She says the moment she met her husband, Aaron, he had one question for her: "Do you like Robyn?"Īaron made Nora consume the singer's entire discography, and it became the soundtrack to their courtship. Nora is a writer and host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks For Asking. It just feels like falling in love when I hear those songs." The air is cold, the leaves are turning but it hasn't snowed yet, and I'm driving down the freeway, listening to these songs that are so hopeful and energetic. "The sun shining, this really blue crisp sky. "That whole album reminds me of it being October in Minnesota," she says. Everything I've found in the months I've spent thinking about it, talking to people about it, working it into my bones, has shown that this song, all about being alone, has helped people find community and togetherness. Berger says his favorite line is one that gets at an extremely teenage feeling:īut whenever the song has popped up in the close to 10 years since its release, the moral of its story has remained the same. It's as if Robyn wants you to live in that space - to give you time to insert all of your emotions and stories and feelings into the seconds between the lines. "Which is not a lot of time in the abstract, but on a pop song, that's like eons." " like six seconds of silence between each line in the verse," Sloan says. Nate Sloan, a musicologist at the University of Southern California and host of the music podcast Switched On Pop, says the miracle of those lyrics is their sparseness.
Robyn dancing on my own synths full#
She's hurt, but she keeps dancing, over a floor full of stiletto heels and broken bottles. She sees him across the floor, dancing with someone new. A woman ends up at the same club as her ex. The result is only around 130 words, with a simple, accessible story. I have a notebook of lyrics that we scrapped." "I remember we were texting each other for, like, weeks on lines. "I think we spent, like, a couple of days on each line," Berger says. The chords and the track and the melody came together pretty quickly, but every single word took its time. Patrik Berger, who co-wrote and produced the song with Robyn, told me the lyrics were the hardest part. "She has kind of learned to carry the intensity of teenage emotion into perfectly adult pop songs. "It's important to see her as a teenager who survived," Geffen says. Music critic Sasha Geffen says in this new phase of her career, Robyn succeeds because she still has teen pop in her heart, even if she broke up with that part of the industry.
Robyn's self-titled album and its follow-up, the three-part Body Talk series, made her a star in Europe and a cult favorite in the States.
For me it was like the last, last thing to try, before I was going to quit music." "It was a big, big change for me," Robyn told NPR in 2010, "but I really didn't feel like I had another option.
Less than 10 years later, Robyn had left all that behind, made her own label, Konichiwa Records, changed up her image and started making pop with an edge. " Show Me Love" and " Do You Know (What It Takes)" were in line with the rest of the teen pop from those days, adjacent in sound to the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync and Britney Spears. In the late 1990s, when she was still a teenager, Robyn had two U.S. People finding community in a song all about being solo.
The ones who have used it to get through not just breakups, but cancer, or death, or a lot more, who love that decadent drum fill toward the end more than life.Īll stories of juxtaposition. People who insist it can be a queer anthem: " Is she singing 'I'm not the GIRL you're taking home' or 'I'm not the GUY you're taking home'? Who knows! Maybe she MEANT it that way? ROBYN IS A GENIUS," they said, more or less. People who have played it for hours in one sitting, or kept it on repeat for a road trip hundreds of miles long, or made it the last dance at every house party they've ever thrown. There were the DJs who spin it at wedding receptions, knowing it will get everyone on the floor. When I decided to make "Dancing on My Own" my pick for NPR's American Anthem series, I went to social media and asked anyone who saw the request to send me their stories about the song. Contrary emotions wrapped up in one package, happiness and sadness living together in a groove: Everything about this song is a juxtaposition.