Songs and Samples

Wild Bird
This song is a lullaby of compassion for all who desperately need a place of safety, healing, and rest – a sanctuary from the torment of addiction and self-hatred.

Fiction Is My Family
Unexpectedly pouring through me, this song was a lifeline that held me together and showed me the reasons behind the consuming self-hatred I felt and acted out. We are only as sick as our secrets. To heal, we all need to tell our stories without shame.

God Song
Finding a Higher Power of my own – different from the God I grew up with - was essential in order for me to embrace the 12-steps of recovery. This song is my Step 2 – defining what I could and could not believe in and how that power was restoring me to sanity, freedom, and forgiveness.

Back Into The Fire
I grew up loving horses and learned young that horses will panic and run straight back into a burning barn. I feel that eating disorders and addictions are very much like that – running for comfort back to the thing that’s going to kill you.

Thin Line
This was my mountaintop moment which occurred after doing an amends with a person who had abused me throughout my childhood. With the love and support of other recovering women, I was able to face my greatest fears – sunlight came into my dark world and I could see the plan of healing and forgiveness so clearly laid out in my life.

The Angels Came
Throughout my recovery there have been so many angels, in the form of recovering humans, who have held my head “above the quicksand.” As I grew and transformed in my own recovery, I became one of those angels for other people.

Your Dreams
This song is for anyone who needs to recognize their own beauty and to cherish and guard their dreams. Recovery has allowed me to dream again and given me a path to follow each day where I can take the small steps necessary to reach my visions.

Hurricane
I wrote this after experiencing the devastation of shattered trust in a relationship. Without emotional sobriety or the ability to make amends, my relationships were stormy at best. Recovery has given me a way to heal my relationships and to even out emotional roller coasters and lessen reactivity.

Get Past The Past
The sexual abuse in my childhood particularly affected my choices in intimate partners. To heal unhealthy patterns, I needed to practice self-respect - to see the other person clearly, pay attention to red flags, and be willing to admit when our values, experiences, and history do not match up in a healthy way.

Burned Away
Therapists call it repetition compulsion – recovering folks call it plain insanity – repeating patterns of pain, addiction, and abuse from generation to generation. Practicing the ninth step allows me to unhook and experience forgiveness and freedom from shame so that I no longer have to re-live the tragic patterns in my family.

Electrify Me
One morning I was up before the sun and witnessed the grace-filled sight of a field coming to life. As the sun slowly swept across the land, the field literally lit up as the tall grass began to glow as if “electrified.” This song is my prayer of longing – my desire to be transformed by the light, grace, and energy of the divine.

Wildest Dreams
Today, I live a life beyond my wildest dreams. Through the 12 steps I have recovered myself and my connection to a Higher Power. I believe there is no greater gift. There is a solution, a way out of the hell of addictions, eating disorders, and self-hatred. It is available to all who want it.

Some Nice Things People Have Said

Soaring with wild truth, Robin’s perfect pitch carries warrior songs of healing. Free your heart with Wild Bird, music that takes you through an inner journey into forgiveness with grace, dignity and pure beauty.
- Cathie Quigley-Soderman,
Warrior Artists Productions

Robin Richardson is heart with a guitar. Her voice conveys the passion of her own renewed life and yet clearly retains empathy with those still suffering. Her lyrics are gut-wrenchingly honest but always with a note of pure hope threading through them. And her melodies...after even the most hectic day, well, they are just wonderful to come home to! Wild Bird is quite clearly a project of Robin's body, mind, heart and spirit, all intertwined in song. When you need hope - or just a little lift - this is the CD you have been searching for.
- Shannon Cutts
Billboard World Song Contest First Place Winner

Forgiveness, mercy and the will to continue are recurring themes in Robin's poignant and graceful album. She reminds us that there is great strength in recognizing our own fragility; if we only remember that all our earthly experiences will willingly weave a safe nest for our triumphant return home. Wild Bird is Grace forged from tribulation.
- Matthew Andrae
Recording Artist

About Robin Richardson

Robin truly did arrive on this planet with a song on her lips and the gift
to sing it.

