“Our emotional vocabularies were not vast”: Black Crowes brothers Chris and Rich Robinson on how they put their legendary feuding behind them and reinvent the band
They say distance makes the heart grow fonder, and that was certainly the case for Chris and Rich Robinson. Famous for being “at each other’s throats”, The Black Crowes brothers claim that their 2015 split was crucial to heal their relationship. Of course, a few rounds of therapy also helped.
In a new interview with Classic Rock, Rich claims that his relationship with Chris is “night-and-day better” than it once ways. “It’s so much healthier,” he insists. “Making records is so much cooler. Touring is so much better. We call and talk about the day-to-day shit… just stuff like brothers do, you know?”
It’s a healthy, brotherly bond that wouldn’t have been possible without their six year split between 2015 and 2021. “When we got back together, we had grown a lot,” Rich explains. “We’re both in our fifties now! So we said: ‘Look, we don’t want to do some bullshit money grab, going on tour and fighting and have it be shitty.’”
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As well as generally maturing, Chris notes that therapy was also played a massive part in healing old wounds. “Rich and I are mid-century products of the Deep South; our emotional vocabulary was not vast,” the brother notes. “To be where we are today, we had to mature, and that meant going through what we went through.”
Speaking to Howard Stern in 2019, Chris expressed his remorse over how he’d ended things with his brother. “I said some horrible things. I was in a negative place, but you know what, I’ve apologised to Rich about that,” he said. “A lot of things have changed for me in the last two years. I was in a relationship that was failing, I was in a negative place, I was dealing with depression. And I’m sitting over here, like, ‘Why am I saying bad things about my brother?’”
It would be two more years until the pair finally made amends in 2021 – and they’re glad they waited. Despite plenty of enticing offers to tour across that period, the brothers knew they had to patch up their relationship before working together again. By 2021, the pair were ready – and it was just in time for the 30 year anniversary of their debut, Shake Your Money Maker.
“We needed to strip everything back, and put our relationship first,” Rich tells Classic Rock. “We needed to listen to each other… and so Chris and I have been really adamant about that, and it’s helped our relationship tremendously.”
Nowadays, the pair are thick as thieves. In the interview, the brothers even recall an interaction with the late Todd Snider; when the guitarist visited the Robinsons, he marvelled at how in-sync they were. “What’s going on with you two?” he apparently exclaimed. “Are you wizards? You don’t even say anything to each other!?”
Since their reunion, the brothers have been churning out some great work together, from 2024’s Happiness Bastard, and their latest record, A Pound Of Feathers, is set to drop 13 March. It’s an impressive feat for a pair who, at one point, couldn’t stand being in the same room as one another.
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