Album Review: Beautifully All Over the Place by Eric Roberson

A grown-folks record comfortable in its own living room. Roberson’s pen is sharpest when it stays indoors; the pep talks could use a window.

Courtesy of Blue Erro Soul.

In 1994, a kid out of Rahway, New Jersey, with a Howard University theater scholarship and a single called “The Moon” on Warner Bros. watched the label shelve his debut and then lost the master tapes when someone broke into his moving truck. Most people would have taken the hint. Eric Roberson took it as a business plan. He built Blue Erro Soul in 2001, pressed his own records, sold north of 100,000 copies without a distributor, picked up two Grammy nominations and a Soul Train award, taught five years at Berklee, and kept releasing albums at a pace that would embarrass artists with entire departments behind them. Beautifully All Over the Place is number eighteen. If you have followed him since the early 2000s, you already know what kind of record this is. If you haven’t, the title is the most misleading thing about it—nothing here is messy, scattered, or half-finished. It is tidy, warm, and almost entirely about two subjects, romantic patience and self-encouragement.

Half the album runs on the same premise. He spots a woman, he senses a connection, and he asks her to give it a chance without pressure. “Come with Me” stages this as a daydream in a lobby—he imagines her reaching for him, wakes up when her girlfriend arrives, and chases after her with a line comparing their potential bond to flowers and springtime, birds and trees. “Trust in Love” strips the scenario down to its gentlest version, Roberson telling a woman who’s been hurt that he’s not there to rush or judge her, just to sit nearby until she’s ready, Jayshawn Champion picking up the same thread with a promise to carry her baggage. “Believe in Me” asks her to let his chest be her pillow, says his story was fading until she filled the rest. Taken individually, any one of these would hit as real tenderness from a singer who clearly means it. Stacked back-to-back-to-back, they begin to lose their edges. He is so committed to patience as a romantic strategy that the songs themselves become patient to a fault—polite, careful, and too alike to distinguish from each other on a second pass.

The three encouragement cuts split the difference between sermon and self-help, and one of them justifies the whole batch. “Fight Thru It All” tells Roberson’s own reflection that he deserves happiness and should dance in the rain while it passes, and the second verse admits some days the current is too heavy to paddle, a decent concession that still dead-ends in a generic directive to fight through it all. “Do Something” drops any personal stake and goes fully outward, challenging you to encourage a stranger, shoot your shot in a mirror, fill the middle of your life with fun. Neither of those tracks offers a thought that couldn’t fit on a motivational poster in a dentist’s office.

But “Where You Gonna Go,” with BJ the Chicago Kid splitting the song open from the intro, actually earns its pep talk. BJ admits up front that he doesn’t know who the message is for, that it might be for himself, and that admission cracks the self-help shell enough to let something honest in. The second verse stacks a mountain and then a river and tells you nobody else can climb or swim for you. And the bridge warns that if we don’t go, we’ll end up somewhere we shouldn’t be, which carries a real sting, the first time in any of the motivational songs where the cost of not moving gets named rather than waved away.

Roberson’s sharpest material shows up in “Harmonize,” which opens with a spoken bit about making breakfast. He offers to cook, she picks cereal, and he surrenders with a laugh and heads for the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It’s a nothing moment, a thirty-second throwaway that accomplishes more than entire verses elsewhere on the record, because it puts two people in a kitchen instead of a speech about togetherness. When the song itself kicks in, Roberson meets a woman whose new melody he already knows the key to, and they sing together until the moon swaps for the sun. Micki Miller wakes up beside him sounding like a symphony that swallows every other noise.

With “Sweeter Than You,” he builds a love song entirely out of small sweet things. He’d give her his last quarter for the gumball machine, knowing she’d bite the gumball in half and hand the rest back. They share morning coffee with no sweetener; her lips take care of it. Even the alarm clock sounds good, thanks to what he sees when he opens his eyes. Avery*Sunshine floats through a duet that never tries to be bigger than the room it’s in. And “Still Be Loving You” swings to the opposite end, pledging love across cosmic timelines. When dust becomes their home and aliens find their bones, his will be wrapped around hers, after cars learn to fly and spaceships drift past. Then he punctuates the whole celestial promise with a wink about the freaky things she does and a bridge where doctors warn him off sugar. That gap between grandeur and goofiness is the funniest and warmest moment on the record, a man so comfortable in a long relationship that he can vow eternal devotion and crack a joke about his blood sugar in the same breath.

Beautifully All Over the Place is built for the audience that already has Eric Roberson in their rotation—adults who play records on Sunday mornings, couples who have been together long enough to know that grand gestures matter less than someone remembering to make the coffee. Roberson sings to that room, and within it, he rarely misses. The trouble is how often he re-enters it through the same door. After eighteen albums, Roberson has earned the trust of anyone still listening. The question this record can’t quite answer is whether trust alone, without surprise, is enough to carry a new set of songs past the ones he’s already given us.

Above Average (★★★☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Where You Wanna Go,” “Sweeter Than You,” “Harmonize”