Memoirs

In 2013, Robert ghostwrote a memoir for a retired Air Force colonel, and he is currently ghostwriting another memoir.

His first personal memoir, A Life Loving Music, will be published in May of 2025. Below is a sample chapter from that book. (To receive 3 additional funny and poignant sneak-peek chapters, join Robert’s email list for FREE at the bottom of this page.)

Let the Broken Hearts Stand

As a 26-year-old college dropout, I was lucky—luckier than I knew—to have the job I had: selling yellow page ads, working 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday, making $45k+ a year (with health insurance) plus bonuses, all from the comfort of a private office with a stunning floor-to-ceiling cactus and a real wooden door.

But somehow I got it in my head that I was on a crash course to waking up in my fifties filled with regret that I hadn’t followed my artistic dream: writing screenplays. I started thinking about quitting my job.

Around that time, the music I most often listened to in my car and in my apartment was the triple-disc Springsteen album Live 1975-1985, and the track I most often played was “Badlands,” a song about not waiting for your dreams to come true, but instead going after them with unapologetic resolve.

“Badlands” was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

I called my mother with the exciting news that I was about to give my two-week notice and go all in on writing a screenplay to stave off a life of regret. But I quickly found that excitement, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder.

“How will you pay your bills?” she asked. “And what about your benefits? You have a good job—especially for someone without a degree. You need to think about these things.”

She hesitated, then added: “I feel like you’re making a mistake.”

I asked her: “Was Bruce Springsteen making a mistake when he wrote Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.? Did he make a mistake in not shelving his six-string aspirations in the interest of stability? Would the world be a better place without Born to Run? The River? The Rising?”

How is a concerned mother to respond to such questions?

Through the miles of silent telephone wire, I could feel her pain.

Wanting to take it away, wanting her to feel instead the rightness of my dream, I said: “Listen to this, Mom,” and I sang her the lyrics to the song I’d been playing on repeat for weeks.

I got through the first verse and the chorus, then I stopped and asked her—pleaded with her: “What does this say to you, Mom!? What do these lyrics say to you!?”

This time there was no hesitation in her reply: “They tell me you need to stop listening to Bruce Springsteen.”