DAILY RECORD, March 19, 2004
By Robert Hicks
Staff Writer

After years of laboring in tiresome jobs in California, Chip Robertson returned home to New Jersey, where he found not only job satisfaction but personal fulfillment in songwriting.

The 44-year-old resident of Bergen County has gradually gathered a local following devoted to his songs based on his personal experiences. Two years ago, he released a three-song EP to help him promote his music to club owners and record labels. Now he is completing new songs for his forthcoming debut, full-length CD called “Looking Ahead”.

“It’s the first song that I wrote. It’s the song that started off my EP. It’ll probably start off the full-length CD, and it kind of sums up the viewpoint of being in corporate America so long and jumping off into this brave new world,” he said from his home in Cresskill.

The song deals with Robertson’ inability to fit into the usual avenues expected from those striving to achieve the American Dream.

Robertson plans to meet with producers to work out the details about accompanying musicians and such in the coming months before releasing the recording in late summer or early autumn.

Tonight, Robertson will perform solo at Uncommon Grounds in Boonton in a concert to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

“A very dear friend of mine, a couple I knew, moved down to Charlotte about 12 years ago. Their 11-year-old boy contracted JD. He wrote me a letter to tell me that he will be participating in a walk to benefit JDRF in April. It just broke my heart. I can’t get to Charlotte, so I decided I would do what I do best, which is play music and find some ways to raise funds that way,” he said.

I addition to playing covers of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springstein, Richard Shindell and Warren Zevon, he performs 14 original songs.

“I write mostly about personal issues – love lost and love found, trying to put yourself through life without living up to the expectations of everyone else, being your own person. Things like that,” he said. “I like for people to be able to see themselves in my songs.”

Robertson started the singer-songwriter phase of his music career in 2002. Many in New Jersey probably remember him from his days in the Jersey Shore garage band, The Crash Street Kids. He performed with that group from 1975 to 1981 before playing solo acoustic music at local bars and cafes and studying to become a paralegal at The Institute for Paralegal Studies in New Jersey from 1981-83.

Then he moved, to live near his sister in Riverside, Calif. His younger brother found work for him as an orderly in the X-ray department of a hospital and as a paralegal at a law firm in Los Angeles.

“There was a lot of office work in between musical careers,” he said. “I always had my guitar in my house and it never was very far from reach. I didn’t always use it, but it was always there. I’ve always been a voracious music collector and concertgoer, so that part of me never waned.”

He returned to New Jersey in 1986. In the late ‘90s, he revived The Crash Street Kids for a benefit concert in December 1998. He met fellow songwriter and musician Tina Vero, who worked with him in the same department in the business security and collections at AT&T Wireless in January 2000. Vero encouraged Robertson to write his own songs.

“After being in a band, I figured the best way to get started again in music would be to play by myself,” he said. It’s kind of hard in a band, because you have to juggle different people’s schedules, tastes and egos.”