If you’re looking for your beach, Rob Hill can help. One of the top songwriters in the world of tropical rock, his words and music will take you to the shore. And listening to the songs on his new solo album Beach Town will leave you shaking the sand out of your shoes. The twelve song collection, co-produced by Rob and Kevin Johnston,also features some of Nashville's top session players, including Dave Roe on bass (Johnny Cash, Todd Snider), Jerry Roe on drums (Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris), Kenny Vaughan on guitar (Marty Stuart, Alan Jackson, Lucinda Williams), and Jim Hoke on multiple instruments (Beach Boys, Don Henley, Kenny Chesney, Cheryl Crow). From 2012 to 2016, Rob spent much of his energy producing and promoting other artists, in particular singer award-winning vocalist Brittany Kingery, now based in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where her popular cabaret show Blame It All on Mexico is based largely on Rob’s music. Having produced two albums of his music with Kingery, Rob has turned the spotlight back on himself with the release of Beach Town, his first album as an artist since the 2009 God, Love & Mexico album by the trio Game Six, which he fronted. “Things have come full circle in a way,” Rob notes. “It was kind of liberating for me to write for another voice and from another perspective for a few years, and now that I’m writing for my own voice again, it feels like something new. And what’s coming out of it are some of the best songs I’ve ever written.” And that’s saying something. Although his music is that of a thoughtful singer-songwriter in the James Taylor-Dan Fogelberg vain, Rob's affinity for sun and sand have made him a highly regarded writer within the tropical rock, or “trop rock” genre, a loosely defined niche of music that Rob describes as a blend of country, rock, reggae and island music whose unifying theme is tropical escapism. The Trop Rock Music Association named his song “Tequila Talking,” co-written by and recorded with Kingery, the Song of the Year in 2015, the same year that her Dream in Blue, a CD mostly comprised of Rob’s songs, was nominated as the Album of the Year in the genre. His music is in regular rotation on most of the major trop rock radio stations, including Beachfront Radio, Radio A1A, Songwriters Island Radio and The Shore Radio., among others. And although the trop rock genre has strongholds in Texas and South Florida, particularly the Florida Keys, Rob has traveled and performed all over the continent, often for Jimmy Buffett devotees known as “Parrot Heads,” who tend to be the biggest fans of trop rock. “I’ve performed a lot on the Gulf Coast recently,” Rob says, “but there are beach bums all over the place.” Just in the last couple of years he’s been performing from the Bahamas to Baja and Edmonton to Toronto and lots of places in between. “Everywhere I go, I find people in Hawaiian shirts drinking fruity cocktails with colorful little umbrellas in them, ready to hear some beach music. But the bottom line is that these are people that appreciate the art of the song. They listen, and to a performer that means that the repertoire opens up quite a bit. You can play things to a listening audience that you can't play in a venue where you are part of the environment and are expected to blend in with the furniture." For Rob, the venture into beach-themed music began with his affection for a Mexican coastal fishing village called Bucerías, an unlikely location for the Irish pub that became the inspiration for his chilled-out ballad “Shamrock Bar.” The song, thanks in part to a no-budget music video shot on a Sony HandyCam on a day of heavy drinking in Mexico, became a point of pride in the village and made the now-closed pub a tourist attraction in itself. “I’ve had people tell me they were inspired to visit the town because of the song,” says Rob. “And I’ve had people tell me that my music gets them through some cold winter days back home.” Since then, his sun-and-sand inspired music has been inspiring others to find their literal and metaphorical beaches. Rob says he used to think there was a limit to how much he could write about tropical themes without getting cheesy and cliché. Turns out he might have been wrong. “It’s a little surprising that the songs keep coming,” he admits. “The key for me is to always remember that when I’m singing about the beach, usually I’m not just singing about the beach. The beach is a symbol for escape. And I don’t mean an escape from real life, but into real life. It’s about taking risks and following your bliss and creating and embracing the magic moments of life.” With the title track, "Beach Town" begins with a lyrical painting of a Mexican coastal town that has become the happy place for the "Gringos and Canadians, with their tennis shoes and their burning skin." It's followed by the clever "Turn Up The Moon," a sharp but brief turn into a Dixieland flavored lament about the halogen and LCDs, the headlights and tail lights that complicate the night, and a longing for a simple moonlit night on the beach for two, no doubt with the ideal incarnation of a woman who is the subject of the country-tinged love song "That's A Girl". In "Blame It All on Mexico," Rob uses a gritty bluesy arrangement to deliver an ironic indictment of Mexico by a singer determined to prove right the people back home who say he's lost and irresponsible (the song also features some of Vaughan's most impressive guitar work on the project). With "This Girl Can Fly," Rob delivers an encouraging word to those fighting cancer, inspired by his oldest daughter's successful battle with late stage thyroid cancer. And in "These Words", even as he expresses frustration that all he has to offer his wounded and defeated friend are "words that soon will be forgotten, unlike the ghosts that call from yesterday," Rob delivers another message of hope and strength that ends with the goose-bumpy reminder that even in the depths of darkness "You have this voice, it's been inside you all along, it could be rising up in song right here and now." In the album's third quarter, "Beach Town" takes a decided turn South of the Border.The Chesney-esque chilled out ballad "Sayulita" uses the popular Pacific Coast Mexican surf destination as a metaphor for living a life of adventure and risk in the here and now. "Little Miss Sunshine" and "What's Left of This Time" are both songs of escape to the beach South of the border, the former a youthful adventure, the latter a mature one. With "Give Your Love", the album takes a diversion into reggae in a song Rob says was inspired friend who posted on Facebook a recounting of his previous night's dream in which he was visited by the wisdom-spouting ghost of Bob Marley. Rob said there enough of the lyric was lifted from the recounting of the dream that the song's co-writer Tom Melendez had inadvertently written his first song and is now a published writer who sports the song title and the image of three little birds in a tattoo on his right arm. The song returns to the themes of living in the moment and rejection of the rat race with its bridge "The spirit teaches us one thing / to throw yourself into the dance / To not go reaching for something that turns to ashes in your hands." The spiritual undertones that run quietly beneath much of the music are less subtle in "Miracle," another song of hope and overcoming that Rob says is an import from his youth, one of few songs he wrote as a teen that doesn't make him cringe. And the running themes of oceans and escapism and dreams and spirituality come together in the album's finale, a thank you delivered to the audience that makes possible "a life of music and oceans," a recognition that the audience is an equal partner in the relationship, that "the truth of it is, I'd have nothing to give, if y'all hadn't come to receive."