Robyn (2007)
Interview Background
Maybe it’s a form of musical sadomasochism, but I enjoy conversing with the prickly interviewees even more than the artists who breezily offer warm and perfectly-formed quotes. Interviewing Scandinavian pop star Robyn is always a test: not only is she a smart operator, she’ll often sternly ask you for clarification of what your question means before she’ll show you (soundbite) love. Her default interview setting seems set at perpetually peeved, so it always feels like a victory when she laughs at your questions, offers an engaging answer or warms to the conversation. As one of the finest pop stars of the 21st century, whose influence can be heard on the hits of Katy Perry and Rihanna, I’d expect nothing less than a feeling of being in the presence of greatness every time we converse.
This interview was originally split over two issues of Rip It Up and Attitude magazines in summer 2007.
Robyn - Blonde Ambition
by Scott McLennan
In 1987, Robyn Carlsson made her stage debut with the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Playing a ghost in the classic Swedish play The Crown Bride, the eight-year-old daughter of actor parents silently stalked the stage under the direction of acclaimed Swedish director and actor Peter Stormare. While the young girl playing the mute spirit was nonchalant about her role at the time, it heralded the beginning of a performing career that has now reached its most dynamic chapter.
Robyn’s eponymous album is arguably the finest pop record of the decade. Encompassing the smart-arse cutie-pie raps of Konichiwa Bitches, the gorgeous atmospherics of With Every Heartbeat and the sweetly yearning sounds of Handle Me, Robyn reveals a mighty talent now in complete control of her career.
“My songs are fiction about reality,” Robyn says while sitting in her tour bus travelling to Berlin. “I’m not going to tell you what’s true and what’s not, because I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that these things are true in my mind – that’s how I see it. Whatever actual situation it comes from doesn’t really matter. The point of view that I’m trying to get across – that’s what matters.”
From sexually brash vamp on Curriculum Vitae through to insecure everygirl on Knife collaboration Who’s That Girl, Robyn’s skilful immersion in the album’s differing personalities mean it’s hard to tell which song best exemplifies the talented Swede.
“I think that’s what’s good,” Robyn accedes. “It’s not about that. It’s not about putting it in a box and deciding who ‘she’ is. It’s about the contrast in people and in me. We’re not, as human beings, like one thing all of the time. That’s what I like to work with in my music and that’s why pop music is so good, because you can do those things. You can swap voices between roles and talk about these simple, almost banal, things from our every day life without sounding pretentious. It’s the perfect medium for the present time to deal with things that are relevant to real people.”
Although released in Sweden in 2005, it’s only since mid-2007 that Robyn has generated a popular resurgence abroad. In the UK her single With Every Heartbeat hit number one in the charts, while here in Australia Konichiwa Bitches remains one of Triple J’s most played songs of the past 12 months.
“It’s a good album and it still works,” Robyn says. “It’s still fresh and I don’t feel tired of it at all yet. I also think the video for Konichiwa Bitches is the best video ever made.”
Out of every clip in the whole world?
“Yes,” she laughs. “It was a long process, because we started making those costumes a year before we actually recorded the video. They are all handmade and made from scratch. I got all my friends in for the shoot and we spent all our money on costumes, so nobody got paid.”
Although Konichiwa Bitches’ title references the Japanese word for hello, the song amusingly mentions non-Japanese locales Saigon and Beijing.
“It is kind of funny, isn’t it?” Robyn agrees. “You don’t have to be really well educated to see that there are things that aren’t actually correct in my lyrics. We talk about a paediatrician hammering your toe [on Konichiwa Bitches], but a paediatrician actually takes care of kids. When we wrote it, because we’re Swedish we don’t have the access to all your vocabulary. A while after writing it we realised it’s not a foot doctor, but we left it in because it’s funny! I think a lot of the lyrics are like that and the whole attitude of the album means it doesn’t have to be correct.”
Joining Sneaky Sound System on their current tour, Robyn’s press release indicated she required three koalas and a wombat on her backstage rider for her second trip to Australia.
“A wombat would definitely be nice to see,” Robyn giggles. “They’re so weird and we’ve been joking about it since the last Australian trip. I know it’s not funny to you, but to me it’s funny. I never got to see a wombat last time, since I was just trying to find teddy bear ones for my friends. From the toys I can’t make out what they might look like in reality.”
