March 4, 2009 - Wednesday New Solo Record in the WORKS... Robbie is in the studio writing a recording a new record. Guest players might include Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Kings Of Leon... More info to come... Cheers.

It has been reported over the past number of months that the dynamic duo has shelved its album. Some have "guestimated" that it is because the two extremely creative musicians could not see eye-to-eye during its production. Robbie's son Sebastian recently responded to our question to him as to what the real reason is for shelving the album. He replied that Eric needed to spend more time w/ his young family & it would take away from the time & dedication that he & Robbie felt was necessary to create an album to their liking. Eric will be a part of Robbie's upcoming solo album though.

The 13-time Grammy nominee’s multifarious talents and far-ranging musical interests are prominent on Levitate, which marks the artist’s Verve debut. The album’s 13 songs span an expansive sonic and emotional palette, encompassing heartfelt insights and absurdist humor, while incorporating a broad assortment of influences within compact song structures. The material ranges from the expansive, expressive songcraft of “Prairie Dog Town” and “In the Low Country” to the gently reflective introspection of “Invisible” and “Here We Are Again,” with the album-opening “The Black Rats of London” offering a swaggering treatise on the influence of the rodents, insects and microbes upon key historical events. Such colorful moments help make Levitate a consistently compelling evocation of Hornsby’s established abilities, as well as a substantial creative departure.

Levitate (which Hornsby co-produced with studio vet Tony Berg) also features guest appearances by Eric Clapton on “Space Is the Place” and fiddler Andy Leftwitch, a longtime mainstay of Ricky Skaggs’ band, on “The Black Rats of London.”

Back-to-back marathons in Dallas and Houston are a fact of life for Toyota Center’s everyday tenants. The Rockets, though, should aspire to manage the feat as smoothly as a pair of 60-year-old musicians accomplished Wednesday night. Twenty-four hours removed from a performance at the less desirable end of Interstate 45, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood mixed greatest hits with vintage blues numbers and, 10 dates into a 14-date tour, a surprise or two for an appreciative Houston crowd. The former Blind Faith bandmates could have filled their two-hour show with a rote rendition of greatest hits but dug into the book of basic blues for numbers like How Long Blues from Leroy Carr and Tough Luck Blues from Big Maceo alongside the expected hits like Clapton’s Layla and Winwood’s Glad from his days with Traffic. They also showed, switching sports motifs, that they can pull an audible. After performing the standard Georgia on My Mind on every tour stop so far, Winwood switched to a too-brief solo piano version of perhaps Traffic’s greatest song, The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys. Even the "Clapton is God" crowd rose to its feet for that one. Alas, there were no numbers from Clapton’s muse Robert Johnson (too bad, given that Johnson’s best-known recordings were made in Dallas and San Antonio) and only one remnant of Texas blues, Clapton’s acoustic Drifting Blues by the late, great Texas City native Charles Brown. Clapton and Winwood came to town on a commercial roll, given the recent release of a CD and DVD documenting their 2008 Madison Square Garden performances, seen here recently on PBS. Included were four songs plus one outtake from their 1969 Blind Faith album (Had to Cry Today, Presence of the Lord, Buddy Holly’s Well … All Right and Can’t Find My Way Home, plus Sleeping in the Ground). Clapton’s contributions included his mini-J.J. Cale songbook (After Midnight, Cocaine and the lesser-known Low Down from 1996), Forever Man (from 1985, one of a handful of post-1970 numbers) and, naturally, the 1990s accoustic version of Layla. Glad, Pearly Queen and Dear Mr. Fantasy represented Winwood’s Traffic years along with Low Spark; the only songs from his 1980s commercial revival were There’s a River and Split Decision. The closer was Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile. With the blues numbers factored in, the average age of the 20-song program was somewhere in the early 40s, which probably hit the sweet spot of a crowd that featured older blues aficionados but also a few parents with teenagers. Presumably, they now know how it should be done.