This Year.
I've had an AMAZING year. I've gotten to travel all over the US, even a little in the UK & Ireland, in the name of music! I've been collecting souvenirs along the way, and some videos, so I made you a little summary. Thank you so much for believing, listening, and telling your friends!
HERE IT IS!
Grace and Peace,
Robert
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
I'm Coming Home. (Christmas Single!)
I haven't spent a lot of time at home in Texas lately, and I'm in Texas allllll of November. It's pretty weird to pay rent in Nashville and not be there for even one single day of the month. There's been a bunch of catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, and also building very unexpected friendships with people you haven't seen in years that you weren't even friends with years ago! I've been playing lots of shows in Texas, with a couple in Houston, and one in College Station, coming up, and I just got back from a friend's lake house with a lot of the new friends I mentioned. In other news, one of our horses is sick, so that's been exciting, and I've been getting the other one ready to ride. I bet you didn't know I was a cowboy. Riding the range, working in the barn, that classic piece of hay you have to keep in your mouth, with the fluffy part at the end? Yep. I'm the real deal.
Okay so maybe I'm not, but I try.
Thanksgiving is coming up! Pretty soon after that, I'll be releasing a Christmas single I've been working on, I can't wait for you to hear it! The title of this point = the name of the song.
-Robert
Okay so maybe I'm not, but I try.
Thanksgiving is coming up! Pretty soon after that, I'll be releasing a Christmas single I've been working on, I can't wait for you to hear it! The title of this point = the name of the song.
-Robert
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Snails.
This June, my sister, Beth, and I missed the last train home from Alnwick to Newcastle in England. We’d been pretending that we were at Hogwarts all day, because we actually were at Hogwarts, aka Alnwick Castle, home of the Duke of Northumberton! But seriously, the first three movies were filmed largely at this castle. When Harry learns to use a broom, and play Quidditch?! Yep. We were there. See below for pictures...
Well, Beth and I misread the train timetable and went and played on some strange England-style park equipment to pass the time. Before that, a dog tried to bite me. After sitting at the train station for 30 minutes waiting for the train that would never come, we panicked and tried the bus stop up the road. The bus driver laughed and dropped us off at a phone booth, in a dark, cold, middle-of-nowhere roundabout where Harry Potter would have found himself as he fled the Snatchers, Dementors, Death Eaters, or Voldemort, of course. We were terrified, and called 999. That’s the British 911. We would have just called a cab, but there was nowhere to put money in the phone, nor was there a place to slide your card. The 999 lady called a cab for us, and we spent the next hour or two huddled inside the phone booth, staying semi-warm, and watching a snail slurp it’s way across an advert (that means advertisement in England). Finally, a cab came to take us 60 miles back to Newcastle, who we tried to talk to, but couldn’t understand at all.
Despite our fear, it’s turned out to be something that we laugh about, and it’s so much better of a story than “we went to the castle and came home.” It’s so easy to get caught up with everything going as planned, when the best things often happen spontaneously. I’m trying to learn how to be more open-minded in regards to where my life is and stop planning everything to death. It just takes away the thrill. If adventure is what we’re signing up for, which I certainly am, I guess I’m learning to deal with the occasional cold night watching snails slurp by.
Now I have to move my car to avoid getting a ticket. Also, do you ever get tired of listening to hipster kids outside of coffee shops talk about songs they’re writing as they smoke pipes and look at their “new” thrift store finds that are undoubtedly 2 sizes to small? I do. :) Enjoy the pictures below!
Well, Beth and I misread the train timetable and went and played on some strange England-style park equipment to pass the time. Before that, a dog tried to bite me. After sitting at the train station for 30 minutes waiting for the train that would never come, we panicked and tried the bus stop up the road. The bus driver laughed and dropped us off at a phone booth, in a dark, cold, middle-of-nowhere roundabout where Harry Potter would have found himself as he fled the Snatchers, Dementors, Death Eaters, or Voldemort, of course. We were terrified, and called 999. That’s the British 911. We would have just called a cab, but there was nowhere to put money in the phone, nor was there a place to slide your card. The 999 lady called a cab for us, and we spent the next hour or two huddled inside the phone booth, staying semi-warm, and watching a snail slurp it’s way across an advert (that means advertisement in England). Finally, a cab came to take us 60 miles back to Newcastle, who we tried to talk to, but couldn’t understand at all.
