The singer-songwriter’s passion project
In early 2022, Rob de Boer was unsure where he next wanted to take his music. The Irish musician released his first EP, Early Light, in February 2021, but covid lockdown had kept him from touring and promoting the record. A friend suggested he make an album. “I was like — ‘how do you even do that?’” Rob recounted to Joe from the website, Waxing Lyrical. “Do you need to go off and build a whole body of work from scratch?” Through their discussion, his friend suggested he combine his unreleased music with new songwriting to complete the project. The resulting album, Man to You, would become his most personal collection of songs. “I looked at some songs that I’d already written at that point, that hadn’t been released, and they were again my own stories, and quite personal,” he recalled. “I decided that they will have to be the consistent factors; it had to be about my own experiences with others. That kind of started it.”
According to De Boer’s Bandcamp page, he’s been posting music there since 2018. It includes a few singles and cuts from Early Light and Man to You. But it doesn’t mean he hasn’t been busy. Rob co-owns a media company (BigStyle Media) that makes videos and short films and he does music production and plays drums in the Dublin band, Papa Romeo. De Boer is a visual artist, and he wanted Man to You to blend his filmmaking skills with the narrative in the songs. “I wanted to elevate the whole project by putting as much consideration into the visual world as the music,” he explained. “That added a lot of time to the completion of the project. Not all the songs really lent themselves initially to interesting visual ideas, so the ones that did I said ‘OK, they should be singles.’”
The music videos for the songs “Our Own Way,” and “Man to You,” have well-crafted short film-styled production with liberal use of visuals and lighting. “Our Own Way” required complex dancing, and Rob consulted friend Douglas Redden (who directed the video with Rob) to learn the dance composition. “I spent a few weeks learning the choreography with him and putting the time in at home in my parents’ garden,” Rob recalled. “It was ambitious but really rewarding seeing that all come together and definitely a highlight of the whole project, getting to work alongside professional dancers and seeing the whole thing come to life.” The production for “Man to You” is more low-key, but the video is beautifully shot, and the music hall backdrop provides a picturesque setting for the touching sentiments in the lyrics.
Man to You took three years to write and produce, completed alongside de Boer’s other activities. “The parameters I set when I decided to make this project was that all the songs had to be informed by my own experiences,” he explained. “I’m a multi-instrumentalist and I work as a visual artist in photography and film. I struggle to do just one project at a time…I’m involved with some other music projects because I love all kinds of music.” Having time to work through the songs, de Boer looked inward for the lyrics, best expressed in the album’s title track. “I named the album after ‘Man to You’ as I feel it best captures the narrative on the record,” he told Camryn Teder in an interview for The Line of Best Fit. “The song came during a time of exploring my identity and sexuality. I felt a growing sense of uncertainty around who I was and how I should present myself to others. As an album title, it goes beyond masculinity or sexuality and addresses broader questions of what it means to be a man or an adult. The record reflects on formative years of learning, growth, and change.”
De Boer wrote most of the songs in 2022, with a few that go back to 2017. He recorded Man to You in his home, in studios, and in various places throughout Ireland. The music has a refined, stripped-down sound with elements of jazz. Guitar and keyboards dominate the songs with touches of drums, percussion, and saxophone. In an interview with RTÉ, de Boer called the music “warm, jazzy, soulful. Terracotta hued.” Man to You is a pleasant listen, the type of album that can be enjoyed during a relaxing day at the beach.
The most gratifying part of creating Man to You was the strength de Boer found in the songwriting. “It’s a collection of deeply personal songs that are all quite autobiographical…It centres around stories of both romantic and platonic relationships, but also navigating what it means to be an adult, and questions around manhood and identity,” he explained. “It’s a collection of my own stories from the last few years, and seeing how I’ve changed, and things have changed around me as time has passed.” Man to You was released in May 2025 and The Irish Times has already taken notice, adding it to their “10 best Irish albums of 2025 so far” list in June. It’s an impressive album set in motion by that casual breakfast a few years back. “A little conversation over a cup of coffee one morning led to me putting three years of my life into every single detail of this thing,” Rob explained. “It gave me so much direction and purpose.”