Standing tall on the back of a brand new album, a two-track single release, and another upcoming album, DownTown Mystic continue to provide a solid example of the importance and value of uniting creativity, passion, and work ethic, in order to build a strong and growing audience.
To start off the new year, we caught up with the songwriter and musician behind the project, Robert Allen, to find out more about the music, how things have changed over time, and what 2025 has in store for the band. Here’s the conversation in full.
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Hi Robert – great to catch up with you, and Happy New Year! You’ve been releasing new music quite consistently of late. Were these last few projects all lined up in unison, or is studio time and releasing just a constantly flowing way of life for you and the band?
Happy 2025 Rebecca! Best wishes 4 a rockin’ year!! It’s good to be back with you. You’re a good luck charm for me. You did the 1st review of RnR 4 The Soul and then we did a cool interview to start 2024, so I can’t start 2025 without my lucky charm! 😊
That’s so awesome to hear – always happy to be a part of your journey! 😊
Releasing music is a constantly flowing way of life. There were 7 DownTown Mystic releases in 2024: 2 albums, 2 EPS and 3 singles. I feel like 2years just went by! LOL
The projects were not all lined up in unison, even though it kind of came out that way (I love when that happens!). I didn’t get the projects lined up in unison until October when I decided to release the Better Day Digital 45. Once that was released, I knew the direction 2025 would take.
Of the 7 releases in 2024, only 5 were available to the public. I released a single and an EP to Radio only. Then I decided to do a Holiday Release on Dec. 20 called The DownTown Demos (AmeriKarma Demos & Final Versions), because I wanted to celebrate the success of that album in 2023 and also my own personal journey to recording that album: https://tinyurl.com/f2d9jne7
What can you tell us about One More Chance – why this bold of a title, what inspired it, and what do you hope it provides for listeners?
One More Chance is a song with a long history. I came up with 3 songs (just music) sometime in the mid-80s. I started playing this 4-chord sequence that became like a meditation for me. Every time I picked up the guitar, I would start playing this 4-chord sequence non-stop. That’s all I had and then I wrote music for a 2nd and a 3rd song. The 3rd song was in the same key as the 1st one and when I’d had enough of just playing that 4-chord sequence, I took the chorus music from the 3rd song, and it would become the chorus for One More Chance. In the early 90s I gave the 2nd song to this artist I was working with, Eddie Walker, and he wrote lyrics to it and that became Think A Little Louder (released on RnR 4 The Soul in 2024).
Around the same time, I began working with another artist, Bruce Engler, and one day when he was at my house, I played him my music for One More Chance. I came up with the title right then and there and we polished off the chorus!! I told Bruce to take the track and create his own melody when writing the lyrics so he wouldn’t be restricted. A few weeks later he played me the finished song, having added a B section to get to the chorus. One More Chance was now a reality. It was a very cool moment to hear!
Bruce says his inspiration for the lyrics came from his concern for climate change. So, there’s some political/protest in there, but with a positive perspective overall. I wrote most of the chorus and my feeling was to put out this vibe of never giving up, that there was one more chance to do what you need to do.
Was the song written as a band effort, or built upon during the jamming or recording session – how long did it take to get things sounding as you wanted?
The recording of the song is kind of interesting. Bruce finishes writing the song and goes into the studio to record it for his 1st solo project. I should mention here that I met Bruce when he sent me a cassette of his songs to my publishing company Sha-La Music. I told him I liked what I heard, and we should meet and talk further. Bruce had just left his band Bang The Drum, which had just won the Top Prize on the TV show Star Search. The show was the forerunner of shows like America’s Got Talent, American Idol & The Voice. This was a very big deal, but Bruce being Bruce, feels disillusioned with all of it. LOL
So Bruce quits Bang The Drum and decides to try his hand as a songwriter, recording some demos and sending me a cassette copy. When we met, I told him he should think about being a singer/songwriter type of artist because he has a great voice and is an outstanding guitar player. It would take a bit of doing on my part to convince him, but I did, which was very cool because I think Bruce is great. Meanwhile…
His version is a bit more laid-back and slower than the way I play the song. I decide to record my version a few years after Bruce’s and it’s going to be more up tempo. I’m also planning on doing a live jam to end the song. I book time at Showplace Studios with Ben Elliott engineering. We’re going live to tape, and I have Tommy Mastro on drums (I managed his band The Discontent), PJ Farley from Trixter (I managed his band Soaked) and Bruce on lead guitar. I’m playing rhythm guitar, and I go over my arrangement with the band.