Despite our fear, it’s turned out to be something that we laugh about, and it’s so much better of a story than “we went to the castle and came home.” It’s so easy to get caught up with everything going as planned, when the best things often happen spontaneously. I’m trying to learn how to be more open-minded in regards to where my life is and stop planning everything to death. It just takes away the thrill. If adventure is what we’re signing up for, which I certainly am, I guess I’m learning to deal with the occasional cold night watching snails slurp by.
Now I have to move my car to avoid getting a ticket. Also, do you ever get tired of listening to hipster kids outside of coffee shops talk about songs they’re writing as they smoke pipes and look at their “new” thrift store finds that are undoubtedly 2 sizes to small? I do. :) Enjoy the pictures below!
Monday, February 28, 2011
New Website! New Record! New Everything.
Hola, Amigos!
If you're reading this, you've prooobably found the new website. You haven't heard a lot from me in a while, because I've been hard at work on a new record, called We Are Poetry. The past 4 months, I've been spending lots of time in the studio with an amazing producer (and, now, dear friend) named Thomas Doeve. He lives in Nashville, makes amazing records (like Andrew Belle's 'The Ladder'), and it's been such a pleasure to work with him. I've even had the pleasure of working with incredible musicians, from the legendary K.S. Rhoads, to Belmont wonders Nathan Spicer and Taylor DeRosa, all the way to virtuoso violinist Eleonore Denig. Not to mention the trumpet stylings of Taylor Massey, and the angelic voice of Jillian Edwards. Rest assured that lots of love, work, hand claps, and pizza have gone into this record.
So from here on out, I'll be keeping you up to speed with everything that's going on, including posting videos, playing shows, and documenting my current and past travels.
There's a lot that's happened so far, lots about to happen, and I feel like the experiences are worth sharing. Come along with me?
Robert
If you're reading this, you've prooobably found the new website. You haven't heard a lot from me in a while, because I've been hard at work on a new record, called We Are Poetry. The past 4 months, I've been spending lots of time in the studio with an amazing producer (and, now, dear friend) named Thomas Doeve. He lives in Nashville, makes amazing records (like Andrew Belle's 'The Ladder'), and it's been such a pleasure to work with him. I've even had the pleasure of working with incredible musicians, from the legendary K.S. Rhoads, to Belmont wonders Nathan Spicer and Taylor DeRosa, all the way to virtuoso violinist Eleonore Denig. Not to mention the trumpet stylings of Taylor Massey, and the angelic voice of Jillian Edwards. Rest assured that lots of love, work, hand claps, and pizza have gone into this record.
So from here on out, I'll be keeping you up to speed with everything that's going on, including posting videos, playing shows, and documenting my current and past travels.
There's a lot that's happened so far, lots about to happen, and I feel like the experiences are worth sharing. Come along with me?
Robert
Middle East Adventures, Pt. 1
I traveled to the Middle East a year and a half ago, and I decided I'd put my experiences into writing. Here's Part 1:
For the past few years, I’ve had this attitude that the best part of life is telling stories that I’ve lived through. Regardless of the outcome, it seems that experiences are just sort of reborn as stories, and it’s often the painful/humiliating/terrifying endings that become the best to tell.
I haven’t really done a lot of writing, but I guess this is the part where I give a little background. To put it frankly, I was raised by wonderful parents, with a wonderful sister, in a conservative (in hindsight) Dallas suburb. There was even a perfectly Baptist church in the story. I thought the world was really small, then I learned that it was really big, then I learned that it was even smaller, but in a much different way.
One other important detail of the growing-up was a summer camp where I spent a lot of time, called Sky Ranch. I roamed around, combating the Texas heat with ziplines, water slides, and, of course, a lake with a Blob. The Blob is a giant air pillow on the banks of the lake. One kid sits on the end farthest into the water while another (preferably much heavier) kid jumps from a platform onto the Blob, launching the former ideally into oblivion, but more than likely into a 15-foot-high soaring belly flop onto an unforgiving lake. At Sky Ranch I learned about what love is, who Jesus is, and how to sneak through the forest in the middle of the night in full camouflage, completely unnoticed by enemy spies.
I loved this place dearly, and worked there as soon as I got to college. I was shocked when I realized that the saintly, all-knowing leaders that I had always looked up to, were actually wide-eyed, older-looking kids than the ones they were in charge of. We really had no idea what we were doing.
