LEWISTON — At the YWCA with his 3-year-old daughter for a swim lesson, feeling inspired by a scene from a 2008 Swedish vampire story, musician Chris Robley looked around and thought that pool would make a great place for his new music video.
To pull it off, he fell in — fully dressed, standing upright — nearly 100 times over four hours, singing his own song backward the whole time. And he had to pretend on fall No. 99 that no, that didn’t really hurt.
The result is cool, unexpected and “he did what?” It’s a fitting introduction to his new album, “The Great Make Believer.”
The West Coast singer/songwriter, who moved to Lewiston just over a year ago, is holding a CD release party to kick off that new album on Saturday at Avant Garde on Lisbon Street.
Robley, 37, said this, his sixth, “most acoustic album,” comes after a six-year break during which he got got married, had a daughter, moved to Maine and grew up a little.
“I’m relieved to have it out — it’s nice to be back in the swing of putting music out,” Robley said. “I definitely feel like it’s my most mature, self-realized batch of songs. I look back on some of my material and think it’s a bit bleak.”
Robley grew up in Rhode Island. After graduating from the University of Richmond in 2000, he and then-bandmates drove around the country looking for the best place to settle. Oregon won out.
Not too long after, that band broke up. Another formed, released an album, then broke up. And repeat. Robley, who played keyboard and guitar and wrote most of the songs, had no intention of becoming a front man, but eventually found himself on lead vocals, too.
A Los Angeles Times review of a live performance called his music “poetic, evocative.”
“I used to tour on the West Coast quite a bit,” Robley said.
He met his wife, Lauren Breau from Lewiston, in Oregon. In 2011, they moved to Maine to be closer to family; his father was battling cancer at the time. In late 2014, they moved to Lewiston.
Robley’s still back in the West regularly and that’s where he recorded the 10 tracks of “The Great Make Believer.”
“I definitely wanted it to be, ‘Here’s what the band did, capture it, leave it be,’ trying to preserve the live feel,” he said. While past albums have been “very densely layered and a lot of strings and horns and psychedelic noise,” this one is “more folk-country than anything I’ve ever done before.”
Robley, who works remotely for the Oregon-based CD Baby, a website helping other independent artists get their music out, connected with friend and filmmaker Craig Saddlemire for the music video of the track “Anonymous.”
The idea for the YWCA of Central Maine shoot: film him falling dozens and dozens of times into the water, singing backward, so they could flip the film to create the effect of him rising out of the water again and again, immediately breaking into song.
Robley was inspired by the pool scene from 2008’s “Let the Right One In,” where a boy is being held underwater while there’s clearly action taking place above.
“I thought, ‘I could probably do that 100 times’ — and that’s the video,” he said. “By the end of the day, my head really hurt, just slamming it in the water all those times. Toward the end of the shoot, I noticed I was really starting to flinch again.”
It debuted on the music blog of KCRW, an NPR station out of Santa Monica, Calif., earlier this month.
He’ll be performing a free 90-minute concert Saturday at Avant Garde as part of his CD release party, which runs from 8 to 10 p.m.
Robley said he has a backlog of music written, with his next album ready to go early next year.
“It’s tough to write happy songs; it takes longer,” he said, laughing. “The record I have finished is still pretty hopeless. The songs I’m writing now — the next record — are looking to various kinds of grace and hope.”
kskelton@sunjournal.com
Send questions/comments to the editors.