But for some reason, as we’re about to start recording, there’s some kind of glitch that will hold up the session for a few hours. That had never happened to me before in a session, so it was bit weird. We kill time by rehearsing the 2 songs we were recording that day. There were going to be 4 in total, but we only get 2 tracks cut before 7pm when PJ and Bruce have to leave. When we finally cut the track for One More Chance, the jam goes off without a hitch. Later, the drummer Tommy and I recorded the track for Tomorrow’s Clown (Better Day Digital 45).
What does the second song Read the Signs represent, and why do these two songs fit together for this project?
Read The Signs is about how time can sneak up on you. You never see it coming and you think you have all the time you need to do whatever it is you want to do, right? But the truth is something different. That’s why the lyric says “And time will never give in, Don’t wait to begin, read the signs”. Time waits for no one!
I must mention drummer Steve Holley and bass player Paul Page who make this track a killer. Their playing takes it to another level like only they can.
The 2 songs fit because Read The Signs starts off with a 4-chord sequence and then I started playing the 4-chords in reverse, which became One More Chance. There’s actually a trilogy of songs—Read The Signs, One More Chance & The Wish that have this particular chord sequence.
I think Read The Signs is also talking about there being no guarantees anymore. Fires, tornados, floods, and pandemics have become common place across the country and the world. LA will never be the same. It’s heart-breaking to see the kind of devastation people are experiencing here and the world over. It’s not just the USA. Look at Europe. They’re experiencing things they never thought were possible. No guarantees.
We are living through a time we’ve never experienced before. The Boomers’ parents came out of The Depression into WW2 and then had families and kids. That generation experienced hardships that their kids didn’t.
My father’s parents (my grandparents) both died in 1933 within a week of each other, leaving behind my father and his 3 sisters. When our families would get together, they would talk about all the things they did to each other and laugh. There was never any crying or bitterness. As a matter of fact, I could never understand as a kid, listening and laughing with them, how they did it! No, oh poor mama and papa—NO!
It was things like my Aunt Wanda (the oldest by 2 years over my father) saying “remember Cerrie (my father’s nickname because he always ate cereal) that time when I was cooking and you were driving me crazy that I got so mad that I chased you out of the kitchen, and you tried to hide under the sewing machine, so I threw my big fork at you and it stuck in your ass!!?? They would be hysterical with laughter, it was insane! LOL
Your audience continues to grow exponentially. What would you say have been three of the main tools or essentials used to secure this kind of growth as an indie act?
Since Spotify is the big Kahuna in Streaming, and I get a good amount of Radio play in Europe, I started to do Showcase Campaigns on Spotify that targeted countries like the UK, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden. I found that when I did a showcase in the USA, it generally took the full 2 weeks that they run. But in Europe, most of these campaigns were done within a day or 2! That was a real eye opener. There’s a big world out there and the USA is no longer the only game in town.
Obviously, promoting my releases to Radio is also key. Over the years I would start by releasing a single in Europe and then judging if the results were really good, releasing the single in the USA. I’ve learned to pick and choose the radio formats because it’s an older media and doesn’t react in the way you might think. I know I can do a release in Europe and I know that nobody at Radio in the USA knows anything about it, and vice versa.
The 3rd thing would probably be videos and YouTube. I’m not that savvy when it comes to understanding how to promote on YouTube, so I hire indies to do that job for me and it’s been very successful. With AI technology coming into play, I’ve decided to try and be on the cutting-edge using AI to create my videos. I found an artist who does it and the 2 AI videos we’ve done are very striking and the reaction to them has been very positive. I’ve doubled my channel’s subscribers on YouTube because of it.
