Pitchfork

Nearly a decade ago, Robyn did something most pop artists would dream of. She released a pair of perfect singles-- chart smashes, both-- from a platinum-selling album. Then she all but disappeared from the public consciousness. At least, that's the way the American version of the story goes.

In her native Sweden, Robyn's a big name; her last album, 2005's Robyn (self-released on her own Konichiwa Records) won the nation's equivalent of the Album of the Year Grammy, and she's revered as both a pure pop juggernaut and a musical innovator. In the U.S., though, it remains unissued, and most folks remember Robyn for "Show Me Love," if they remember her at all.

Those of us fortunate enough to track down a copy of Robyn discovered a savvy, silly, salacious dance-pop album that deserved to be heard by as many people as possible. But, despite the record's sonic commercial viability and no shortage of rave reviews (including a #39 placement on Pitchfork's "Best Albums of 2005" list), Robyn's new music remains largely unheard in America. It turns out, Robyn's just been waiting for the right time to strike. She recently issued Robyn in the U.K., and hopes to offer it to U.S. audiences at some point soon.

All this comes as Robyn makes plans for her next album, which-- though still in the early stages-- should feature collaborations with producer Andreas Kleerup (with whom she collaborated on "With Every Heartbeat") and Teddybears guitarist Klas Åhlund. We spoke with Robyn Tuesday morning while she recovered from a pair of festival sets she'd done over the weekend. She told us a little bit about her upcoming projects, a little more about her struggles to get her music heard outside of Sweden, and a whole lot about what it takes to be a pop star who cares equally about her craft, her image, and running her own business.

Pitchfork: You just got back from a couple of festival dates. How'd those go?

Robyn: I'm actually at home sick today with a little bit of fever. The shows went well, but I guess I had too many drinks and cigarettes, and that's why I'm sick.

Pitchfork: Ah, that'll do it. You don't play live too often. How is it, getting out there?

Robyn: It's amazing to see how it's been developing these last couple of months. The first shows I made were kind of like 150 people, and now it's a lot more. So I'm really excited to see it grow. I've never been able to be a part of it in that way, to see it actually happen. I've always wanted to work with a major, so you could push the record everywhere at the same time. But this time, it's really nice to see each show be a little bit bigger, and more and more people come.

Pitchfork: What do you attribute the growth to?

Robyn: Well, you have to have luck, of course. But I think, except for that, a really great album. And I think that, because I have the possibility to work with my own company and the people I really want to work with, I'm able to give the album the marketing it deserves. It connects with people in a natural way; it's not something that's forced on them. It's been there for a while and it's spreading, through the internet and stuff. It's a very, very exciting thing for that to happen for me, especially when the record executives were kind of bored with how my other records have been marketed.

Pitchfork: Is it hard to get excited about pushing a record that's two years old at this point?

Robyn: You get tired of your music after awhile. If I wouldn't have been working on my next album now, I think I would have been very bored. But I think that there's something good about doing things slow, you know? I mean, I get stressed because it's been two years since it was been released in Sweden. But at the same time, I've used those years to really find the right kind of situation for me to deal with. It would've been stupid of me to go over there and release it on a major label and kind of rout up everything I built in Sweden.

Pitchfork: You say you're working on the new album. How far are you into that?

Robyn: It's kind of in the beginning. I'm working with Klas Åhlund, the guy I worked with on the last album. And I'm also working with Andreas Kleerup, who I made "With Every Heartbeat" with. But it's very much in the beginning. It's taking forms in my head.

Pitchfork Are there things you know you want to talk about on this next record, or things you want to achieve musically?

Robyn: Yeah, I do. But I can't describe them yet. They're too early. It's just too scary to talk about before it's there. So I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.

Pitchfork: Do you have any sense when you might be going into the studio?

Robyn: It all depends on how much I'll be working this summer, I think. "With Every Heartbeat" is due in the UK right now, and if everything goes the way we think I'm going to be very busy, so it's impossible to say actually.

Pitchfork: What's your writing process like? You seem to pay a lot of attention to specifics, but you also make an awful lot of wild, boastful statements. In a way, it's like you're writing in character, like a rapper might.

