“Never underestimate your audience.”

Robinson’s first choice is Trapeze by Patty Griffin, a song that exemplifies the kind of fearless storytelling she admires most. “I love that Patty Griffin drops you into a world without doing any explaining. She just drops you into a story,” Robinson explains. “And there’s this piece of writing advice that I really love, and it is never underestimate your audience, meaning, don’t over-explain things. You can drop people right into a world, into a person, or into a story or a place without doing all this explaining on how they got there.”

She lights up when discussing Griffin’s craft, particularly her portrayal of women on the margins. “That song in particular, I mean the first couple lines of the second verse… she started with us on the back of a horse just 17 and already divorced. Like, I have chills when I think about that line. It’s like one of the greatest first lines of a verse. She’s just an incredible songwriter.”

The perspective, Robinson notes, comes from someone else in the traveling circus. “It’s somebody else, presumably a little bit older, reflecting on this young, bright talent who’s also a pretty shattered young person herself. And I don’t know, I just like I love that song. I will love it till the day I die. I often use it for sound checks because I just love to sing it.”

A Green River runs through it

For her second cover, Robinson turns to John Prine’s Paradise – a song she’s known longer than any other in his catalog. “When I was in university I worked at a summer camp and it was on the Green River in North Carolina, which is a different Green River than the one up in Muhlenberg County in the song. But the camp had kind of taken it on as their song, as Paradise, you know, down by the Green River where Paradise lay.”

Those campfire singalongs left a lasting impression. “We played that song every campfire and the kids loved it so much. And I just, you know, something I love about John is his songs were not cliche, they were not overt, but he was just there to tell a story.” That story – about strip mining and environmental destruction – connects directly to Robinson’s own songwriting, particularly her new song Dirtbag Saloon.

When the billionaires push out the millionaires

Dirtbag Saloon emerges from Emily Scott Robinson’s years living in Telluride, Colorado, where she witnessed dramatic economic transformation firsthand. “In the past five years, people started saying that the billionaires came and pushed out the millionaires,” she explains. “Affordable housing was a crisis and people were driving an hour and a half just to work. So a three hour commute every day. People still regularly do that.”

She watched as rental houses were torn down and replaced with expensive new builds. “I would see people post houses for rent for like $10,000 a month. You know, that is so out of touch.” The economic reality created an unsustainable situation. “If you want to go to a restaurant, if you want to ski on the mountain, if you want to like go to a coffee shop – who’s going to serve you? How will this economy work? It’s incredibly top heavy and there’s no sort of base.” But writing about economics alone wasn’t enough. “I wanted to write about that, but I didn’t know how to couch the story. A song needs to have a heart to it.”

The solution came from a bar called Linda’s in another Colorado town: “One of the last great weird Western bars in Colorado, in my opinion. Linda lived in Aspen for a long time and moved over to this town a long time ago. She has this crazy cool bar and it’s covered in Victorian dolls and antique velvet furniture and this great but terribly old opera piano that sounds like it fell off a cliff.”

“And it’s only open on Fridays and on Christmas and she opens it around 6:30, maybe a little earlier in the winter because it’s dark out. And then she closes it when she’s tired of having people in her house because she lives in the back.” For Robinson, Linda’s represents something essential. “Linda’s for me stands for the place where the locals can still go. And it’s kind of like the last stand. The keep where everyone’s hiding, you know. Once places like that are gone, it’s like the culture is gone.”

A collection of life songs.

The new album, Appalachia, represents a significant chapter in Emily Scott Robinson’s career. She recorded it with Josh Kaufman from Bonnie Light Horseman, along with a small group of collaborators. “It was me, it was Josh, his wife Annie played the bass. My friend Duncan plays fiddle and cello all over the record. And my friend Lizzie sings harmonies. It was a really intimate creative process. Just five days, two songs a day, boom, a record.”

When asked what the album means to her, Robinson pauses thoughtfully. “It’s like a collection of life songs. It’s really an album about death and the thin veil between worlds, and about endings and new beginnings. New life breaking through.” It’s Robinson’s first album of songs she has written since she went through a divorce in 2020. “A weird couple of years to begin with, as so many of us went through a lot of loss and confusion and heartbreak and division. But it’s also quite joyful and connected.”

The album explores deeply personal territory. “There’s a song in there about my grandmother who had dementia at the end of her life. It’s called Time Traveler and I think it’s a song that might bring comfort to people who have loved ones who have dementia. There’s a song about a friend of mine and Lizzie’s who died right before we went into the studio that we wrote on the final night before we finished the album.”

The album opens with Hymn for the Unholy, a New Year’s song that challenges conventional resolutions. “It always felt strange to me that we were supposed to have all this energy in January around changing our lives. January is like the lowest energy month. And so it’s really a song inviting us to step into the mystery of like this very, like this broken and beautiful and very human existence that we live in.”

Appalachia will be released on January 30th, 2026

Photos

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