While Americana has been embraced by a relentless stream of country-turned-folk lately, it’s now rare to see an artist turning the A word into rustic blues and folk that spares us of the honky-tonk. With a strummy vibe and welcoming vocals evoking earthy joy, singer-songwriter Rob Marshall sounds like a by-the-way artist on a dusty record pulled from the store bin with the imaginative cover.
Marshall has been cutting his teeth on the L.A. Americana scene for several years now. On keys & vocals with his band The California Cavalry and also as a solo artist, he has performed & recorded with The Mastersons, Calling Cadence, Grammy-winner Gabby Moreno, bassist Taras Prodaniuk (Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, Shelby Lynne) and keyboardist John Ginty (Neal Casal, Whiskeytown, Blind Boys of Alabama). Marshall has also been featured recently at Americana UK & on Holler’s “Best New Country” playlist.
Glide is premiering Marshall’s new tune “Honey Bear” – a downhome modern acoustic folk tune that tells the tale of a bear who lives in a canyon. He eats honey, weathers the changing seasons, hibernates, wakes up, and eventually falls in love and starts a little bear family—all to Marshall’s gorgeous guitar picking and gentle voice, which flows like an Appalachian brook. The song plays like a daydream on a fine spring day, like the song might be an outtake from Jerry Garcia & David Grisman’s celebrated Not for Kids Only record. Of course, the last verse offers an existential twist about “a rock in space, deep in the bottom of nothing,” and the humans living on said rock, their search for meaning, and the lessons learned in love and life and death.
Marshall wrote “Honey Bear” more than ten years ago while in school studying opera and classical art song at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Taking a break to dabble in country, folk & blues was how he downshifted from all that heady music theory he was learning at the time.
“I came up with an early version of ‘Honey Bear’ while I was living with this funny old lesbian lady named Crystal,” Marshall recalls. “I lived in her back garage, and I had a ukulele at the time. I just remember sitting in my room looking out at her backyard, and just playing these simple chords. I don’t remember exactly how the idea of the honey bear started, but I remember playing it for my Dad. I only had the initial concept of it and some part of the lyrics, but I played it for him, and he said, ‘You know it’d be really cool if you had this whole story of the bears, and then they have kids.’ I kinda brushed it off at the time, like ‘Dad, you’re such a dork.’ But then it actually ended up developing that way.”
