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American singer and songwriter

Robert Ellsworth Pollard Jr. (born October 31, 1957) is an American singer and songwriter. He is the leader of indie rock group Guided by Voices. In addition to this, he has also released 22 solo albums. He has nearly 3,000 songs registered to his name with BMI. In 2007, he was nominated for the Shortlist Music Prize.

Pollard was born in Dayton, Ohio, where he has lived all his life. During most of his childhood and adolescence, sports were his main interest. When Pollard began to show interest in music during high school, his father tried to discourage this. Pollard has said that much of the inspiration for his songwriting has come from time spent hanging out with his high school friends from Dayton, a group he calls "The Monument Club". Pollard said of his teenage years:
<blockquote>Growing up, I didn't really have any musical talent. I could always sing, but that's it. So I started hanging around with all these weirdoes from Northridge who could play guitar. And I would just watch them, 'Wow, I've got to learn how to do that.' That song 'Hank's Little Fingers' (on Devil Between My Toes) – Hank (Davidson) is the guy that inspired me to play the guitar. He had a deformed hand with these little bitty fingers. he eventually abandoned athletics realizing that he wasn't quick enough to be a professional and that his character was too independent to be obedient to the strict athletic program. "I was sick of people snapping their fingers and expecting me to move." Pollard has worked at all levels of primary school, from elementary school to middle school to high school. He found the most difficult assignment to be teaching physical science to junior high schoolers. Eventually he settled on teaching fourth graders. To finance the band's early recordings, Pollard, his brother, and their manager obtained a loan from the Dayton Public Schools credit union. Between 1986 and 1992, they released six records in this way, recording, pressing and distributing them at their own expense. These records got very little response, and although the pressings ran only to between 300 and 1,000 copies of each, the producers were left with many copies on their hands. In 1992, bowing to the lack of support from family and friends, and to the pressure of unpaid debt, Pollard broke up Guided by Voices after releasing Propeller, which he felt was their best album to date. He then committed to teaching school full time. However, Propeller impressed the indie label Scat Records, who signed the band to a recording contract. The result was that Guided by Voices got back together in 1993, and played a show that year at the New Music Seminar in New York City – the band's first live date in almost six years. With the release of Vampire on Titus (1993), the band was finally able to perform live around the United States. They released their second post reunion album, Class Clown Spots a UFO, on June 11. A third album, The Bears for Lunch, came out on November 13. The fourth post reunion album (and twentieth Guided by Voices album), English Little League, was released on April 30, 2013. Motivational Jumpsuit and Cool Planet followed in February and May 2014, respectively. In September 2014, the band announced they were disbanding once again and cancelled all remaining dates on their tour.

Pollard began releasing solo records in 1996, alongside regular releases from Guided by Voices. These albums were typically recorded with a small group consisting of current or former Guided by Voices members, and they were generally considered to informally be part of the Guided by Voices canon, as that band would regularly perform selections from the solo releases in concert. After the dissolution of Guided by Voices in 2004, Robert Pollard launched his official solo career with the release of From a Compound Eye in February 2006. Pollard's recent studio work has eschewed the live band format, instead relying on the multi instrumental talents of Todd Tobias, who produced several Guided by Voices albums. In 2006, Pollard resumed touring with a new band informally dubbed "The Ascended Masters", which featured Tommy Keene on lead guitar and keyboards, Dave Phillips on guitar, Jon Wurster on drums, and Jason Narducy on bass, but subsequent to the cancellation of some 2006 dates due to a leg injury, Pollard announced his retirement from touring. Despite this, Pollard performed two shows in support of his new albums. The first show was on November 30, 2007, in Chicago at The Metro. The second was on December 1, 2007, in Newport, Kentucky (across the Ohio River from Cincinnati) at the Southgate House. After releasing Superman Was a Rocker in January, he announced that he would be leaving Merge Records to form Guided by Voices, Inc., his own record label that will produce his entire musical library.

When Pollard announced that the Fading Captain Series was being concluded he also announced that he was starting up a new record label, then called Record Company Records which is named after a song off his first solo album Not in My Airforce. The first (and thus far only) release on Prom is Coming was Silverfish Trivia. In spring 2007, Pollard began a singles collection called the Happy Jack Rock Records Single Series in which one 7 inch record was released per month for 12 months starting June 22, 2007. All the records featured an A side from Pollard's dueling Merge releases that year (Standard Gargoyle Decisions and Coast to Coast Carpet of Love) and a non album B side. 1,000 of each 7 inch was pressed. Pollard's album Superman Was a Rocker was the first LP released on Happy Jack Rock Records (although the vinyl version of Circus Devils' Sgt. Disco had been released on the same label in 2007). Pollard continues to release 7 inch records on the label. June 2009 will see the first release from a new Happy Jack project Cosmos, a collaboration with Richard Davies titled Jar of Jam Ton of Bricks. In 2008, Pollard announced the forming of yet another new label Guided by Voices Inc. The first album release on Guided by Voices Inc. was Robert Pollard Is Off To Business, preceded by the 12 inch EP Weatherman And Skin Goddess. Pollard's first two Boston Spaceships releases have been on Guided by Voices Inc.

In the fall of 2003 Pollard released EAT, a literary magazine consisting of original poems and collages by Pollard. As of 2023 EAT is on its eighteenth issue. Pollard's collage art is featured on many Guided by Voices albums (notable exceptions being the two released on TVT Records). In 2008, Pollard's collages were collected and published in Town of Mirrors: The Reassembled Imagery of Robert Pollard. Town of Mirrors features Pollard's visual art and lyrics/poetry. There are over 175 collages, 20 of which were created specifically for the book's release.

Pollard had two children with Kim Dowler. He wrote a song about each: "Your Name is Wild" about his daughter Erika and "My Son Cool" being about his son Bryan. However, the success of Guided by Voices in the mid 1990s coincided with the breakdown of their marriage. In 2007 Pollard married Sarah Zade. The couple currently lives in Dayton, Ohio. "I've never considered myself to be a runaway success at anything I've done, including parenthood", Pollard wrote in 2005. "But I've at least allowed my children to pursue their own interests without too much interference, and I think they both turned out pretty good."