The Ghost of You: Robin Young’s Soul Speak

Today, Boston-based folk singer-songwriter Robin Young has unveiled her debut album, Letters to a Ghost. A decade in the making, the 10-track collection serves as an emotional time capsule, reflecting on Robin’s first experience with love after moving to Boston at eighteen.

Produced by Ryan Gallagher at Plaid Dog Recording, Letters to a Ghost follows a relationship that stretched across some of her most defining years. Some songs were written in the thick of it; others emerged only after time lent clarity. The result is a raw, folk-driven portrait of obsession, heartbreak, and healing.

Robin shares, “Creating this album has given me the closure that I was never able to get from the relationship that inspired it. I almost felt like I was giving my younger self a hug, letting her know that I’m proud of her for making it through the seemingly unending waves of grief that I was feeling at the time.”

After studying songwriting at Berklee, Robin stepped away from music to explore other passions. A marriage that discouraged emotional reflection left her songs unwritten. Now, from a quiet Boston-area cabin and with a supportive partner, she’s finally letting her words flow.

I sat down with Robin and we discussed everything from her new album, how she sees himself as a songwriter, on through to reminiscing about certain album tracks and, oh yeah, even her thoughts on penguins!

Being that Letters to a Ghost was a decade in the making, how much of the past 10 years fed into these lyrics, or was it moreover only certain pivotal moments, perhaps? - “Letters to a Ghost is about a relationship that began almost half my lifetime ago, when I was between the ages of eighteen to twenty-one. Songs like “There’s a Part of Me” were written in the more immediate aftermath of the relationship’s end. But many others were written from the perspective I’ve developed as I’ve grown up, as an adult looking back on a story of love and loss that shaped everything about the person I am now. “Letters to a Ghost” is an example of a song that I composed more recently.”

“I didn’t write a lot of music during my twenties because I was in a marriage where it wouldn’t have gone over particularly well to be working on an album all about love from my past. That part of my life is reflected in the song “Brooklyn”.”

Indeed, what were some of the biggest obstacles along the way to bringing this album to fruition and how did you overcome them? - “The biggest obstacle was internal: deciding that now was the right time to pursue my childhood dream of making this album. I’ve found that it’s so easy to get caught up in a cycle of everyday busyness that prevents you from doing anything outside of your routine. So, deciding to devote my resources to this project now—and believing that these songs were powerful enough to resonate with other people besides myself—took a long time. It was discovering the really special recording studio I worked with, Plaid Dog Recording, that prompted me to finally embark on this project in my thirties.”

As for the album, I understand that it has been described as an “emotional time capsule,” so can you please explain just why it feels this way to you; within the context of how it came together, both thematically and musically. - “Because the songs for this album were written across a period of many years, I needed to step back in time into the emotions I felt when I was younger. That was the only way I could give the songs I wrote more recently the same depth and power as the ones I wrote back then. I had to revisit the grief, confusion, and longing I felt when the relationship first ended every time I sat down to write. It was an emotionally intense experience, but reprocessing those feelings through songwriting helped me to find the clarity and closure that I hadn’t been able to access previously.”

Indeed, a lot of words and terms will be used to describe your music on this album, but how would you yourself sum up your sound on it ... and in just five (5) words? - “I would describe the sound as haunting, poignant indie folk music.”

Please tell us more about the album cover and why you chose that particular shot? - “The photographer I worked with, Isabella Dellolio, took many beautiful shots when I met up with her out in western Massachusetts last fall, but when it came to choosing the album cover, there was no competition. This shot captured between storms at the very moment the sunset tried to poke through the clouds best captured the mood I was hoping to achieve.”

Please tell us (in a couple of sentences or less) a little more about what these tracks noted below mean to you and how they came to be:

The Ghost of You - “I wrote this song in my early twenties, and it was so gratifying to hear how the musicians were able to bring it to life over a decade later. It’s the song that perhaps best captures the haunting atmosphere that I was hoping to create with this album. It was my producer Ryan’s idea to add drums in the second half to kick things up a notch, and I love how it adds to the dramatic soundscape of this song.”

Midnight Train - “This is another song that I wrote in my early twenties, about a train that passed by the apartment where I lived at the time. I’m a lifelong insomniac, so I sometimes used to lie awake at night imagining the person I’d loved taking the train across the country to show up at my doorstep. (This was not at all realistic.)”

Mirror - “I wrote this song as a sister track to “Letters to a Ghost” - they’re in the same key and also have the same strumming pattern on the acoustic guitar so that one moves seamlessly into the next. I wanted “Mirror” to have a swelling instrumental section at the end that abates by the end of the track, and I absolutely love the electric guitar part that my producer, Ryan Gallagher, and guitarist, Charlie Burket, came up with for this song.”

Letters to a Ghost - “This was actually the very last song that I wrote for the album. I knew that I wanted a title track to tie the narrative together across all of the songs I’d composed, but several attempts I’d made just didn’t have the feeling I was looking for—until this one. It perfectly encapsulates the mental place I’d arrived at by the time I finished writing the album.”

And was Letters to a Ghost always going to be the albums name or was there another that nearly won the race come the time to take your hands off the project? - “I came up with the title “Letters to a Ghost” many years before writing most of these songs—once it entered my mind, there was never any question that that would be the album’s name. It helped me shape the story of each of the songs on the album around a common theme—letters written to someone not as he exists in the world today, but as he exists in my memory.”

Do you believe in ghosts, in general, and if so have you ever encountered one? - “I’ve never personally encountered a ghost, so I’m not sure if I believe in them or not just yet—I wouldn’t mind a paranormal encounter or two to tip my opinion in one direction or the other!”

Noted as being a “masterclass in release,” can you please detail if the release you got from this album finally being done and put out into the world was physical or mental? - “It was a mental form of release for me that I experienced upon writing the final song and title track, “Letters to a Ghost.” I felt a sense of closure and completion that I never had before, with the relationship I wrote about having ended in an unsatisfying way that left me on my own in coming up with an explanation. Once the final track was written, I abruptly lost the urge to continue writing songs about this person, because in a way, it felt like I’d finally stemmed the leak after all these years.”

What are some of the last albums (CD, vinyl, cassette, et al) you physically purchased (vintage and/or new releases) and which one have you already gone back to listen to more and why? - “I am a collector of vinyl records for albums I truly enjoy from beginning to end. The two most recent albums I bought are “Older” by Lizzy McAlpine, which I listened to often while working on “Letters to a Ghost,” as well as the new release from my favorite band, the folk supergroup I’m With Her. Highly recommend checking out those two albums if you’re a fan of folk music, the songwriting is impeccable!”

What would you like all the readers of this interview to know about the album and what to expect? - “Though I wrote these songs about a relationship from my own personal history, I chose to record them out of a hope that there are people out there who they’ll resonate with just as much as they do with me. Music has such a powerful way of making the specific universal, and so I hope these songs reach the people who need to hear them most, in the way that I would have loved to receive this album when I was twenty-one and fresh off the heels of heartbreak.”

And yes, we ask everyone we interview this very same question (as we are putting together a kid’s book). We here at Exclusive Magazine love penguins and so we were wondering if you had any love for them and/or had a story of one (soft toy, zoo, chocolate bar, relative, etc.) that you could share with us? - “I don’t have any personal connection with penguins, unfortunately for me, but I do find the idea lovely of presenting a stone to your mate to show you’re bonded for life. Isn’t that what many humans do with diamonds?”

Interviewed by: Russell A. Trunk

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