By the time guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson stood in a Dublin studio with the members of U2, he had spent years refusing to make another record. He had announced his return through a Billboard article in 1983, but the plan moved slowly, tangled in label deals and a search for someone who shared his restlessness. On October 27, 1987, that long-delayed return finally reached the public. That search led to the Canadian producer Daniel Lanois, who was just finishing work with U2 on The Joshua Tree. Lanois invited Robertson to Ireland, and Robertson arrived carrying almost nothing: a brass score left over from Martin Scorsese's film The Color of Money and a guitar riff recorded with a tom-tom.
A debut shaped by U2 and Gabriel
The result was released on October 27, 1987, as Robertson's debut solo album, simply titled Robbie Robertson. It was a strange, ambitious record that paired a man best known for the rootsy American sound of The Band with the arena-sized atmospherics of U2 and Peter Gabriel. Robertson had spent the previous decade mostly away from music, working on films and guarding his privacy. He had even created a private concept he called The Shadowland, a mythical place where his songs could unfold. Now he was stepping into the light, and he had chosen the most modern, texture-obsessed collaborators available.
The Dublin sessions were chaotic in the best way. Robertson and Bono improvised lyrics while the rest of U2 played behind them, producing a raw 22-minute track that was later edited down into the single 'Sweet Fire of Love.' Lanois then took the unused brass arrangement from Gil Evans and built 'Testimony' around it, again with U2 as the backing band. Robertson had not planned to make an album that sounded like this. He had simply followed Lanois, who believed in experiments over comfort.
He had simply followed Lanois, who believed in experiments over comfort.
Grief at Peter Gabriel's studio
From Ireland, Robertson travelled to Bath, England, to work at Peter Gabriel's home studio. There he found another kind of collaboration. 'Fallen Angel' had been conceived as a song about a soul passing into another dimension, but it took on a sharper grief when Robertson dedicated it to Richard Manuel, his former bandmate in The Band, who had taken his own life in 1986. Gabriel added backing vocals and keyboards, and Robertson was struck by what he called a ghostly, angelic sound created through layered voices. The song became the emotional core of the record.
Robertson also reached back to his own past in a more direct way. He asked Rick Danko, another former member of The Band, to add vocals to 'Sonny Got Caught in the Moonlight' during the mixing sessions. Robertson had originally planned to sing the track alone, but changed his mind because he had already used other vocalists throughout the album. It was a small gesture, but it carried weight: a man who had avoided reunions and nostalgia was quietly letting his old bandmates back into his music.
The album did not dominate the charts, but it found a real audience. It reached number 38 on the Billboard 200, and two of its singles made a strong showing on the Mainstream Rock chart: 'Showdown at Big Sky' climbed to number 2, while 'Sweet Fire of Love' hit number 7. Critics were split. Some praised the record's reach and ambition, but the writer Greil Marcus later dismissed it as draped in overproduction, with themes so worked over and vocals so disguised that the real person behind it all was hard to see.
That criticism pointed at the album's central gamble. Robertson had spent years crafting a mystique, then handed the controls to collaborators known for their own grand sonic signatures. The risk was that his voice would vanish inside their sound. Instead, Robbie Robertson became a record about searching: for a new musical identity, for a way to honour the dead, for a place where a songwriter could belong after the band that made his name had fallen silent.