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Robbie Christmas plays to a full crowd at The Royal Room

Christmas played a two hour, two part set with a mix of new and old tracks

Dan Ray November 10, 20182 Comments
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Robbie Christmas plays to a full crowd at The Royal Room November 10, 20182 Comments

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Robbie Christmas on stage at The Royal Room. // Photo by Nicole Hagens

Three years ago, a barely-yet-charting James Bay took the stage for his early-day set at Lollapalooza 2015. I stumbled into the show, having some vague notion of who he was, and was struck by his sheer talent: with his silky-smooth voice, mad acoustic guitar skills, and honestly-him demeanor, he captured my attention, even in the early-afternoon blazing sun and humidity of a Chicago summer.

On November 9th, 2018, I purposefully strolled into The Royal Room for an early-evening set from Robbie Christmas (aka RX), and — from the second the first note escaped Christmas’s throat — was instantly transported back to that feeling of watching a then-Bay about to pop.

Christmas, a singer-songwriter who grew up on iconic bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, captures a feeling similar to Bay and other such artists like James Arthur and “Chariot”-era Gavin Degraw (complete with homburg hat), and his voice sounds like the way anything on r/oddlysatisfying would make you feel — a perfectly sliced avocado, the last piece of a holographic, gradient puzzle, or pottery being perfectly shaped.

Along with drummer Jeff Brown, who used brushes to play a snare dampened with a towel, Christmas played two sets: the first was filled with material from his previous two EPs, 2016’s Few and Far Between and 2017’s When I Finally Get Myself Together, while the second set served as a preview for his next release.

Throughout the set, Christmas discussed how he and Brown most often play breweries and wineries around town, where the crowds tend to pay less attention to the music than their drinks in hand. At The Royal Room, a restaurant-venue in Columbia City where the tables are all set up to face the stage, Christmas played to a full room paying rapt attention, and he took the opportunity to provide insight into each one of his songs before he played them. The care he took in prepping for this gig was apparent, from his carefully curated set list to his undeniable honesty about his musicianship.

Christmas’s original music is littered with intricate finger-picked guitar parts and smooth vocal melodies, and the falsetto he incorporates into almost every tune is powerful enough to melt anyone’s underpants within a five-mile radius. But, some of the best tunes from his show were actually the covers — not because his original songs aren’t extremely well-written, because they are — but because of the way he discussed how musicians like Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Paul McCartney, and Eric Clapton have influenced him. The admiration and inspiration he felt for and from these musicians was palpable as he laid back into his guitar.

But, original tunes like “Since I Left You,” from Far and Few Between and as-yet-unreleased  “Over the Moon,” with striking guitar parts and bluesy vocals, prove Christmas can hold his own among these legends.

The way Christmas structured his set also speaks to his prowess as a musician: the first set of older tunes was solid, but the second set of upcoming tracks had a distinctly different feel. Throughout the set, Christmas discussed how when he was writing When I Finally Get Myself Together he was in a place of, well, not being together, and the punchier guitar parts, more varied vocal lines, and less predictable song structures of the tunes in his second set showed that Christmas has not only grown as a person since the release of Together, but also as a songwriter.

It was difficult to tell how much of the audience Christmas drew was family and friends and how much was people who just stumbled across his show, but with only one table vacant at the end of the show, it’s clear Christmas has support, and, even if that’s mostly from his own community, it won’t be long before that community begins to grow. Within one minute of Christmas finishing his set, a group of about ten people ran backstage to congratulate him, and, even though they most likely knew Christmas beforehand, it was apparently clear that they were all legitimately excited about his music. With true, honest support like that, the greater Seattle community will have no choice but to gravitate towards Christmas’s infectious positivity and smooth-as-a-baby’s-bottom-right-after-a-bath vocal cords.

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).