The point of all that isn’t the Blob at all, but that the second summer of working there, I got to go with a group of other Sky Ranch Staff to southern Kenya, where we had a really cool summer camp 50 miles from Mt. Kilimanjaro in the middle of Maasai-land. The Maasai are an old-spirited, wandering tribe, who heard cattle and goats, make really cool jewelry, and wear red pieces of linen wrapped across their bodies. It’s quite honestly real-life National Geographic, until you hear a phone ring, and one of the herder guys pull a cell phone from the folds of their costume-that’s-not-actually-a-costume. See what I’m saying with the whole “small-big-small” thing? I was amazed that people lived so differently than I live. It’s something you hear about, but it’s difficult to realize there aren’t Chick-Fil-A’s just around the corner from the pictures of babies with big bellies and flies on their faces until you see it for yourself.
I’d seen firsthand that my lifestyle is far, far from the norm. I think that a lot of people like to come back from trips like that (maybe I did this…) and look down their noses at everyone because they just aren’t “cultured,” and don’t appreciate refrigeration or hot showers like I did after drinking “heat-treated” milk that magically didn’t need refrigeration (and came amazingly packaged just like a juice box), or trying to wash my hair in freezing Kilimanjaro-water while trying my hardest not to get anything else wet, but it really is an amazing blessing of an opportunity that most people won’t get to have. And let’s face it, a large number of Americans are tricked into thinking that they can see the world through CNN and FOX, which is basically the same as deciding you don’t need to see a sunset over the Pacific because you’ve seen your electric stove things get all orange and hot when it’s switched on.
The fact is, I’d been told by my world that Africa was a continent with crazy monster-people that ate each other and bugs and were always fighting each other for any vast number of reasons, and I was shocked beyond belief when I landed at the Nairobi airport and I saw no scary men with machine guns, but was greeted with kindness and love that I’d only expect from the closest friends. (Weeks later I did find machine guns, but I was bringing tea to/taking pictures with the very un-scary policemen who were holding them).
One stereotype I’d been subtley taught had crumbled before my eyes, thus rattling the foundations of all the others I’d heard my whole life, and I was dying to explore them.
Two summers later, before my senior year of college, I had planned to go back to Africa, but the trip sort of fell through. Around that time I’d heard lots of people saying all kinds of crazy stuff about the Middle East and how everyone there wants to kill me and everyone else here in America. I got pretty defensive and shocked a bunch of people when I told them that I’d just have to go and see what’s going on over there and report back. I got so into it that I actually booked a flight with a bunch of earnestly-collected frequent flier miles, and somehow even managed a begrudged blessing from my parents, who were feeling brave after watching their son go to Africa and make it out alive. Before I knew it I was mailing my passport to a Syrian Consulate in Houston, TX. You’d think that would be pretty official, but the number I called actually made its way to a gruff voice muttering “Hello?” I was shocked, but I mailed my passport to him, and it came back with a stamp on it with Arabic writing, and I thought that was pretty neat. I planned tentatively to hit up Syria, Jordan, Israel, West Bank, and Egypt. Oh, I forgot to mention that I couldn’t really find anybody equally excited about this month-long adventure/quest/thing, and decided that I’d go by myself. My friends and family were positive I was marching off to my death, and I’d started growing a beard.
All I knew was that I had a backpack with a few pairs of clothes, tennis shoes, sandals, sleeping bag, one of those “secret” fanny-packs that you wear under your pants so no bad guys can take your passport, and a tiny guitar that could strap to the side of the backpack. It even fit in an overhead compartment! As I sat in the Dallas airport, loneliness crept in. I noticed a mass of high school kids in matching shirts, and I knew by my Baptist upbringing that it could be nothing other than a mission trip. Their shirts informed me they were from a local mega-church, and after talking to a few of them I learned we had a mutual friend. The loneliness subsided, we talked and talked, and we boarded the plane headed for Amsterdam.
