Robert started his classical training at MUN. “I trained in Tuba but never was so good at it,” he says. “I always just wanted to be a composer.”
Robert uses the name R Sheaves as his stage name for his alternative folk/rock music. This is in order to differentiate it from his experimental classical music. “I do like having these two sides of my creative practice; they really feed into each other,” he says.
The slow down of the pandemic gave Robert the opportunity he needed to explore his songwriting/producing side. “Around the latter part of 2020 I wrote and recorded the first song for the album. At the time I wasn't sure if it was part of an album, or a one-off, or even if I would release it at all,” he continues. “I had played in bands, in the background, but there was this silly inner struggle about whether I was actually ready to share my own songs on stage, at the front, singing and whatnot. Classic “imposter syndrome” stuff.”
“I thought, okay, it is the pandemic now, I don’t have to worry about performing. I just need to create. Later, once I've made a batch of songs, we can go from there. And here we are.”
Robert tried to be resourceful for this album. “The idea for me was to take what I have around me in any given place and try to use it.” For example, he wanted to use a pedal steel in the album, but didn’t have access to one. “So I learned how to play a saw, like an actual saw,” he says because the sound of a handsaw being bowed with a violin bow roughly emulates the timbre of a pedal steel. “It is a haunting sound,” adds Robert.
“That is really the story of the album, how to make something interesting and sometimes large and cinematic out of almost nothing, like a guitar, a saw, whatever upright piano someone is willing to let me use for an afternoon, and some trinkets.”
Robert is honest and humble about the emotional content of the album. “I would say that this album was written in response to some newly uprooted anxieties in my life and some deaths, some of them foreseen and some unexpected,” says Robert. “There are lyrics about grief, sometimes guilt and shame, but also about life and love and the act of making art itself. And I think that journey comes across when you listen to the album all the way through. You’ll hear sadness but also pockets of hope.”
In the quiet of those pandemic years, his first album called MARY SPINS came to life as it was recorded in many unique places from remote cabins to friends’ basements. He wrote and recorded part of his new album in Newfoundland but he also created much of it in Calgary, AB, and in Kitchener, ON. “It has kind of happened all over the place, just taking my gear around and doing it really lo-fi, just one microphone,” he says. “As I listen to the album now, I can hear the ghosts of three years of my life spent in all of these different places,” Robert says.
The album will be released on March 14th 2025 and the kick off concert will be at the Rotary Arts Centre on March 22nd 2025. Robert is now more than ready to hit the stage and perform these songs. “We have a great band and we are hoping to perform live more often.”
Robert is excited to be back in Newfoundland for the launch of this new album. “I grew up in Pasadena,” Robert says. “I am enjoying being back now. There is an energy here that I vibe with. I feel a strange pride at living near a place as beautiful as Gros Morne. I like being around my family. I like the ocean.”
He adds with a shy smile, “I have always felt like a Newfie.”
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