As the head of Konichiwa Records, Robyn now has a say in all aspects of her career after initially earning pop fame as a teen with the global hit Show Me Love. Promoting her eponymous album for over a year in various territories has left the singer exasperated by some of the questions she constantly fields.
“All of you journalists ask that question if I’m into alcohol,” Robyn sighs. “I think that whole thing about Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse has brainwashed you guys and all the female artists have to be into alcohol.”
But Britney’s actually recorded some of your songs, hasn’t she?
“Yeah, but she hasn’t released them,” Robyn notes. “I actually don’t know or remember exactly which songs she has recorded of mine. Britney probably records 40 or 50 songs for each album she releases. Those are songs that are gathered from all over the world and most songwriters that do anything good will tell you that they’ve written a song that she’s recorded. It’s nothing special. It’s a very unpersonal (sic) process and it’s all done through my publishing company. It’s not very glamorous.”
Now the head of her label Konichiwa Records, Robyn’s current swathe of success follows the Swedish singer’s global hits as a teen pop star in the 1990s. At the height of a Euro-pop explosion, Robyn found her 1997 single Show Me Love earning attention overseas in the US and Australia and ensuring a number of years of album promotion with little chance for a break. In 1997 she was scheduled to support the Backstreet Boys on a massive tour of the United States, but was taken off the bill with the official reason cited as exhaustion.
“I don’t know if I was ever exhausted,” Robyn laughs. “I don’t think I was very keen on touring with the Backstreet Boys – I was keen on doing my own thing. I was just tired of being on the road and I’d been promoting the first record from the age of 16 through until I was 19, so I needed to go back to Sweden. I think a lot of artists start out very young and they promote a record so long they don’t know what they want to do any more. I was not interested being that kind of artist. I wanted to master what I did and to find my own personal style. You can’t do that by promoting a record for three years – you have to go back and do your homework.”
Back at home in Stockholm, Robyn fell in love with the smartly executed electro formula of fellow Swedes The Knife, working with them on her 2005 single Who’s That Girl. Further collaborative efforts with Sweden’s Jenny Wilson indicate there’s a cool gang of Swedish musicians partaking in a mutual appreciation society.
“I don’t see The Knife and Jenny Wilson a lot but we see each other sometimes,” Robyn acknowledges. “I don’t think there’s a ‘cool club’ in Sweden but there’s some really good musicians and sometimes we get together and work together. That’s the good thing about being part of a small music scene – people don’t have the luxury of isolating themselves in one music genre and there’s an open mind to working with people who make other types of music, which creates a really interesting environment. Pop music is something that offers artistic freshness and I think that it’s really nice to be a part of the Swedish music scene right now. There are a lot of really cool things happening.”
Given Robyn’s success, how confident is the pop star she can make lightning strike twice with the album’s follow-up?
“I feel confident that I will be able to do it again,” she says. “For me it is about continuing on with what I’ve done on this record and I’m very proud that I’ve been able to record it in Sweden and work with people from there. I think it gives the record its own sound and for me it’s important not to do the typical thing that people do when they have success with a record and go make a record with an American producer that sounds the same as everything else. For me it’s about continuing on this and making the next record with the people I’ve already worked with in Sweden.”
Robyn (Universal)
Unpublished Interview Material
When I’ve seen bands in the UK it often gets quite rowdy and the crowd gets quite drunk – do you find much of a difference between the UK audiences and mainland Europe shows?
"Yeah, it’s a huge difference. UK crowds are crazy compared to European crowds (laughs). Berlin was really wild as well, so you do have those places in Europe as well. I have to say the best place to play was Dublin, where the crowd was absolutely insane. They went mad and knew the lyrics to all the songs and sang along really loud all the way through."
You’ll be supporting Sneaky Sound System here in Australia. Will it be strange only having the chance to play half a dozen songs?