I ended up only an aisle away from the kids I’d been talking to, which was amazing considering there were at least a hundred of them…the plane even gave them a shout-out upon takeoff and landing. We talked a lot about music and the suburbs, and they expressed the usual terror regarding my solo journey, complete with dismal “we’ll be praying for you.” This is when I got out my Trader Joe’s chocolate covered almonds, and offered them around. I even asked the guy sitting behind me, who was wearing a full military uniform and hadn’t made the slightest sound. He was shocked, and I repeated myself “Do you want some of these chocolate covered almonds?” Timidly, he agreed, and he told me that he was going to Germany, then to Afghanistan. I decided to ask him for advice for my trip, and he gave me a stern, ghostly command to “Always have a point of contact.” I emphatically agreed…then asked him what he meant. “Always be sure someone knows where you’re going, how you’re getting there, and never take the same way twice,” he urged, “make sure you carefully map the paths you take, and gather intel on dangerous places around you.” I nodded and agreed, while my brain flopped around inside my head as I realized there was no way I was prepared to do any of that. I was truly marching off to my death. I would never survive in this dangerous part of the world called the Middle East. I nervously ate my chocolate almonds and turned on a movie. Before I knew it I had decided on a pretty neat-looking movie called Taken. Ironically, the whole premise of this movie is a girl who goes to Europe, gets kidnapped, addicted to drugs, and amazingly is saved by her warrior-father from being a sex-slave. Really great movie choice. This sparked lots of thoughts. “I don’t think I want to be a sex slave” “Isn’t Europe safer than the Middle East?” “I’m going to get kidnapped within 5 minutes of my plane landing” “At least I have a beard?” It was very comforting. We landed in Amsterdam, said my goodbye’s to the mission trip kids and the scary military guy, and I got on another plane to Rome.
MORE TO COME...
For the past few years, I’ve had this attitude that the best part of life is telling stories that I’ve lived through. Regardless of the outcome, it seems that experiences are just sort of reborn as stories, and it’s often the painful/humiliating/terrifying endings that become the best to tell.
I haven’t really done a lot of writing, but I guess this is the part where I give a little background. To put it frankly, I was raised by wonderful parents, with a wonderful sister, in a conservative (in hindsight) Dallas suburb. There was even a perfectly Baptist church in the story. I thought the world was really small, then I learned that it was really big, then I learned that it was even smaller, but in a much different way.
One other important detail of the growing-up was a summer camp where I spent a lot of time, called Sky Ranch. I roamed around, combating the Texas heat with ziplines, water slides, and, of course, a lake with a Blob. The Blob is a giant air pillow on the banks of the lake. One kid sits on the end farthest into the water while another (preferably much heavier) kid jumps from a platform onto the Blob, launching the former ideally into oblivion, but more than likely into a 15-foot-high soaring belly flop onto an unforgiving lake. At Sky Ranch I learned about what love is, who Jesus is, and how to sneak through the forest in the middle of the night in full camouflage, completely unnoticed by enemy spies.
I loved this place dearly, and worked there as soon as I got to college. I was shocked when I realized that the saintly, all-knowing leaders that I had always looked up to, were actually wide-eyed, older-looking kids than the ones they were in charge of. We really had no idea what we were doing.
The point of all that isn’t the Blob at all, but that the second summer of working there, I got to go with a group of other Sky Ranch Staff to southern Kenya, where we had a really cool summer camp 50 miles from Mt. Kilimanjaro in the middle of Maasai-land. The Maasai are an old-spirited, wandering tribe, who heard cattle and goats, make really cool jewelry, and wear red pieces of linen wrapped across their bodies. It’s quite honestly real-life National Geographic, until you hear a phone ring, and one of the herder guys pull a cell phone from the folds of their costume-that’s-not-actually-a-costume. See what I’m saying with the whole “small-big-small” thing? I was amazed that people lived so differently than I live. It’s something you hear about, but it’s difficult to realize there aren’t Chick-Fil-A’s just around the corner from the pictures of babies with big bellies and flies on their faces until you see it for yourself.
I’d seen firsthand that my lifestyle is far, far from the norm. I think that a lot of people like to come back from trips like that (maybe I did this…) and look down their noses at everyone because they just aren’t “cultured,” and don’t appreciate refrigeration or hot showers like I did after drinking “heat-treated” milk that magically didn’t need refrigeration (and came amazingly packaged just like a juice box), or trying to wash my hair in freezing Kilimanjaro-water while trying my hardest not to get anything else wet, but it really is an amazing blessing of an opportunity that most people won’t get to have. And let’s face it, a large number of Americans are tricked into thinking that they can see the world through CNN and FOX, which is basically the same as deciding you don’t need to see a sunset over the Pacific because you’ve seen your electric stove things get all orange and hot when it’s switched on.