As a little girl, she soaked up music like a sponge, memorizing and performing the entire soundtrack for Jesus Christ Superstar. Driven by musical diversity at its best, Robin’s influences range from her brother’s Alice Cooper to her sister’s James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg, and from her mother’s classical symphonies to her dad’s Johnny Cash and Grand Ole Opry. Her brother and sister still tease her about singing songs in her sleep and answering questions with a melody.

Robin won a grant to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, an event that helped her realize and develop her gifts as a singer-songwriter. Her years at Berklee and her songwriting teachers helped Robin to hone her skills and gave her the confidence to move to Nashville.

Like many of Nashville's musicians, Robin developed waitressing chops, worked in a Music Row law office, and assisted on music videos before getting breaks into the music biz. Before long, she co-created The Barbie Syndrome; a four-part women’s a cappella performance-art band. The Barbies made fun of everything while gaining respect and a dedicated following for their great harmonies, cleverly outrageous lyrics, and memorable stage antics.

Robin then met her long-time music partner and husband, David Kiefer. Together they formed the duo, Naked Pop, which delighted audiences with outstanding vocal harmonies and upbeat rhythms. For several years they travelled across the States to please UT fans in Tennessee, vacationers on Hilton Head island, and college students in Texas and Ohio.

Through a live video, Robin and Dave were invited to perform at the Grand Hyatt in Seoul, Korea. A door opened to a new world of travel and adventure as Naked Pop was wooed by Five-Star hotels across Asia. For seven years they performed in Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and South Korea.

Well, you take yourself wherever you go, and Robin slowly realized that she had traded the inspiration and truth of writing and performing her own songs for the excitement of pleasing international audiences with the most-requested pop songs of the day. Sadly, Robin left Naked Pop and chose to return to the States to recommit to the path of personal development and recovery. Naked Pop’s last gig was at the Osaka Hilton in August of 2000 ending nine years of partnership, world travel, and music.

Boulder, Colorado was Robin’s next destination. There she earned a Masters degree in Transpersonal Psychology as well as finding her own way back to center. She grew roots and gained wisdom, strength, and hope through connecting to a spiritual community. Boulder is also where Robin found a new healing vision and purpose for her life and music.

In 2005, Robin released her first solo CD, recorded by Grammy award-winning producer Tom Wasinger, entitled "Back Into the Fire." She also joined Mystic Highway, a collaborative music project with Sara Kelton and Sally Morgan.

Mystic Highway found a following stretching around the world and played to packed houses across Holland, England, Ireland, and Scotland, not to mention Denver and Boulder. In July of 2007, Robin and Sarah Kelton recorded "Velvet Bridge," featuring powerfully honest lyrics and harmonically rich melodies.

Robin is now singing her truth as an inspirational source for girls and women. She recorded her CD, "Wild Bird" in the spring of 2008 and uses the songs in her performances at schools and conferences across the United States and Canada.

Dean Wharton, Principal of Muscatel Middle School, states "Your message of hope along with your music...captivated the girls to the point where I strongly feel you changed several lives that day." For Robin, nothing could mean more.

Today her music is direct and powerful, infused with the wisdom of her life’s journey while incorporating the jazz, folk, and R&B influences from her years of performing the West’s most loved music.

A Message From The Artist About Wild Bird

The songs on this CD chronicle my journey: from victim to thriver, from addiction to recovery, from self-hatred to self-honoring, and from hopelessness to embracing life. Each song represents a stage of growth, a new learning or a discovery along the path - a gift from the universe to me, and now, to you.

I am an incest survivor, healing from an eating disorder, and a recovering alcoholic. These are my truths and yet I am so much more than these labels.

Giving up and asking for help were my essential first steps. In time, recovery gave me back myself. My life today is about thriving - about a whole new relationship with myself and my Creator based on love and trust.

I hope my songs and my story will convey to anyone who is struggling that nothing is too big, too dark, or too difficult to be overcome and turned into a source of light and usefulness to others. If I can recover, you can too. Don't ever give up - your miracle is on its way.

Sending you light for the journey,
Robin