Eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds. That’s how long Robert Kramer takes to open his new album, Beyond The Great Divide, and he isn’t apologizing for it. “Letting It Go” is the first thing you hear, and it’s built like a threshold. You walk through it or you don’t.
Kramer has been on the Midwest scene for over 20 years. Keys, guitar, vocals, composing. He’s written for film, video and TV, landed music on CBS’s The Young & The Restless, and worked with Napoleon Murphy Brock, the Frank Zappa vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. His solo run goes back to Songs Of Past Lives in 2000, with Shadow Logic arriving in 2017.
Then came a long gap. This album took ten years to finish, and the backstory is rough. Personal struggle. Health recoveries. A production history that dragged on for over a decade. You can feel why the opener is about surrender.
A King With Nothing Left
The lyric runs on a feudal kingdom metaphor, and it commits. Kramer starts as a “king inside his castle, holding on to all my gold.” Rich, safe, and completely alone. The castle walls echo back at him until he asks the only question that matters: “What have I done?”
The chorus is basically a mantra. “Hold on, I’m Letting It Go.” From there the crown gets heavy, the drawbridge comes down, and the status goes out the window. By the last movement he’s a “lowly peasant” on a dirt road, with “only just my soul for food.”
And here’s the best part. Once he’s given the crown away, the sun lands on his head and becomes a “golden crown.” He had to lose the fake one to get the real one. It’s an old idea, sure, but he lands it with a neat twist and I bought it completely.
Pipes, Keys and Patience
According to the album notes, the arrangement tracks the story. It moves from a dark, keyboard and synth atmosphere of isolation into a guitar and pipe-led crescendo as the narrator steps into the light. And yeah, those are Northumbrian bagpipes. That’s a gutsy pick. Most rock writers would grab a string pad and call it medieval. Choosing a real folk instrument for a song about a lonely king tells you Kramer actually thinks about this stuff.
The players back that up. Guitarist Chris Siebold and Hall Of Fame keyboardist and composer Dave Rice are on the record, across 13 tracks. Kramer says the whole project is about getting real music back into the indie community. Big claim. A ten-year build with players like that at least earns him the hearing.
Long songs ask for patience, and this one asks for a lot of it. If you’ve got eight and a half minutes, go watch Letting It Go and see if you put your own crown down too.
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