Bobby Oroza

Like many of us, Bobby had to face more than a few personal hardships through this time which forced him to acknowledge and work through some brutal truths. And what came of it? Well, for one, this new record. Being called Get On The Otherside, it pretty well describes what Bobby's been through: He had to demolish his ego and his old thinking and tried approaches to anchor into a refreshed perspective with new understandings. This approach may be best evidenced by the album's namesake song, "The Otherside." Again, the music has that soulful texture, the wonderful push-and-pull of Bobby's voice and guitar with Cold Diamond and Mink's full-feeling drums and bouncing basslines. Even with a loose listen, you'll hear that it's a song about how life and love change. It's like a life philosophy given to us in an easier pill to swallow: Bobby tells us that sometimes we're responsible for our own limitations and unknowingly bolster them. We have to come to terms with ourselves to grow and move beyond these self-constraints—to get to the other side of them. It still may be hard to nail down and define Bobby and his sound. He's no one thing more than the other. But what he's showing us now, on Get On The Otherside, is that we can also label him a soulful, philosophical optimist. Someone who can say a lot with a little, and who wants us all to know that it's us that has to do the hard lifting to truly live a life in love—both with the world and with yourself.