Robert Kramer

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THE CROWN WAS ALWAYS HEAVY MUSIC REVIEW -1883 MAGAZNE

ROBERT KRAMER/LETTING IT GO

Eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds. That’s how long Robert Kramer takes to open his new album, Beyond The Great Divide, and he isn’t apologizing for it. “Letting It Go” is the first thing you hear, and it’s built like a threshold. You walk through it or you don’t.

Kramer has been on the Midwest scene for over 20 years. Keys, guitar, vocals, composing. He’s written for film, video and TV, landed music on CBS’s The Young & The Restless, and worked with Napoleon Murphy Brock, the Frank Zappa vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. His solo run goes back to Songs Of Past Lives in 2000, with Shadow Logic arriving in 2017.

Then came a long gap. This album took ten years to finish, and the backstory is rough. Personal struggle. Health recoveries. A production history that dragged on for over a decade. You can feel why the opener is about surrender.

A King With Nothing Left

The lyric runs on a feudal kingdom metaphor, and it commits. Kramer starts as a “king inside his castle, holding on to all my gold.” Rich, safe, and completely alone. The castle walls echo back at him until he asks the only question that matters: “What have I done?”

The chorus is basically a mantra. “Hold on, I’m Letting It Go.” From there the crown gets heavy, the drawbridge comes down, and the status goes out the window. By the last movement he’s a “lowly peasant” on a dirt road, with “only just my soul for food.”

And here’s the best part. Once he’s given the crown away, the sun lands on his head and becomes a “golden crown.” He had to lose the fake one to get the real one. It’s an old idea, sure, but he lands it with a neat twist and I bought it completely.

Pipes, Keys and Patience

According to the album notes, the arrangement tracks the story. It moves from a dark, keyboard and synth atmosphere of isolation into a guitar and pipe-led crescendo as the narrator steps into the light. And yeah, those are Northumbrian bagpipes. That’s a gutsy pick. Most rock writers would grab a string pad and call it medieval. Choosing a real folk instrument for a song about a lonely king tells you Kramer actually thinks about this stuff.

The players back that up. Guitarist Chris Siebold and Hall Of Fame keyboardist and composer Dave Rice are on the record, across 13 tracks. Kramer says the whole project is about getting real music back into the indie community. Big claim. A ten-year build with players like that at least earns him the hearing.

Long songs ask for patience, and this one asks for a lot of it. If you’ve got eight and a half minutes, go watch Letting It Go and see if you put your own crown down too.

THE STORY OF "BEYOND THE GREAT DIVIDE"

Some years ago, shortly after my Shadow Logic release in 2016, I began exploring different musical inspirations to write new material. Browsing through the various pictures across the internet, I was specifically looking for a graphic that reflected an idea for a song I had after watching the Indiana Jones movie “The Last Crusade”.

In the movie, which focused on the search for the “Holy Grail”, there was one scene where a drawing in a journal was displayed of a knight in full battle dress crossing a great open divide, arms outstretched, grasping at a chalice just in front of them. It became the inspiration for the title and cover of the next album.

The "leap of faith" sketch from Dr.Henry Jones diary—it is officially known as "A Leap from the Lion's Head"—is a key artifact from the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989)

Inspired by this, it got me thinking about how the search for each persons true purpose in life sometimes seems to be just out of reach, and the struggles we go thru to try and reach the unreachable, in spite of all odds.

As I explored further, I searched for more graphics that could inspire me to compose a song centered around that basic idea. I came across what I thought at the time looked like an old photograph of a temple. It was a haunting photograph taken by an Irish photographer named Harry Thuillier Jr.

("Temple" by Harry Thuillier Jr. - used with kind permission of Ian Thuillier)

I did some research into this photograph, and discovered the intriguing, complex life of Harry Thuillier Jr., and his struggles with his craft and his life, and the background of his art.

One of the side stories regarding Harry was an incident that occurred according to his brother, Ian Thuillier:

Harry followed the photographic route and after returning from studying photography in Memphis College of Art and Boston, he was involved in an accident one December night where he was attacked. This resulted in him losing the majority of his sight in his photographic eye and he was forced to change the way he took photographs from a normal camera to a large format 10x8 field camera. He became a successful artist mastering the notoriously difficult technique of platinum and palladium printing and was one of the early pioneers in the early ‘90s in Ireland of this medium. He never truly recovered from his ordeal and passed away suddenly on 27 December 1997 at the age of 33 in Milan.

I knew that here was the inspiration I was looking for, and from this one photograph, discovered a whole new compositional direction with what was to become the title track “Beyond The Great Divide”. I knew this was my “Holy Grail”, musically speaking, so I went to work, composing this and eventually other songs as well, centered around this basic theme.

During the 2016-2017 time frame, I also had a number of songs I wanted to work on for this new album. Having over 200 songs stuck in a file drawer just collecting dust didn't seem very productive, so I reached out to a number of pro-level musicians I knew thru my good friend and fellow musician/composer Val Leventhal, who had worked with some top flight session players in the past. One of the musicians was Steve Hashimoto, a fabulous bass player who had an extensive recording and performing career. As he also did charts, I thought this would be golden opportunity to get down to it and bring some of these dust-gathering tunes to life. He collected a number of other musicians he had worked with, and I booked a session at my home recording studio.

After the initial 2017 recording sessions, I thought we were on track to complete the album, but due to the classic “unforeseen circumstances”, the project got put on hold. There were financial and personnel issues, and just a wide gap of situations that got in the way to make finishing it untenable at the time.

Using other musicians and actors, I had also just completed filming footage for a possible music video for one of the songs, “Letting It Go” at a beautiful location called Ravenstone Castle in Harvard, Illinois. (We actually even got a real bagpipe player for the intro! )

Everything seemed all good, and then, well, life happens. The timing just wasn't right, although we had the material and a group of super musicians in the lineup. As I mentioned, we had Steve Hashimoto on bass, and he brought in Pat Fleming on guitar, Mike Levin on woodwinds, Leandro Lopez Varady on keys, and Heath Chappell on drums and percussion. The sessions went very well, and we captured the essence of the feel of the tracks for the album I was hoping for. Due to scheduling issues, however, they were already committed to other projects and such, so local appearances and touring was out for the moment.

Fast forward to 2024. I was all set and ready to resume and finish the project when…. the car accident happened. I thought, “ok, the universe must be telling me something..”. Thru the darkness of struggling thru the many months of surgery, rehab, and recovery, I came to understand that the original meaning and inspiration behind the project was to get BEYOND whatever happens in our lives. In the material and in the artwork, I chose to represent the struggles and challenges everyone must go thru to get past whatever happens to us IRL, and take the proverbial “leap of faith” and forge on in spite of whatever we're going thru, just as Harry Thuillier Jr did with his art and his life.

So, back into the studio I go, this time, with a top line-up of the great people and musicians I had come to know at Shanahans Pub in Woodridge, Illinois, which by this time, had become my new musical family.

Every picture tells a story as they say, and the people in these photos were responsible for bringing the rest of the album to life so that it could now be released into the world.

In an ironic and sad twist of fate, a year after the final tracking was completed on the last two songs on the album, our drummer, Larry Ortega passed away in July 2026. His efforts, talent, and heart will be missed by all who know and love his soul, his humor and his stunning, energetic performances.

This album is fondly dedicated to him.