Robyn: I've always been influenced by hip-hop, and I think that it goes very well in hand with how I was brought up in youth. Both my parents were in theater, and I always used to see them on stage, performing, creating, you know. I think I was brought up used to the idea of playing a role, and using a character to describe an emotion. To me, using a character or playing a role doesn't contradict this, as an artist, being very personal. So I think those contrasts, those are the cultures that I work with. They're really kind of having to say to yourself, looking at yourself from the outside and being very simple and almost mimic about what you're trying to say and then at the same time trying to be so close and personal to yourself that you're not even making sense. I think those two extremes are really, really, really interesting. That's probably important to me in all aspects of my music, you know, and how I look at visuals and production as well.

But I think it has a lot to do with friends. I think probably my biggest inspiration during my teenage years was listening to Biggie Smalls and, you know, TLC. It's been very important to me.

Pitchfork: Is it strange to know you have a fanbase around the world who'd buy your music if only they could?

Robyn: Yeah. It makes me very impatient sometimes. It's horrible, actually. It's bad for me. But I think it's just something I have to live with for right now, because it would just be hard for me to get in the same situation I have here for how I would release my records in America right now. It wouldn't have been good for me. I try to stay in touch with people through MySpace and through my website.

I'm thinking that me collaborating with Kleerup and doing stuff like me releasing an EP, even though it's not officially released in the States, I know a lot of people know about Teddybears and they know about "Cobrastyle". I'm thinking that we still will keep them feeling like I'm still including them. I'm thinking about coming over there and seeing those fans, because ever since I released my first record there has always been this bunch of people from the States that just kept staying in touch with me through the internet and stuff. I was just always amazed at how that happened because it's been, what, ten years between my first record and this record? People just wouldn't stop trying to reach me even if there was nothing released in that ten years. I definitely feel obliged to get over there.

Pitchfork: I think a lot people-- Americans in particular-- who've heard your newer music have a hard time imaging you're the same person who made "Show Me Love" so many years ago. Our pop stars just don't tend to evolve like that. Clearly you've undergone quite a lot of changes in the decade or so since that first album was recorded.

Robyn: When you're sixteen, it's very hard for you to be a finished person. You're not really, um... how do I say this in English? You're not very deep, you know? You're deep because you're a human and have feelings and things happen to you that are amazing and horrible, and all that stuff. And don't get me wrong, teenage emotion is one my biggest interests. But when I made my first record, I was really young, and it was hard for me to communicate who I was to people in the record industry. And so, when you look at that part of my career, what you see was just a small percent of who I really was.

I think that me taking the step of creating my own record company, and all these other things I had tried to do before, has been because I realized quite early that, if I am supposed to do this in a way that is true to myself, I have to give myself a better starting point. There are a lot of things there, but it's hard to communicate yourself through that and the record business. It's a very shallow place, and it takes a lot of time and experience to really find out how you're going to use this instrument in the best way. I think that's a big part of being an artist. I think that's a skill that some artists have, and sometimes you think, "I love their music, their music is so great," but maybe it's also that their music is good at showing who they are.

I think that I was young and it was hard for me to know exactly what I wanted to do. That's how I've looked at these past ten years. It's been my school; it's been my way to getting to this point I am right now.

Pitchfork: Yeah, there seems to be an evolution of you asserting your own personal intent on a record. I take it that's how you want to do it from now on, and at least part of the reason why you started your own label.

Robyn: Yeah. That's the way the last record was made, and I think there's no return for me. There's no compromise anymore. There's no point for me to really give any of this freedom away. I'm getting to do what I want. The changes between my first and third record were much bigger than the changes that are going to be between this record and the next record. I really feel like I've found my place. I'm going to keep doing this.

Pitchfork: On record, you have this real investment in electronic music as well as Swedish pop music; you have Kleerup on your single, and Bjorn Yttling from Peter, Bjorn and John plays on the Rakamonie EP. You seem to be invested in the work of people making forward-thinking music.