Do you have the year ahead planned out in terms of new songs, studio time, live performances, or will you just roll with the punches?
As I said earlier, with the Better Day Digital 45 release in Oct. 2024, I knew what 2025 was going to look like, and that was unusual for me, to see what the next 8-10 months would look like in advance. I knew One More Chance would be the next single in January 2025, leading up to the April 11 release of The Wish album. The Wizard of Mastering down in Australia, Leon Zervos, just sent me his mastering of The Wish, so we’re good to go!
This now allows me to begin the planning of the promo & marketing for The Wish. At the same time, I will be back in the studio working on the next release that will follow The Wish. I’m halfway through recording & mixing and these are songs that were recorded as part of the AmeriKarma sessions but didn’t fit that album’s concept. George Marinelli, who recently retired as Bonnie Raitt’s lead guitar player of the last 20 years, recorded some great guitar parts for one of the songs that I think will surprise a lot of people coming from me.
Playing live has become something different since the Covid-19 pandemic, which closed many clubs. I’m not that sure of the live scene these days, so I spend my time in the studio recording because at the end of the day, it’s all about the music. Instead of playing live, I’m looking for other ways to put myself out there with the fans and reaching a new audience.
I can give Stereo Stickman an exclusive by announcing here that I will be creating the DownTown Mystic RnR Radio Show Podcast. It will be a 30-minute show and I’ll be recording it at Cellar Dweller Studios, where I’ve worked many times, to give the show that professional sound that I’m used to. Since I get worldwide Radio play, I have 100s, if not 1000s of stations that play DownTown Mystic and I plan to syndicate the show to worldwide Radio.
I’ve been making deals in Europe & Asia since the 90s, so it makes sense to expand and take DownTown Mystic to the world in a more personal way. Nobody really knows anything about me because I only concentrate on the music. I can talk about music, numerology, and things like what it was like playing with Garry Tallent & Max Weinberg of the E Street Band, as well as playing live at CBGBs in 1975. I’m excited!
I also want to get into releasing DownTown Mystic on vinyl records. It’s a no-brainer for me, but I don’t really have the time right now, so I’ll be looking for a potential partner who specializes in that kind of thing.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
There is something else to tell you. Remember that 3rd song that I took the chorus from to put in One More Chance back in the 80s? In 2018 I’m thinking of recording a new album and I’m starting with a track that’s been in the can since 2010. It was the last track recorded for the Standing Still album and I never finished the lyrics. But I have the basic track recorded so I’m finally going to finish the lyrics and finish recording it for the new album.
I finally wrote a new chorus and have a title—The Wish. It was also during this time that I started to work on these demo tracks I had around since 2013 that would form the core of songs for AmeriKarma. In an odd way, The Wish and AmeriKarma would be kind of written together, with AmeriKarma being released in 2023 and going on to become my biggest success. That’s the main reason for releasing The DownTown Demos (AmeriKarma Demos & Final Versions) in December so that listeners could hear how the demos differed but informed the final versions of the songs on AmeriKarma.
As for The Wish release on April 11, it has some of the biggest production numbers I’ve ever produced. Even I was blown away when I heard the final mixes. I couldn’t believe how good they sounded. The album also rocks in a way that shows a steady evolution from last year’s RnR 4 The Soul.
Record Store Day is on the day after The Wish release, April 12. I plan on releasing a rare vinyl 45 single Sweet Little 16 by a band called The Tupelos, released in 1979. It’s their cover of the Chuck Berry song from 1958. Who are The Tupelos you ask? That was my band (1975-1981) and it was my 1st recording as lead singer, arranger and producer (the 45 says Produced By The Tupelos). You can probably figure out why I left the band to go solo. lol
It was this single that caught the attention of one E Street bass player named Garry Tallent. The rest, as they say, is history 😊
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