"You always want to play your own show, but I have no problem with opening up for another band as it’s very different when you start your own company from beginning to end. At this point it’s not about doing everything I want to do, it’s about building the album and I’m really happy to come back to Australia, of course. I’m signed to Modular Records in Australia and they were the ones who asked me if I wanted to do this tour. I don’t know them and have never met Sneaky System – sorry, Sneaky Sound System – but I know that they’re huge in Australia and it’s a good tour for me to do, so that’s why I’m coming over. (laughs)"
You seem very driven and committed to your career – will there still time to go crazy and party if the Sneaky guys are inviting you for a big one?
"Yeah, I don’t mind. It depends if they’re nice guys – if they’re nice guys I might party with them, otherwise I’ll just party with my band!"
The word ‘Nazi’ is masked on Handle Me. Were you not allowed to sing it?
"We decided to reverse it because we thought that it was a word that didn’t need to be said – you know exactly what I mean. I didn’t want to keep saying Nazi every time the record is played. When I’m on stage I do it, but I thought censoring that word was kind of good because it’s a word that doesn’t need to be said. It’s just something me and my friend did and we thought it was funny to censor a word so that people become more interested in it. Which it is now, since you’re asking me about it. It’s not censored because it’s a bad word, it’s censored because me and the guy who wrote the song chose to censor it because we thought it was funny to do that."
Apart from appearing in The Crown Bride, what other acting did you do as a child? Where you on any television ads?
"I was never an active child performer, but my parents were in theatre and if one of their friends needed a kid in a play they of course asked my mother and my dad if I’d like to do it. Basically I did those things because I wanted my own money. My parents were poor artists and we didn’t have a lot of cash, so I dubbed a lot of cartoons on my weekends and in my free time, because it was good to get some extra cash. I wasn’t in it to be a performer – I loved music and music was what I spent my time on."
Do you have any music tastes that would surprise people, like heavy metal or country?
"I like all music. There’s really nothing I can’t get into if it’s good. It’s more about asking what I don’t get into, since I listen to everything. Did you want examples? I’m listening to Queens Of The Stone Age’s new album and this old record from 1989 made in Belgium which is an old house record from an artist called Hithouse. It is a crazy but cool album and you can actually get it on iTunes, which is crazy. I’m trying to tell all my friends. And I’m listening to old stuff like Technotronic, Neneh Cherry and Prince."
Maybe it’s a form of musical sadomasochism, but I enjoy conversing with the prickly interviewees even more than the artists who breezily offer warm and perfectly-formed quotes. Interviewing Scandinavian pop star Robyn is always a test: not only is she a smart operator, she’ll often sternly ask you for clarification of what your question means before she’ll show you (soundbite) love. Her default interview setting seems set at perpetually peeved, so it always feels like a victory when she laughs at your questions, offers an engaging answer or warms to the conversation. As one of the finest pop stars of the 21st century, whose influence can be heard on the hits of Katy Perry and Rihanna, I’d expect nothing less than a feeling of being in the presence of greatness every time we converse.
This interview was originally split over two issues of Rip It Up and Attitude magazines in summer 2007.
Robyn - Blonde Ambition
by Scott McLennan
In 1987, Robyn Carlsson made her stage debut with the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Playing a ghost in the classic Swedish play The Crown Bride, the eight-year-old daughter of actor parents silently stalked the stage under the direction of acclaimed Swedish director and actor Peter Stormare. While the young girl playing the mute spirit was nonchalant about her role at the time, it heralded the beginning of a performing career that has now reached its most dynamic chapter.
Robyn’s eponymous album is arguably the finest pop record of the decade. Encompassing the smart-arse cutie-pie raps of Konichiwa Bitches, the gorgeous atmospherics of With Every Heartbeat and the sweetly yearning sounds of Handle Me, Robyn reveals a mighty talent now in complete control of her career.
“My songs are fiction about reality,” Robyn says while sitting in her tour bus travelling to Berlin. “I’m not going to tell you what’s true and what’s not, because I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that these things are true in my mind – that’s how I see it. Whatever actual situation it comes from doesn’t really matter. The point of view that I’m trying to get across – that’s what matters.”
From sexually brash vamp on Curriculum Vitae through to insecure everygirl on Knife collaboration Who’s That Girl, Robyn’s skilful immersion in the album’s differing personalities mean it’s hard to tell which song best exemplifies the talented Swede.
