Swedish pop icon Robyn, who announced her new album Honey last week, talked to The New York Times about her writing process. Barring a few one-off shows and collaborations, Robyn had been missing from out of the public eye for most of this decade, returning in August with an incredible single, “Missing U.”
Robyn is known for being a private person in every facet except her songwriting. She mines broken relationships, her own self-doubt, and her tenacity in overcoming it all, and she writes incredible pop hooks about ugly feelings. Back in 2010, while promoting her biggest US breakout, Body Talk, Robyn told Spin that the three pillars of pop songwriting were “love, the club, and feeling like an outsider.” In the eight years following, Robyn has added a few more pillars: “Eternity and death. And losing control.”
In the ensuing years since Body Talk, Robyn has found more perspective. “In a way, I still agree that [love, the club, and feeling like an outsider] are the three pillars of pop music. Those are pillars of youth,” she said. “Everyone deals with sadness and lack of love when they’re kids, and all this abandonment. Most people do. Hopefully, you want to learn something new and you want to move on to this other place.”
The product of almost a decade of painstaking work, Robyn’s new album Honey drops on Oct. 26. Read Robyn’s full interview with The New York Times here.
