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n some American cities — New Orleans, Chicago and New York, to name just a few — a vibrant music scene is a traditional part of the culture, ingrained so deeply that it’s impossible for young artists to create without standing on the shoulders of local heroes.
In other areas — like Hilton Head, for instance — those shoulders might be a little harder to come by. But for Trevor Hall, a singer/songwriter who was raised on the island before taking his music around the world, the lack of a local sound helped him blaze his own trail.
“In Hilton Head, I really didn’t have too many ways of expressing my music, because there weren’t a lot of arts programs or places to dive in musically,” says Hall, whose next album, “Everything Everytime Everywhere,” was released in August on Vanguard Records. “Because of that, I was kind of left to myself to really explore and learn.
“It provides for that wonder, you know? That hunger. Without it, it’s easy to take your dreams more casually — to sort of miss out on that intense yearning. I think maybe people who grow up sort of submerged in a scene don’t have that, and I tried to use it to my advantage.” He adds, “In some ways, I think that was really beneficial for me, because I didn’t really have a standard way of learning music. That’s liberating, because I was able to focus on what I liked, and what I wanted to do.”
Ultimately, Hall’s environs helped shape not only his approach to his career, but his heavily reggae-flavored sound. As he points out, “In Hilton Head, being around the beach, you hear a lot of island music, a lot of reggae. That was really important for me.”
Though he’s only been putting out albums since 2005, Hall’s already built an impressively crowded discography; counting EPs and live collections, “Everything Everytime Everywhere” will be his eighth commercially available release. That kind of prolific output suggests an artist with a workmanlike approach, but Hall says he doesn’t write songs on a timetable.
“I’m too scatterbrained for that,” Hall jokes. “I don’t have any control over when it happens. Sometimes, I’ll be just wiped out after a long day, and really looking forward to laying my head down, and some ideas pop up in my head, so I have to get up and grab my guitar.
While Hall’s blend of pop and reggae certainly doesn’t lack radio-friendly appeal -— something underlined by the inclusion of his song “Other Ways” on the soundtrack to “Shrek The Third” — he says it doesn’t happen by design. “When I’m writing a really good song, it’s like I’m not really doing anything -- it’s one of my favorite feelings.”
And although Hall’s creative approach means he doesn’t go into his albums with any rigid rules -- as he puts it, “I never really go into the studio thinking ‘I’d like the album to sound like this,’ or ‘I want the focus of the album to be this’ ” -- that doesn’t mean he didn’t have goals for the new CD. “With this record, I wanted to bring a really raw flavor — a little bit of a harder thing,” he says.
“A more honest depiction of the struggle, you know? Not just peace and love and everything’s fine.
“The title of the record is a reflection of that,” Hall continues. “As a spiritual person, sometimes I feel like a stranger in a strange land. I was in India with one of my teachers and I mentioned this to him, and he just looked at me and said, ‘Everything, everytime, everywhere.’ God is everything, all the time, everywhere you go.
“It really hit me hard,” he admits. “For the rest of my trip over there, I was thinking about those words. When I got back, I knew I wanted that to be the theme of the album, and I wanted to show the struggle of living those words. If we share our struggles, we can learn a lot from each other.”
