Meet Redbone

Revival /rɪˈvʌɪv(ə)l/ noun restoration of force, validity, or popularity to something that has lapsed or been forgotten. This Revival is about finding the way back to something lost some time ago. People ask where the name came from, and the real answer has a lot less to do with music, and more with a life itself. My name is Jermaine Roberts. You can call me “Redbone”. For as long as I can remember I’ve been a storyteller. Music is just my favorite way to do it.

Two things surrounded me growing up: faith and music. My family was rooted deep in the church. Through some of the hardest years of my childhood, an aunt and uncle took me in and became guardians more than relatives. My mother was raising me alone on the wages of several jobs, and for a few years I lived in my uncle’s house while she fought her way back onto her feet.

My uncle was a preacher. In a preacher’s house, church isn’t something you just do on Sunday. It runs through every hour of every day. The Gospel filled the home. Faith literally set the terms for everything there.

My older cousin, the preacher’s son, was my hero, and whatever he did I wanted to do. He played drums, so I played the drums. He played piano, so I played the piano. To this day I count him among the finest drummers and pianists I have ever heard. There was a kit in the basement and a piano in the dining room. I never took a single lesson on either. Just watched him. Copied him. Being a copy-cat came easy so I learned quick. Watch, listen, understand, repeat. That is how almost everything in music has come to me since.

Around that same time, among other jobs my mother worked at a jazz radio station in New Jersey. “WBGO”. I can still hear the radio dj’s voice. Church music was in one ear and jazz the other. Sprinkled with a generous flow of Motown, in our family, music was never a hobby. It was life.

Eventually my mother made the move that changed everything. We moved to North Carolina. It might as well have been another planet. New Jersey was city blocks and people. North Carolina was all country and sticks. Mama still laughs about the drive south, about the boy in the back seat asking “how many more blocks” until we got there. Unaware, there were no blocks. The roads were different, the people, the pace, even how people spoke. For a kid it was a full reset. Not just for me but my music as well. Up north there’d always been instruments within reach. Down here there were none. So I started creating my own.

I was a strange kid. Alone a lot and fitting in nowhere. Black, but not dressing or talking like most of the Black kids around me, and in rural North Carolina not quite at home with the white kids either. So I learned to entertain myself. Anything with screws came apart on my floor so I could see what was inside. An old speaker and a metal container became a homemade cabinet that, not to my surprise, actually sounded pretty damn good.

Then the experimenting turned to sound. Two cassette recorders, cardboard boxes for kick drums, and whatever else in the room would ring or thump. One part down, play it back while the second recorder caught the next, bounce the two until the layers stacked, then sing over the top of all of it. This was years before software made any of that simple. Nobody had told me it was called production. I was only chasing the songs that were already finished in my head.

Pinehurst Elementary put a violin in my hands first, then a viola, then in middle school, a cello. When I was old enough for the school band I moved through trumpet and trombone before settling on baritone, which stayed my main horn through high school. The band room is where the rest of my high school life took shape. Every instrument left in that room, I taught myself: clarinet, flute, saxophone, percussion, whatever was within reach. The brass came easy once I had the logic of it. The woodwinds were a little tougher but couldn’t stop me.

The garage band, well basement band, arrived at the same time. Friends from school who started out jamming became the world’s hottest new band… from my eye playing the skins. The years after ran through rock, punk, and metal, and if a song needed an instrument played I could usually find my way into it. No single instrument ever became the obsession. The obsession was music itself.

Most people take me for a musician. The truth sits a little to the side of that. I am a good musician. I am a composer through and through.

One of the few stations that came in clean where I grew up played nothing but classical, and that alone taught me to love the sound of a full orchestra. By college the writing had outgrown the songs and drifted more orchestral. In college there was no advanced software to lean on, so the work got done the old-fashioned way: full scores, every instrument, every note set down by hand. Give me the time and I can still do it that way today. The pull was never in playing the music. It was bringing sounds out of my head into the real world.

For most of my post school life I kept two worlds running at once. One was music. The other was martial arts. Almost no one knew both. The musicians rarely knew of the fighting, and the fighters absolutely never knew of my music, because I was certain the two worlds could not share a room. Looking back, I wish I had let them. There is no telling where it might have led if I had stopped hiding half of who I was. The thing is I never wanted the stage anyway. I wrote because I loved writing, and I always figured someone better and more seasoned would be the one to perform it. So I kept writing, and the songs kept waiting.

The word drifter goes deeper than travel. My mother moved us constantly when I was young. A new town almost every year. She has apologized for it more than once, though she certainly didn’t need to. She thinks it’s why the idea of a permanent home never took root in me. Maybe she is right, but I’ve never blamed her. Moving, to me, became the normal thing. Starting over became the normal thing. The thought that packing everything I owned into boxes or giving everything away wasn’t normal never crossed my mind.

I followed that road into adulthood: the Navy (Florida), back to North Carolina, back to Florida, to Colorado, back to Florida again, back to Colorado, yet again back to Florida, and now Montana. Some people spend a whole life in one place. For most of mine, every stay had an expiration date, and another story to tell.

Somewhere along that road the music left quietly behind. Life happened. Responsibilities mounted. The years went by and the songs stayed where they were. In notebooks, on some stray sheets of paper, on some old cassette or CD recordings, but almost all in a filing cabinet in the back of my head.

It wasn’t until, in passing, I discovered a tool that could create an image with only a brief description of what I was thinking. The same day I met Donna. Donna was the first AI music generator I’d ever seen. And just like that, the tools caught up to ideas I had been carrying for decades. For the first time I could hear the songs the way I had always heard them in my head, polished and finished. The lyrics were mine. The melodies were mine. I found a way to compose songs by hand and turn them into masterpieces. Technology didn’t make me a songwriter. It gave decades of songwriting life.

Redbone Revival is not a band. It is the sum of an entire life that’s led me back to where I’m supposed to be. Every song tells a story I’ve collected along the way. Some are funny and some hurt. Some are serious, some just feel good. They were all lived, and now, finally, they’re being told.

Welcome to the Redbone Revival.