Photographed for Spin at Hotel Delmano in Brooklyn, New York, June 6, 2008

Miles
Benjamin
Anthony
Robinson
After a despairing
detour, prolific singer/
songwriter hits the road

MORE AT SPIN.COM WATCH VIDEO OF MILES PERFORMING IN BROOKLYN. SPIN.COM/MILESBENJAMIN

For the first time in a long time, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson doesn’t want to die when he wakes up each day. And that frightens him. “It’s scarier to want to live and make a fourth album,” says the Brooklyn resident, standing outside Schubas in Chicago on the opening night of his first national tour.

Casual life-or-death references aside, it’s a bit surprising that Robinson, 24, is talking about his fourth album when his self-titled debut—a gauzy, stirring collection of folk rock recorded with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor—just came out. But he’s been on a creative binge lately; his follow-up has already been recorded with TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, and most of a third record is written. It’s a startling rebound from last year’s “summer of fear,” when he split with his fiancée and his old band disintegrated. Robinson claims that the cure for his problems was also the cause: “I like making music too much, and it made me weird and maladjusted.”

Robinson’s myth-ready life story
includes tales of a touring comedian

father, a pilgrimage from Oregon to New York (inspired
by the punk-rock oral history Please Kill Me), years
of playing in “fucked-up bands,” speed-fueled song-
writing sessions, and homelessness. It’s easy to listen
to Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson’s morbid lyrics
and psyche-scraping sonic clutter in the context of his
personal history, but he hopes it’s not too easy. “You
can apply the tortured, drug-addicted archetype to
anything and it works; it makes it more
interesting and romantic,” he says.
“I just hope that it’s not too fucking
corny. I’m not deadly self-serious.”
Even so, he admits that he has often
wondered what it would’ve been like
to make it as a rock star when he first
started out in New York. “I wasn’t the
kid genius I thought I was,” he says. “I
wasn’t Bobby Dylan. I didn’t make it at
19. If I had, maybe I would have died
at 23, so maybe I’m glad I didn’t. I’m
giggling all the time now.” Even if
that’s still a little scary, it’s reason
enough to get up in the morning.

FAST FACTS

> One of Robinson’s big regrets is attending art school at N YU. “It was a terrible idea, personally and economically.”

> He once did carpentry work for Urban Outfitters. “Going on tour makes me so much happier than being afraid of cutting my fingers off in circular saws, as my elbow goes to hell.”

B Y SPENCER KORNHABER PHOTOGRAPH B Y ADAM FEDDERLY