Tear Your Love

“Everybody Knows” is the debut album from Texas-based roots songster, Robert Kuhn. If you’re into categorizing, the album might fall in the Folk/ Americana section, but it has eclectic overtones of reggae, blues, rock and roll, country, Latin, and soul. Folk music is the music of the people, and “Everybody Knows” is folk music of the Americas.
Robert George Kuhn was born in Houston, Texas, in nineteen seventy-eight, minutes after his twin sister, Anna. The birth was complicated and Robert entered the world blue and nearly dead. The first weeks of life were in an incubator but he soon recovered though a sad, sickly child. To boost moral his father, a lawyer, and mother, a schoolteacher, raised him believing he was the first-born.
Robert picked up music from his mother Nancy, who, once a concert bassist, dabbled in the piano. She bought Robert his first guitar at age thirteen and let him play with a harmonica as an infant. His father, George, was a popular-music enthusiast of the fifties, sixties, and seventies and saturated Robert with artists such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Buffet, the Beatles and the Band.
After eighteen years in suburban middle class Houston, Robert received a football scholarship to Bucknell University and moved to rural Pennsylvania. His parents finally told him the truth of his birth and he left Houston with music in his head.
Four years in Pennsylvania earned him Cum Laude degrees in Mathematics and English Literature, and Academic All American honors in football. An injury in his junior year relieved him from sports and allowed him space for music, art and recreation. He devoured Beat poets like Kerouac and Ginsberg and the transcendentalists Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau. He took a semester abroad and traveled through parts of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Before leaving Bucknell, where most of his peers were led into the corporate financial world through greed or debt, Robert said he wanted to be a poet.
After University, Robert worked odd jobs in New York and Houston until saving enough for a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires, Argentina. A week after the World Trade attacks he left the United States with a guitar, back-pack and curiosity for the road that connects the Americas. He arrived to a vast freedom.
He spent eight years in South and Central America, writing, playing music, traveling, shedding himself and making life as a street performer, teacher, fruit-harvester, carpenter, painter, campesino, drug-runner and finally a fisherman and farmer in Nicaragua where he settled for six years.
Hardship inspired Robert to return to Texas in 2010. He found labor at a shirt factory during the days, and at night discovered Houston’s raw music scene in the cafés and bars. At an open mic, Robert met legendary Third Ward native, Little Joe Washington, an archetype who connected Robert to the ancient vein of the Blues.
Robert became Little Joe’s harmonica player, chauffeur, and apprentice, gigging with him around Houston and Galveston. He grew practiced at performing his own material and soon, the energy and originality of the music attracted accomplished musicians such as Clark Duhon, Jahrel Pikens and Chris Larmour to support the songs.
With the money saved from the factory, Robert booked a day at Houston’s famous Sugar Hill Studios and recorded “Everybody Knows” live in ten hours. The twelve songs were tracked in analog by Josh Applebee, mixed by Sugar Hill producer Andy Bradley then mastered at Sterling Sound by Steve Fallone. This album is a fun, soulfully melodic and lyrical experience with something for everyone. Everybody.