“I think that’s what’s good,” Robyn accedes. “It’s not about that. It’s not about putting it in a box and deciding who ‘she’ is. It’s about the contrast in people and in me. We’re not, as human beings, like one thing all of the time. That’s what I like to work with in my music and that’s why pop music is so good, because you can do those things. You can swap voices between roles and talk about these simple, almost banal, things from our every day life without sounding pretentious. It’s the perfect medium for the present time to deal with things that are relevant to real people.”
Although released in Sweden in 2005, it’s only since mid-2007 that Robyn has generated a popular resurgence abroad. In the UK her single With Every Heartbeat hit number one in the charts, while here in Australia Konichiwa Bitches remains one of Triple J’s most played songs of the past 12 months.
“It’s a good album and it still works,” Robyn says. “It’s still fresh and I don’t feel tired of it at all yet. I also think the video for Konichiwa Bitches is the best video ever made.”
Out of every clip in the whole world?
“Yes,” she laughs. “It was a long process, because we started making those costumes a year before we actually recorded the video. They are all handmade and made from scratch. I got all my friends in for the shoot and we spent all our money on costumes, so nobody got paid.”
Although Konichiwa Bitches’ title references the Japanese word for hello, the song amusingly mentions non-Japanese locales Saigon and Beijing.
“It is kind of funny, isn’t it?” Robyn agrees. “You don’t have to be really well educated to see that there are things that aren’t actually correct in my lyrics. We talk about a paediatrician hammering your toe [on Konichiwa Bitches], but a paediatrician actually takes care of kids. When we wrote it, because we’re Swedish we don’t have the access to all your vocabulary. A while after writing it we realised it’s not a foot doctor, but we left it in because it’s funny! I think a lot of the lyrics are like that and the whole attitude of the album means it doesn’t have to be correct.”
Joining Sneaky Sound System on their current tour, Robyn’s press release indicated she required three koalas and a wombat on her backstage rider for her second trip to Australia.
“A wombat would definitely be nice to see,” Robyn giggles. “They’re so weird and we’ve been joking about it since the last Australian trip. I know it’s not funny to you, but to me it’s funny. I never got to see a wombat last time, since I was just trying to find teddy bear ones for my friends. From the toys I can’t make out what they might look like in reality.”
As the head of Konichiwa Records, Robyn now has a say in all aspects of her career after initially earning pop fame as a teen with the global hit Show Me Love. Promoting her eponymous album for over a year in various territories has left the singer exasperated by some of the questions she constantly fields.
“All of you journalists ask that question if I’m into alcohol,” Robyn sighs. “I think that whole thing about Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse has brainwashed you guys and all the female artists have to be into alcohol.”
But Britney’s actually recorded some of your songs, hasn’t she?
“Yeah, but she hasn’t released them,” Robyn notes. “I actually don’t know or remember exactly which songs she has recorded of mine. Britney probably records 40 or 50 songs for each album she releases. Those are songs that are gathered from all over the world and most songwriters that do anything good will tell you that they’ve written a song that she’s recorded. It’s nothing special. It’s a very unpersonal (sic) process and it’s all done through my publishing company. It’s not very glamorous.”
Now the head of her label Konichiwa Records, Robyn’s current swathe of success follows the Swedish singer’s global hits as a teen pop star in the 1990s. At the height of a Euro-pop explosion, Robyn found her 1997 single Show Me Love earning attention overseas in the US and Australia and ensuring a number of years of album promotion with little chance for a break. In 1997 she was scheduled to support the Backstreet Boys on a massive tour of the United States, but was taken off the bill with the official reason cited as exhaustion.
“I don’t know if I was ever exhausted,” Robyn laughs. “I don’t think I was very keen on touring with the Backstreet Boys – I was keen on doing my own thing. I was just tired of being on the road and I’d been promoting the first record from the age of 16 through until I was 19, so I needed to go back to Sweden. I think a lot of artists start out very young and they promote a record so long they don’t know what they want to do any more. I was not interested being that kind of artist. I wanted to master what I did and to find my own personal style. You can’t do that by promoting a record for three years – you have to go back and do your homework.”
