🎧 Episode 167: Robyn (Song Exploder)

Listened Episode 167: Robyn from Song Exploder

Robyn is a Swedish singer and songwriter. Her first album came out in 1995, when she was 16 years old. It went platinum in the US, double-platinum in Sweden. Since then, she’s been nominated for five Grammys and started her own record label. But there was an eight-year gap between Robyn’s album Body Talk, which came out in 2010, and her most recent album, Honey, which came out last October. Time, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork all named it one of the best albums of the year.

For Song Exploder, Robyn breaks down the song “Honey,” the title track from that album. The first time the public heard the song was in a 2017 episode of the HBO show Girls, but that’s not the final version that was released on the album. In this episode, Robyn traces the long history of how she made “Honey,” a song that The New York Times called “her masterpiece.”

Robyn discusses the process she took in writing her track Honey. Whether it be the discovery of a seed in a sample, hours a riffing to find a melody and additional production from others. In the end, the initial beginning is there in beat and spirit, but has been progressively mixed out.

One response on “🎧 Episode 167: Robyn (Song Exploder)”

  1. This is such an important message Fiona. It reminds me of Austin Kleon’s message from Steal Like an Artist:

    What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.

    We however forget about stealing from our past selves.
    This is what I like about Song Exploder, where artists break down the birth of an idea.

    Reply

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