"Eleven Stories," the title of Bruce Robison's latest release, seemingly states the obvious: He's a country songwriter, so aren't all his albums filled with stories? "I guess it was an odd choice," Robison agrees. "It's kinda saying that's what I'm tryin' to do. I suppose you're right; I guess that's what all of my records are like."

Robison penned The Dixie Chick's tear-jerking "Travelin' Soldier," which details a moving wartime romance. He also has a lighter side that comes through on "What Would Willie Do" from his previous "Country Sunshine" CD. That song's all about Willie Nelson's "medicinal" use of pot. It's one of his best "stories" and perhaps his funniest. "My records had been a little bit serious to that point, I was afraid, so it was good for me," Robison says of the song. "My sense of humor is a big part of who I am."

One has to wonder what Willie did and thought when he first heard it. "He seems to like it," Robison reports. "I got to talk to him about it a couple of times. He seemed to take it in the spirit with which it was offered. It's tough to be around him in that sense; I don't know if you know it, but there's been a ton of songs written about him. So in a way, you're just another bootlicker whenever you pay a tribute like that. But I meant it, and I think he's a really a great guy and a talented guy and a hero. But I'm not the first person that ever wrote a song about Willie Nelson. In my perfect world, he'd think of me as somebody that aspired to be a peer, rather than just someone who was just paying a tribute. But I'm a little bit of both."

On the new CD, Robison covers "Tennessee Jed," a Grateful Dead song written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Robison takes great joy in choosing the songs he covers and sees Nelson as an example of one who chooses cover songs well.

"I always thought that Willie Nelson chose really interesting things, and I try to find things that are outside of my own genre," he explains. "It really wouldn't be a stretch for me to do a Guy Clark song; I've been listening to him for a million years. That song, 'Tennessee Jed,' was one I wasn't aware of until I heard it about a year ago."

He loves the song, but he is by no means a Dead Head. "I don't know anything about The Grateful Dead, except for the two or three songs that they would play on classic rock radio," Robison admits. "A few years ago I bought a couple of their records that I really love, "Working-man's Dead" and "American Beauty." "I know very little about them, especially since they're such a way of life for such a huge part of the public. I think it is interesting, and it's not the type of song that I ever could have written, so it's a lot of fun to sing."

Because he's not a Dead fan, he came upon this gem purely by chance. "I think I heard it in the middle of the night on some weirdo radio program where they play Grateful Dead songs for a half an hour," he recalls.

Why he covers any particular song sometimes varies from song to song. A Webb Pierce number covered on the new release just called out for a duet vocal with Robison's wife, Kelly Willis, for instance. "Sometimes I'll want to do songs because they'll be fun to sing or that I can think of something that I can do that's different than the original," he explains. "And 'More And More,' the Webb Pierce song, didn't have harmonies on the original, so it was an excuse to do a tune with Kelly, which I'm always looking for."

If there's a theme that unites these 11 newly recorded songs, it's a rhythmic tie rather than a lyrical one. Robison set out to record an album of songs that were simply pleasurable to perform. "I wanted songs that you could play a tambourine along to," Robison says. "I wanted songs that felt really good; songs that weren't poetry, they weren't prose, they weren't novels. They were music, and they felt good in the way that a lot of my heroes' music feels. And that's what I was attempting to do - make a real musical record. And I realize that's redundant. Some songs that I've recorded, I've felt like they weren't all that groovy. So that's something I really thought I could do better."

A single from this new CD, "All Over But The Cryin'," is one of those instantly likeable songs. It's amazing nobody's used such a perfect song title before. "That's what I thought of when I thought of the title," Robison admits. "I actually went and looked on the internet to try and find out if there were 50 songs on there by that title."

Robison was happy, of course, to realize he was first with this title. "It was a pleasant surprise. It's a lot of fun to sing and play. It's real dramatic. It's real over the top. And it's tough to pull those things off, so it was a lot of fun to do."

"Eleven Stories" retains continuity, even though Robison worked with three separate bands while recording it. "We kind of got our studio up and running, so that makes it easier to work down here," says Robison about the songs he recorded in his Austin home. "On every record I've had, I think I've ended up doing some work with the players in Nashville, who are the best players that are on the planet, I think. And it's an amazing thing to be able to take part in. The guy, who played steel on the songs that we did in Nashville, played the steel on 'Exile On Main Street' and 50 other enormous, huge hits. So to be able to have that, it's hard to turn it down. You get your own special kinda vibe down here, but the players in Nashville, as far as our kind of music, they're all there, and they're the best."

Robison's biggest hits, such as "Traveling Soldier," have all been for other artists. He also wrote "Angry All the Time," a hit for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and "Desperately" for George Strait. Robison is probably best known as a songwriter, but he's okay with that. "That's my goal," he admits. "I'm a songwriter; that's what I do. The rest of it's kind of cake. I like to perform, but I'm a songwriter. My songwriting career makes everything possible. I don't think I would be a singer. I don't think anybody would want to hear me sing if I wasn't a songwriter. I have that going for me that luckily some people want to hear songs the way the writer does it."

Robison knew from the very start that he had a gift. "About 15 years ago, when I first started writing songs, I felt good at it," he recalls. "And I realized that I didn't feel good at any of the other stuff that I'd been doing. And that was a wonderful day. And I called myself a songwriter for 10 years before I made a penny at it, and I loved it. And I've felt fortunate ever since then. That's what I hope for my kids...that someday they find something that they're good at, regardless if they ever make any money at it or not."

Although he knows he's a good songwriter, this knowledge doesn't hold him back from constantly improving his craft. "It does come easy to me in that I understand the vernacular of it and that it wasn't a struggle," he explains. "I feel like I'm always trying to get better, and it's difficult to write a good song. And it's difficult to be a good songwriter. But I think you can say that about anything that's worthwhile. Nothing's easy. And it's easy to be crappy at anything. The minute I started doing it, I felt right, and I felt like I had a talent at it, so that's about as easy as it gets."

"Eleven Stories" was released on Sustain Records, Robison's new self-owned label. He's excited about the opportunity to have his own label, as well as the unknown potential offered by the emerging internet. "I haven't done much work on that," says Robison of this new business venture. "I think that there are a lot of possibilities, and I think that the music business is all upside-down and being reinvented. It's like the Fifties again, and I want to be part of it. I don't know how I feel about it, and I don't know how it's going to shake out. I think it's going to be good for the people who have - whatever you want to call it - the songs, the intellectual property, the content. Anything they need to fill up that crazy internet out there. The people that make it happen are going to be in a better spot."

In a previous musical life, Robison recorded a few albums for Lucky Dog, an edgy Sony Records subsidiary, also including brother Charlie and Jack Ingram.

Oddly enough, Robison might become even more famous for a Claritin-D allergy medication commercial he and his wife recently appeared in. It wasn't something he sought out. Nevertheless, it's a venture that made sense for both Robison and Willis. "I think somebody on the creative side of it, like the producer, was sort of a fan of me and Kelly's," he says. "And I think they had that whole treatment going. And then he said, 'Bruce and Kelly are perfect for this whole little set piece.' So they asked us to do it, and we said yes. It happened really fast, so I'm not sure if they had somebody else in mind, or they just fit us into it or not. But it was, like, 'Hey, we're shooting this commercial on Tuesday. Do y'all wanna do it?' We were happy to. It's kind of hard to get your name and face out there these days; there's kind of million records coming out on any given day."

Just for the record: Both Bruce and Kelly use this medicine. "It's a product I use, so I was able to do it with a clear conscience," he says.

Who knows, maybe Robison's next album will include 11 songs all about allergy medications. That's doubtful, but he's a fine songwriter who does what Willie also does well: He writes great songs.