Robyn: It's not like I'm consuming a lot of music right now. There are times when I'm just listening to what my friends listen to, or sometimes my friends will give me a record or I listen to the radio. I don't really pick up on the song until it's a hit. I think Swedish music is basically what influences me the most right now. But also club music that I go out and dance to and kind of listen to a lot, techno and stuff. Not in the sense that I collect records or consume them at home; I just go out dancing a lot. I think those two things, Swedish songwriters and techno music, that's totally what I listen to the most.

Pitchfork: There seems to be a strong element of community in the Swedish music scene, people guesting on or producing other peoples' records all the time. What do you attribute that to?

Robyn: When you live in a country that has a lot of different artists and songwriters and stuff, that is as small as Sweden is-- we're only nine million people-- naturally you meet everyone in the record business sooner or later. That's something I think is very cool. That means that the Knife and the Teddybears and Peter, Bjorn and John and me and Andreas Kleerup are all sort of forced to influence each other. Which is very nice. Because there is no space for genre, no space for little music scenes. Just one scene where everyone's trying to take in what's there and make their own version, their own interpretation of it.

I also think there's an aspect of pop music that is not really argued here. People really like pop music and respect pop music. I think America does in a sense, too, because you've got such strongly and fundamentally different aspects of popular music. In the UK, for example, people are afraid of melody. If there's a melody in there, it's just not cool [laughs].

Pitchfork: You covered a few people on the Rakamonie EP that took some folks by surprise: Prince, Saul Williams. What made you choose those particular songs?

Robyn: Both of them were kind of accidents. I love Prince. I think he is the best. But "Jack U Off" is not really a song that I listen to a lot. Basically, we were in the studio and we were doing this ballad version of "Be Mine", and then I wanted to do a Prince cover. I brought a bunch of records, and I put them on and we listened to them and we heard "Jack U Off", and we just tried it, and it turned out good. I was kind of looking for one of those songs where Prince does his Little Richard thing, because I think it's really funny. I just didn't think of "Jack U Off" until I heard it, actually.

And then the Saul Williams song was actually Jenny Wilson's idea. We were going to do a song together on this Swedish music program on TV, and we called each other and discussed what kind of song we wanted to do, and we sent each other different examples. She came up with this song, and we just thought it was a nice thing for two girls to sing, you know something that he sings, because, you know, it made it easier to interpret when it was not very similar to a lot of the stuff the rest of us are doing.

Pitchfork: One of the coolest things you've done since the record came out was the "Konichiwa Bitches" video. Were you thinking about the video when you wrote the song?

Robyn: That's a good question. I think that when me and Klas wrote that song, we were really, you know, thinking very visually. I was really inspired by Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes and stuff. I had been watching that. And we were listening to a lot of old school hip-hop. You know, there's things that come out of these rappers' mouths-- I just adore them for it. You know, I listened to this Run-D.M.C. song "Sucker MCs" last night and one of the guys said something like, "And after twelfth grade, I went straight to college," and he was like boasting about the fact that he went to college [laughs]. I think that's great! Just like dissing each other for fun. It doesn't have to be about crack. It used to be about other things.

Of course, we made the intro of the CD, "Curriculum Vitae", where I'm like, "I have the high score in Tetris," and I do all these things almost like I'm a super hero. When we started thinking in those terms, yes, we have to think visually, how to be as clear as possible. When we made the video, the easiest and most obvious thing to do was just to illustrate the words. It just came naturally out of the place that Klas and I were in.

Pitchfork: What are your plans for the rest of the year?

Robyn: I have no plans, except releasing my record. Right now, there's a setup in the UK where I'm releasing my record together with my management, and hopefully we'll release it before Christmas in Europe and maybe in the States after that. But it's so hard to say. It all depends on kind of what's going to happen in the UK and if there's an American label that feels like they can really push it in the way I want them to push it, but hopefully-- I mean, I'm looking to work this album as long as I can, because I think there's an audience out there, and I really think this album deserves to be released in as many places as it can. But I'm going to finish my next record too, at the same time, and release that as soon as possible. I just want to keep making records.