Rob Roper Bio
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, I got my first acoustic guitar when I was 12 and took lessons for 5 months. Soon after that my dad moved us to Dallas, Texas, where I spent my teenage years. I got an electric guitar, and played with high school friends in their garages, but no band ever formed that lasted more than a couple of practices. I took more lessons when I was 18, and learned to play lead guitar. Music was a hobby in my college years and in my twenties, but in my thirties I began taking it more seriously, taking more guitar lessons and then singing lessons, and joining bands in Tucson, Arizona, where I had moved.
It was in Tucson that I met bass player and songwriter Kurt Loken. We made two home recordings on 4-track cassette in 1994-95 under the band name "Faded Innocence". Kurt wrote and sang most of the songs and played bass. I played guitar and did the arrangements. I wrote two of my first songs at this time, and they appeared on the first album. You can hear a few of those songs on the Faded Innocence Myspace site Faded Innocence.
After Kurt moved away from Tucson, I played a couple of solo acoustic gigs, playing mostly cover songs, and accompanied another singer-songwriter on acoustic lead guitar. Then in 2000 I moved to Denver. I played lead guitar in a band for awhile, and then around 2003 quit that band and started getting serious about learning songwriting. In 2004 I attended the Song School in Lyons, Colorado, and learned some songwriting skills and gained confidence that I could write songs. I focused on songwriting for the next three years, and the result of that was a "Do-It-Yourself" CD called "Some Songs I Wrote", released in 2007, which is available at cdbaby.com/cd/robroper.
Since then I've been performing in the Denver area at various small venues, and playing the occasional open mic. Last year he began performing with Julie Oxenford O'Brian accompanying me on violin. And, of course, I'm still writing songs.