The New Yorker Radio Hour - Robyn Talks with David Remnick

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

For the past twenty-five years, since she was a young teen-ager, the singer Robyn has been on the cutting edge of pop music. Her sound is sparse and complex, influenced by electro and dance music while preserving the catchiness of pop. After a brief stint with Max Martin early in her career, Robyn has avoided the big hit-making producers who put their stamp on an artist. Instead she’s produced, written, and performed all her own work, becoming a kind of oxymoron: an indie pop star.   “Body Talk,” Robyn’s previous album, came out in 2010, and, for many of the years that followed, