Artist Robert Sherwood Bio: Singer/songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist Robert Sherwood was born to an American diplomat and a concert harpsichordist in Helsinki, Finland in the darkest days of the Cold War. The years of his youth were scattered across the globe, living on the road, in hotel rooms and diplomatic compounds from South America to Europe and Scandinavia.
The fusion of international sounds has informed his music all his life, as well as the mingling of classical and pop traditions from Bach to Antonio Carlos Jobim to the Sex Pistols. He emerges as the very definition of a “difficult” artist, one who resists stylistic pigeonholes to the extreme. After several years in Los Angeles and sundry brushes with the charts he has found a very different base of operations in rural Western Massachusetts where he has located his dream studio and set about recording music free in every sense of the dreaded “commercial straitjacket”.
Whether producing other artists, on the road with his soul band, or indulging incipient middle age with a new-found passion for writing string quartets, he remains a musical gadfly, a bit of an obsessive, and the possessor of a vocal instrument like vintage port with a whiskey chaser. robert.sherwood.35@facebook.com
CD: “Good Expectations” is the first collection of music Robert Sherwood has created since his youth that isn’t under contract or subject to the demands and editorial vagaries of record labels, radio promoters, agents or managers. One might expect such a passionate bid for creative autonomy to yield art so esoteric or difficult as to confound the listener, but the truth is something else entirely. In this case, autonomy simply means that every creative decision has been made based on the simple query of, “how can this be more beautiful?” rather than “how can this sell more t-shirts and Volkswagens?”
Not content to confine himself to the last however many years of pop music for an influence base, Robert has crafted a vast warehouse of music that draws as much from Schubert, the Gershwins and Burt Bacharach as it does from the modern era. From the sweeping dynamics that underpin the desperation of the opener “Like Dying” to the austere solo piano and voice of “You And I” or the playful blue-eyed soul of the ’70’s inflected “Monday Wedding”, “Good Expectations” never settles into the dead-end of genre considerations. The listener will find themselves buffeted by the near punk-rock of the anthemic “Leaving California” one minute only to be gently settled into a Victorian drawing room the next amidst the Stephen-Foster-by-way-of-The-Beach-Boys art song, “Knocking On Your Own Front Door”.
“Good Expectations” is a double cd four years in the making, and Sherwood considers it a “plastic” collection in the John Lennon sense of the word; he is continually adding to it and subtracting from it, maintaining a twenty-song structure by choosing from an ever-growing stockpile of more than 50 pieces.
The title is of course a cynical riff on Dicken’s classic novel “Great Expectations”, chosen as a comment on the institutionalized mediocrity of our pervasive mass-market culture where the very concept of “greatness” is more often than not met with derision, suspicion and contempt, and our cultural icons tend towards strawmen, hypocrites, tycoons, media mavens and other characters who share the common trait of decided non-greatness.
