The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast · Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey

PEL Presents NEM#246: Robert Deeble in His Talking Voice

·1 hr 19 min·5 clips

That was done amongst a small group of friends that I'm still in deep contact with.

The conversation moves backward through Robert Diebel's catalog. Mark starts with "The Forest from the Tree" and then heads into "The Attic of Desire" from The Space Between Us, before backing up to "Uncertain" from the 2017 album Beloved, the title track from Earthside Down, and finally "Rockabye" featuring Victoria Williams from 1994's Days Like These, his professional debut. Diebel says he is promoting his seventh album, though he also notes that his recording life goes back to 1989. That backward motion gives the episode a clear shape. It keeps the focus on how the songs connect across time, instead of treating the earlier records as loose trivia. A lot of the talk is about process. Diebel describes making a rough drum loop for timing, laying down a basic guitar-and-vocal skeleton at home, sending it to Rich, and then letting the arrangement fill in around that frame. He makes it clear that those scratch parts are the structure everyone else follows while the track is still coming together. The episode gets especially interesting when he talks about revising a song that was not working fast enough. He had already gotten most of the way to finishing it when he realized the vocal and conceptual shape needed more room. So he played it live a bit more, worked with some different people, and finally decided to slow it down. That meant re-recording drums and losing the earlier tracks, which Rich meets with clear surprise. Diebel is matter-of-fact about that kind of change. He also has a dry, self-aware streak, joking about whether a title is apologizing to his wife or to Leonard Cohen. The conversation can get technical, but it keeps coming back to plain language and ordinary judgment. By the end, the newer material and the older material feel linked by the same habit of revision, testing, slowing, and reworking until the song settles into a version that can stand on its own.

As heard by us

A grounded songwriter discussion that makes studio process the center of the story.

Robert Diebel's episode on Nakedly Examined Music follows his writing from The Space Between Us back through earlier records and keeps its focus on how the songs were actually made.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Hear how one song got rebuilt until the slower tempo finally clicked.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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