We were lucky to catch up with Bobbo Byrnes recently and have shared our conversation below.

Bobbo , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My folks kind of made me work for it. Not in a Dickensian way but they were not all that enthused when I started playing music. And I started kind of late. I was 17. For the most part they tolerated it, which is fair because I was terrible for a long time. I went out and bought the only electric guitar I could afford and I didn’t know how to tune it and I cranked up the distortion and made experimental feedback noises in the basement because I didn’t know what I was doing but I was having fun.

Some nights my dad would stand at the top of the basement stairs, flick the lights on and off and yell down “Play the guitar with the hole in it!” Meaning, he was tired of listening to electric guitar and it was now time to pick up an acoustic – and that’s when I started working at the craft of songwriting.

But they let me figure it out on my own. I think that they thought it was just a phase and I’d get over it and go do something normal but I saw myself with a guitar and performing as a way to see the world. I wanted to learn and grow and have experiences to write about beyond my hometown. My folks weren’t the typical stage parents, in fact, I don’t think they liked any music I made until maybe my fifth or sixth album when I remember them calling me up to say how much they liked a specific song and they were fans from then on. My dad used to wear my shirts all the time and now my mom will sit in the audience and sing along, sometimes she tours with me and she does like to heckle me as well.

For me, having to prove myself and me believing in me and what I was doing was the motivation I needed.

Bobbo , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a singer/songwriting/world traveling troubadour. I love toast. I still think of myself as a hockey goalie. And I am beyond lucky to be married to my favorite person in the world.

For the first bit of my musical life I just wanted to be the lead guitar player in a band that sang a song or two. I was always writing songs but never felt that comfortable being the singer and at some point I ended up with a backlog of songs that I liked that were never going to be played in the band that I was in because the actual singer of that band had lots more good songs that we were playing. That’s how my first solo album came about.

I’ve always found it easier to be the man behind the front person. Like when my wife Tracy is singing lead in our band, The Fallen Stars, I love supporting her in the sideman position. But most of the time, I am the lead singer/front person/solo artist and that part was born out of necessity and not so much desire. I love it now but it was not originally my plan.

I’ve found the discipline of being a solo artist is much harder than being just a dude in a band. If everything goes wrong, it’s all you.  But sometimes everything goes right.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

That is something I encounter all the time in my studio. Someone will say “yeah, but I’m not really a songwriter…” or whatever. They discount their own creativity before they even start. My mother makes amazingly detailed quilts by hand and she will say “oh, you know, it’s alright.” The amount of artistry that goes into it is insane. A single quilt will take her over 100 hours to complete. She’s cutting and sewing and making the design and visualizing it before it even exists. That’s creativity. That is art. My wife Tracy took up watercolor painting just a few months ago and she’s never done anything like this before and she’s amazing at it.  No one told her she could or couldn’t do it, so she just did it. I love that!

Artists of all types need the space to suck. What I mean by that is that very rarely is your first song going to be great. You’re likely not going to be a good singer at first either. And if you get judged by your first attempts, it may stifle your creativity from there on. I have written or co-written about 400 songs and easily another hundred or so that no one has heard because they are terrible. I clearly remember having a teacher in college that encouraged my writing. And she didn’t have to. But it made me believe that I could do a thing if I stuck with it. I wrote hundreds of songs and poems back then all just trying to find my voice.

When I start working with new clients in my recording studio, I make them read two things that I have framed on my wall. The first is the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by WC Williams. It’s a poem about how all art is dependent upon the actual doing it. You can talk about how you could’ve painted a thing or whatever but until you actually do it – it doesn’t matter. Shut up and do it. Because there will always be some person telling you that they can do it better but they don’t, they just talk about it. So don’t pay them any attention.

The second is a quote from musician/producer Brian Eno:

“If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted – they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that. Then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you can say, ‘well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning and I could start something.’ The tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest and then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work.”

That’s the main thing – we are all creative. A lot of folks forget that. I look at those two quotes EVERY DAY.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

It’s funny you chose the word “resilience” because I’ve adopted a Black Eyed Susan motif recently. I took a picture of some in my friend Heike’s garden in Germany and it became part of the artwork for my new album “October”. Black Eyed Susans symbolize resilience. When I found that out, I started making t-shirts with Black Eyed Susans. My whole story is persistence and resilience. I’m not the best singer songwriter in the world, hell probably not even on my street – but I am the one doing it.

Calvin Coolidge is not brought up all that often but he has a quote that I love:

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

I think I’m going to frame that quote too and put it on my wall.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bobbobyrnes.com
• Instagram: bobbo_byrnes
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Bobborockstar/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbo-byrnes-8a103b2/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheFallenStars
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BobboByrnes
• Other: https://www.patreon.com/BobboByrnes https://linktr.ee/bobbobyrnes

Image Credits
Roman Sonntleitner, Tracy Byrnes