The fact is, I’d been told by my world that Africa was a continent with crazy monster-people that ate each other and bugs and were always fighting each other for any vast number of reasons, and I was shocked beyond belief when I landed at the Nairobi airport and I saw no scary men with machine guns, but was greeted with kindness and love that I’d only expect from the closest friends. (Weeks later I did find machine guns, but I was bringing tea to/taking pictures with the very un-scary policemen who were holding them).
One stereotype I’d been subtley taught had crumbled before my eyes, thus rattling the foundations of all the others I’d heard my whole life, and I was dying to explore them.
Two summers later, before my senior year of college, I had planned to go back to Africa, but the trip sort of fell through. Around that time I’d heard lots of people saying all kinds of crazy stuff about the Middle East and how everyone there wants to kill me and everyone else here in America. I got pretty defensive and shocked a bunch of people when I told them that I’d just have to go and see what’s going on over there and report back. I got so into it that I actually booked a flight with a bunch of earnestly-collected frequent flier miles, and somehow even managed a begrudged blessing from my parents, who were feeling brave after watching their son go to Africa and make it out alive. Before I knew it I was mailing my passport to a Syrian Consulate in Houston, TX. You’d think that would be pretty official, but the number I called actually made its way to a gruff voice muttering “Hello?” I was shocked, but I mailed my passport to him, and it came back with a stamp on it with Arabic writing, and I thought that was pretty neat. I planned tentatively to hit up Syria, Jordan, Israel, West Bank, and Egypt. Oh, I forgot to mention that I couldn’t really find anybody equally excited about this month-long adventure/quest/thing, and decided that I’d go by myself. My friends and family were positive I was marching off to my death, and I’d started growing a beard.
All I knew was that I had a backpack with a few pairs of clothes, tennis shoes, sandals, sleeping bag, one of those “secret” fanny-packs that you wear under your pants so no bad guys can take your passport, and a tiny guitar that could strap to the side of the backpack. It even fit in an overhead compartment! As I sat in the Dallas airport, loneliness crept in. I noticed a mass of high school kids in matching shirts, and I knew by my Baptist upbringing that it could be nothing other than a mission trip. Their shirts informed me they were from a local mega-church, and after talking to a few of them I learned we had a mutual friend. The loneliness subsided, we talked and talked, and we boarded the plane headed for Amsterdam.
I ended up only an aisle away from the kids I’d been talking to, which was amazing considering there were at least a hundred of them…the plane even gave them a shout-out upon takeoff and landing. We talked a lot about music and the suburbs, and they expressed the usual terror regarding my solo journey, complete with dismal “we’ll be praying for you.” This is when I got out my Trader Joe’s chocolate covered almonds, and offered them around. I even asked the guy sitting behind me, who was wearing a full military uniform and hadn’t made the slightest sound. He was shocked, and I repeated myself “Do you want some of these chocolate covered almonds?” Timidly, he agreed, and he told me that he was going to Germany, then to Afghanistan. I decided to ask him for advice for my trip, and he gave me a stern, ghostly command to “Always have a point of contact.” I emphatically agreed…then asked him what he meant. “Always be sure someone knows where you’re going, how you’re getting there, and never take the same way twice,” he urged, “make sure you carefully map the paths you take, and gather intel on dangerous places around you.” I nodded and agreed, while my brain flopped around inside my head as I realized there was no way I was prepared to do any of that. I was truly marching off to my death. I would never survive in this dangerous part of the world called the Middle East. I nervously ate my chocolate almonds and turned on a movie. Before I knew it I had decided on a pretty neat-looking movie called Taken. Ironically, the whole premise of this movie is a girl who goes to Europe, gets kidnapped, addicted to drugs, and amazingly is saved by her warrior-father from being a sex-slave. Really great movie choice. This sparked lots of thoughts. “I don’t think I want to be a sex slave” “Isn’t Europe safer than the Middle East?” “I’m going to get kidnapped within 5 minutes of my plane landing” “At least I have a beard?” It was very comforting. We landed in Amsterdam, said my goodbye’s to the mission trip kids and the scary military guy, and I got on another plane to Rome.
MORE TO COME...
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