Back at home in Stockholm, Robyn fell in love with the smartly executed electro formula of fellow Swedes The Knife, working with them on her 2005 single Who’s That Girl. Further collaborative efforts with Sweden’s Jenny Wilson indicate there’s a cool gang of Swedish musicians partaking in a mutual appreciation society.
“I don’t see The Knife and Jenny Wilson a lot but we see each other sometimes,” Robyn acknowledges. “I don’t think there’s a ‘cool club’ in Sweden but there’s some really good musicians and sometimes we get together and work together. That’s the good thing about being part of a small music scene – people don’t have the luxury of isolating themselves in one music genre and there’s an open mind to working with people who make other types of music, which creates a really interesting environment. Pop music is something that offers artistic freshness and I think that it’s really nice to be a part of the Swedish music scene right now. There are a lot of really cool things happening.”
Given Robyn’s success, how confident is the pop star she can make lightning strike twice with the album’s follow-up?
“I feel confident that I will be able to do it again,” she says. “For me it is about continuing on with what I’ve done on this record and I’m very proud that I’ve been able to record it in Sweden and work with people from there. I think it gives the record its own sound and for me it’s important not to do the typical thing that people do when they have success with a record and go make a record with an American producer that sounds the same as everything else. For me it’s about continuing on this and making the next record with the people I’ve already worked with in Sweden.”
Robyn (Universal)
Unpublished Interview Material
When I’ve seen bands in the UK it often gets quite rowdy and the crowd gets quite drunk – do you find much of a difference between the UK audiences and mainland Europe shows?
"Yeah, it’s a huge difference. UK crowds are crazy compared to European crowds (laughs). Berlin was really wild as well, so you do have those places in Europe as well. I have to say the best place to play was Dublin, where the crowd was absolutely insane. They went mad and knew the lyrics to all the songs and sang along really loud all the way through."
You’ll be supporting Sneaky Sound System here in Australia. Will it be strange only having the chance to play half a dozen songs?
"You always want to play your own show, but I have no problem with opening up for another band as it’s very different when you start your own company from beginning to end. At this point it’s not about doing everything I want to do, it’s about building the album and I’m really happy to come back to Australia, of course. I’m signed to Modular Records in Australia and they were the ones who asked me if I wanted to do this tour. I don’t know them and have never met Sneaky System – sorry, Sneaky Sound System – but I know that they’re huge in Australia and it’s a good tour for me to do, so that’s why I’m coming over. (laughs)"
You seem very driven and committed to your career – will there still time to go crazy and party if the Sneaky guys are inviting you for a big one?
"Yeah, I don’t mind. It depends if they’re nice guys – if they’re nice guys I might party with them, otherwise I’ll just party with my band!"
The word ‘Nazi’ is masked on Handle Me. Were you not allowed to sing it?
"We decided to reverse it because we thought that it was a word that didn’t need to be said – you know exactly what I mean. I didn’t want to keep saying Nazi every time the record is played. When I’m on stage I do it, but I thought censoring that word was kind of good because it’s a word that doesn’t need to be said. It’s just something me and my friend did and we thought it was funny to censor a word so that people become more interested in it. Which it is now, since you’re asking me about it. It’s not censored because it’s a bad word, it’s censored because me and the guy who wrote the song chose to censor it because we thought it was funny to do that."
Apart from appearing in The Crown Bride, what other acting did you do as a child? Where you on any television ads?
"I was never an active child performer, but my parents were in theatre and if one of their friends needed a kid in a play they of course asked my mother and my dad if I’d like to do it. Basically I did those things because I wanted my own money. My parents were poor artists and we didn’t have a lot of cash, so I dubbed a lot of cartoons on my weekends and in my free time, because it was good to get some extra cash. I wasn’t in it to be a performer – I loved music and music was what I spent my time on."
Do you have any music tastes that would surprise people, like heavy metal or country?
"I like all music. There’s really nothing I can’t get into if it’s good. It’s more about asking what I don’t get into, since I listen to everything. Did you want examples? I’m listening to Queens Of The Stone Age’s new album and this old record from 1989 made in Belgium which is an old house record from an artist called Hithouse. It is a crazy but cool album and you can actually get it on iTunes, which is crazy. I’m trying to tell all my friends. And I’m listening to old stuff like Technotronic, Neneh Cherry and Prince."
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