in the last house on our street, with nothing but a farm-to-market road between us and a 17-mile-long wheat field. I think that song romanticizes that time of my life before driving. This song is Panhandle, Texas or anywhere you need it to be. “Shadows” is me from my first kiss to my last down of football. It was the calm before the storm, and I’ll always have a special place in my heart for that town and those years. A lot of time has passed since then, and I still know those streets. I still smell that early morning “two-a-days” grass. I still hear the band and I still feel the wind. SHADOWS OF THE HEARTLAND!

9. “Way Down” (Bobby Pinson/Jeremy Spillman)
I love this groove. It’s kind of a Tom Petty thing. I get my lyric from emotions, and sometimes I get my emotions from melody. Somebody will play something, or I’ll have a line, and I’ll hum it, and go through and lay out the melody, just as a road map. It might change three or four times, but I like doing that because it gives me something to do while I figure out what else I’m doing. I just kinda give myself a concert and wait for the words to fall. My favorite line in the song is “a friend of mine heard from a friend of hers she was workin’ on last name number three-there was a time I’d have relished those words, but I’m not where I used to be.” This song’s about getting over the bitterness of love gone bad and finding peace and freedom through forgiveness.

10. “I Thought That’s Who I Was” (Bobby Pinson/Tommy Conners)
You think you are who you are until you realize who you’re not, and that’s just how life is. I wrote this with Tommy Conners right before Christmas last year, and I didn’t think it was finished, so I forgot about it. He called me up the day before my last session for the album and said he wanted to demo it, so I went in to sing it and I couldn’t remember the song. When he reminded me of how it went, I could see that it didn’t need anything more. I knew by the time I was done that it was something special. I just loved the song, So I called [RCA Label Group Sr. VP A&R] Renee Bell in Florida, and overnighted her a copy of the board tape, and she called me back while I was in the studio and said, “you’ve got to cut that.” I threw it on and it turned out to be one of my favorites. Demoed on Tuesday, recorded on Wednesday, now that’s old school!

11. “Time Well Spent” (Bobby Pinson/Kris Bergsnes/Jim McCormick)
I wrote this about four years ago. It’s funny the things that meant the world to you when your world was small. This song is that first love you lost your senior year in high school, but didn’t quit loving until your senior year in college, or those friends who were so important before they went away and now you can’t remember their last names. “Time Well Spent” is that yearbook book picture of me in the letter jacket and championship mullet with a mouth full of metal and tight rolled jeans.

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Bobby Pinson - Man Like Me