Robin Orr is getting ready for rehearsal with her new band. In the past couple months, as musicians emerged from pandemic isolation, she put together a colorful pop-rock group called Snowbound.
“When we first moved to Tahoe we were painting our house,” she says. “Snowbound was one of the different shades of white. I connected with it since I have a white grand piano in my living room and I like snow and skiing. I just thought it was a good name for being drawn to live here in the alpine landscape.”
Listen to “Bleeding Heart”
Courtesy Robin Orr
The band features a colorful cast of characters including professional rock climber Timmy O’Neil on drums, New York arranger Mike Grippi on bass, classically trained Jacob Melvoin on guitar and South Shore journeyman Dylan Long.
“There’s a good mix of personalities and talents. We have a musical chemistry that came together really naturally.” –Robin Orr
“There’s a good mix of personalities and talents,” says Orr. “We have a musical chemistry that came together really naturally.”
Orr’s style features an eclectic mix of new age, pop and rock, which evokes a bygone era of The Sundays, Dido and Annie Lennox. As a child, her father charmed her playing “Claire de Lune” by Claude Debussy on their old upright piano. He would often play his record collection of jazz artists such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and George Winston. She grew up in Palos Verdes and Orange County where she attended and sang at megachurches.
“I liked that people were always engaged,” she says. “It felt like energy was being passed back and forth through the music.
As a teen, Orr loved popular rock music of the day such as U2, The Police and Peter Gabriel. She studied music at University of San Diego where she played keyboards in a jam band called Pure Noodle. She recorded her first album, “Little Vortex,” under the name Ghost Called Gravity in 2015 at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco.
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Orr recently built a home recording studio in her spare bedroom in the Al Tahoe neighborhood of South Lake where she has lived for the past three years with her fiancé, two dogs and a cat. This simple act has completely altered the way she approaches songwriting.
“Before, it was almost a painful process,” she says. “It would be so much effort to write a chorus, not being happy with it and doing a lot of rewrites. With writing via recording, things come together a lot quicker for me. It’s great to have that ground level of a song to work from.”
She is now releasing one single per month as she gathers material for a new album that explores themes of dreams, love and loss.
In May, she put out slow burner “Bleeding Heart” inspired by the book “Love You Like the Sky: Surviving the Suicide of a Beloved” by psychologist Sarah Neustadter.
“It was these letters that she wrote to her beloved,” says Orr. “This rarely happens to me, but I read the book and wrote the song in about 5 minutes. I almost felt this connection with her man on the other side.”
June brought “Babylon,” a spacey Bjork-like exploration of her relationship with her second husband who had bipolar disorder.
“It was a really dark point in my life trying to support him and realizing there was nothing I could do,” she says. “Babylon is something you start building, but the bigger it gets, the more dramatic it is when it falls.”
This month she released electro-dance single, “State of Mind.”
“I wanted to try to write a dance tune,” she says. “It’s loosely inspired by Madonna’s ‘Music’ and Bill Withers ‘Lovely Day.’ The lyrics don’t have any meaning.”
August will see a remix of Ghost Called Gravity tune “Pretty Penny,” an upbeat, catchy song recalling early 90s female-fronted post-punk acts like Letters to Cleo and The Cardigans.
“It’s about my friend who had moved from Michigan to Hollywood with all her stuff in the car to pursue her dream of working in the film industry,” says Orr. “She made it happen, worked all these amazing jobs and then changed her mind. At the time, we had a really cool connection.”
Like so many musicians around the world, Orr is simply happy to be playing with other musicians and performing live again.
“I feel really inspired and grateful because I love it so much,” she says. “It’s just been so fun to explore new types of music and songwriting.” | snowboundmusic.com.
