My final form

A couple of years back I made the decision that I would no longer release music under my name, that I would throw everything up online that I’d made and leave it there for posterity. And I did it. I put up songs and albums I’d made spanning a decade, and decided from that point on I’d be doing things under a new name: Stirling.

But I recently decided

that it was time to make a return, to put Stirling aside, and start fresh. Why? Well, how about a backstory.

In 2018 I was courting one of the biggest artist managers in Los Angeles, someone who I looked up to a great deal, and wanted more than anything to find myself on their roster with their artists. The conversation about managing me as an artist took a serious turn, and one of the first things they mentioned was my name - that they found it difficult to pronounce, and that it didn’t feel that strong as a performer’s name. Me, still being impressionable and steeped in low self-esteem, thought that their idea made a lot of sense, though I needed time to think about it. Cue me being on stage a few days later and my last name was mispronounced three times, three different ways. So there I had it, my answer: change my name.

Changing my performance name, however, came with the desire to curate a version of myself that focussed on my perceived strengths, and on what I thought would make me attractive to others. See, my low self-esteem went (and still goes) back a long, long way. My idea in my mind of who ‘Robert Gillies’ is as a person was loaded with insecurity; amongst my childhood friend group, I always felt like the youngest and most immature, always needing to prove myself worthy of their friendship; my school years were, frankly, pretty terrible, as I constantly found myself unworthy of pretty much any clique (I was too English, too nerdy, not Scottish enough, too weird); and I had always had this battle between different parts of myself, in a constant battle to latch on to one part of my identity and make it my whole (funny or serious, a bookworm or athletic, English or Scottish).

So I created Stirling.

Stirling was confident, boundless in energy, in touch with his emotions, fearless - and available. I posted nothing about my family life, about being a dad or a husband, about home life. Why did I do this? It felt like a mechanism to help me survive in LA, which frankly feels like one of the most toxic places to pursue a career in the arts as someone 1) over the age of 25, 2) married, and 3) as a parent. I felt shamed on multiple occasions for being older. I was told I needed to colour my hair. That I needed to be writing different music because I was a dad now and that apparently should change who I fundamentally am. That I will fade into obscurity if - God forbid - the hype around me dies out.

Stirling was how I got through the last couple of years there - and I’m grateful for it. The music was slow to come, but being well-received, and the live show was growing stronger and stronger. In fact the last show I was meant to play, and was forced to cancel, was a Saturday headline slot at Hotel Café, which promised to see bigger numbers than I’d ever seen for a live show. Then 2020 happened and I, like everyone else, was forced inside.

I started writing and producing my own material for Stirling, and since home life was - by social media/LA standards - pretty boring, it meant I could focus even more on this curated version of myself. I wrote songs I thought I needed to write, leaned into writing like some of the artists whose sound I thought would help me pop off. Honestly, though, I hated it. LA is a miserable place to live when there’s nothing to do, and all of my opportunities had dried up.

So, on the verge of completely giving up, I wrote a song.

I wrote, and I cried, and I just gave up my ideas of how I wanted things to be.

And it felt amazing. A floodgate opened and suddenly I was writing the best songs of my life. I saw things in a new light - and if you’ve read my last blog, you know I made the move to Norway.

(I also need to say that the period from 2018 until this point also coincided with therapy, which I credit with so much of this change)

Now that I’m here I no longer feel the need to pretend or to hide.

Norway, and the musical company I now keep, care deeply about families. They honour age, children, and experience. The more I thought about continuing this journey as Stirling, the more ridiculous I felt. Here I am, feeling fulfilled in all ways, and still trying to disguise it. When I look at my favourite artists - Coldplay, Sigrid, Ed Sheeran - they don’t hide their lives, they live them fully and share them passionately.

Which brings me to this moment. The Robert Gillies of 2018 is a far cry from the Robert Gillies who is writing this blog. The Robert Gillies of 2018 thought he knew what it meant to get in touch with his emotions, but really, he didn’t. He thought he knew the right kind of people for his life, who to trust in and who to give himself to. But Robert Gillies of today? I am proud of being a father and a husband; I am more in touch with my emotions than I’ve ever been, and I live more fully with them every day; I embrace myself, failings, victories, and all.

These new songs mark what feels like my final form - if I’d spent my life as Pikachu, I was now Raichu. They are the sort of songs I wanna hear over and over again. They are deep, explosive, fun, and unabashedly me.

More importantly, they represent what happens when I finally find that version of myself that Stirling was a shadow of.