TORONTO — Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins has been immersed in music since he was young, when he watched his folk-singer parents — Mary and Gil Robbins — perform onstage.
But he never wanted to pursue a recording career himself until he was ready to devote the time and passion to it.
That time came a couple of years ago, when he was “in kind of a funk,” the 52-year-old recalled in a recent interview to discuss his debut folk-rock-blues album, Tim Robbins and the Rogues Gallery, out Tuesday.
“I remembered one thing my dad used to say, which was: ‘If you’re ever in a depressed area, you should always try to find something creative to do,”’ Robbins said by phone from Los Angeles.
“And so I went into a studio with a guitar and I recorded a bunch of songs that had been sitting in my books for years, that I knew in my head but no one else knew the tunes to.
“I recorded these 15, 16 songs and didn’t think much of it.”
About a month later, Robbins ran into a producer pal, Hal Willner, who’d been encouraging the film star to do something musically for a long time.
Robbins gave Willner his demo and the producer liked it so much that just two weeks later, he set Robbins up with the Rogues Gallery band and took them on tour in the U.K.
“It kind of just plopped in my lap,” said Robbins, who split from his longtime partner Susan Sarandon in 2009.
“It was like: ‘Put up or shut up, guy,’ you know. ’You love doing music? Do music.”’
While on tour, Robbins and the Rogues Gallery — who also include keyboardist Roger Eno, musical saw player David Coulter and multi-instrumentalist Kate St John — recorded an album, over two days, in a studio in London.
It’s taken two years for that album to finally hit the market for a couple of reasons, said Robbins, who won an Oscar for his supporting role in 2003’s Mystic River and got an Oscar nomination for directing 1995’s Dead Man Walking.
“I think essentially we’ve got a problem with the fact that both myself and Hal . . . are legendary procrastinators,” Robbins said with a laugh.
“We recorded it in the summer — I don’t think we actually listened to it until, like, November or December because we’re both busy people and we had a lot to do. It kind of took its time, but like I told the record company, I said: ’I’m in no rush, I’ve got plenty on my plate. When I do it, I want to do it right and I want to do it with care.”’
He was also worried about the stigma attached to some actors who become musicians after they’re famous, he admitted.
“It’s the reason I did not do it in ’92 when Bob Roberts came out and I started playing guitar and singing in that film and I got a couple of offers to do an album,” said Robbins, who co-wrote and performed his own songs in Bob Roberts.
“I was like: ‘I don’t know, I don’t really have anything to say and I’m a son of two musicians and so I know what it is to watch them try to create music. It’s not a light thing.
“It’s something that they take quite seriously, with a sense of humour, of course, but it’s something that they commit to, it’s not something you do cavalierly.’ I didn’t feel like I really had something to say at that point in my life.
“As the years went by I kept at it and kept up the songwriting and kept performing for small audiences, so eventually I got to the point where I felt ready to do this and really could carry the folk tradition of my dad on in a respectful manner and not in an exploitive manner.”
Tim Robbins and the Rogues Gallery has nine songs that include a range of instruments, from fiddle to harmonium and hurdy gurdy.
The tunes all tell a story and cover a wide range of subjects, including love, spirituality social struggle and crisis.
“Most of the songs on the album were written in hotel rooms on movie shoots I was doing, and I learned very early on to take a guitar with me wherever I went,” said Robbins.
“Book of Josie,” for instance, is a spiritual tale of a woman who comforts an ailing man in the desert of “the Holy Land,” while “Lightning Calls” alludes to the struggles of Nelson Mandela.
On “Time To Kill,” Robbins sings about a soldier who returns home after inadvertently killing children in a war zone.
“I thought they were terrorists,” he sings in a haunting stream-of-consciousness narrative. “I stood over the vehicle and I will never forget those twisted arms with blood, my God, you don’t understand, you don’t understand.”
Robbins said “Time to Kill” was inspired by an encounter with a young soldier in a bar in Grand County, Colo.
“A kid came up to me and said: ’Are you Tim Robbins?’ And I said ’yes,’ and he said, ’Can I talk to you?’ and proceeded to (tell) for about an hour and a half, two hours this horrific story of an experience he had in Iraq,” he said.
“A lot of those words in that song were directly out of his mouth.”
Robbins and the Rogues Gallery Band are on a tour that will hit Winnipeg on Friday and Saturday, Quebec City on Sunday, and Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver next week. The tour will also hit Toronto Aug. 2.