A Life Loving Music

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

His first personal memoir, A Life Loving Music, was published in 2025 and is currently available for direct purchase from the author.

Copies are $15.95 each ($14.95 + $1.00 for sales tax and a small Venmo handling fee). Simply either scan the above QR code or log in to your Venmo account and search for: @robertgrantwriter

You can include your name and mailing address in the “What is this for?” field. Or, especially if your Venmo transactions are set to “Public,” you can send that information through Robert’s Contact form and he will get a book out to you right away!

Below is a both a sample chapter from A Life Loving Music as well as the sign-up form to join Robert’s email list and receive a SNEAK-PEEK listen of “Close to Bob Dylan,” one of the original songs mentioned in the book.

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.”