Lonely Robot

Lonely Robot is the brainchild and solo project of Irish progger John Mitchell.

Mitchell began Lonely Robot, inspired by a single image: Carl Sagan requesting that the cameras on Voyager 2 be turned around before the probe left our solar system forever.  What came back was the Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away.  A barely visible speck suspended in a ray of light.  That image, and everything Sagan wrote about it, is where Lonely Robot was born.

Over five albums, Mitchell has followed an astronaut stranded in space, unable to return home.  He gazes down at that pale blue dot and asks the kind of questions Sagan spent his life wrestling with.  What are we?  Why do we behave as we do?  What does it mean to be human?  The first three Lonely Robot albums looked outward at our species. The fourth and fifth turned the lens inward, as the same frailties the astronaut had observed in humanity, he began to recognize in himself.  The grand philosophical questions became something far more personal.  The big picture and the individual life are, it turns out, the same thing.

Being a science fiction aficionado, it's no surprise Mitchell created a project with a sci-fi theme and atmospheric sound. The project is filled with sci-fi inspired themes, epic arrangements, and lush instrumentation. Progarchives.com described it best by saying, "the project blends neo-prog, crossover prog, and atmospheric pop elements, with Mitchell’s earthy vocals reminiscent of his time with It Bites, but the music often channels the textures of Frost* and Arena".

To date, there have been 5 studio releases - Please Come Home (2015), The Big Dream (2017), Under Stars (2019), A Model Life (2020), and Feelings Are Good (2022).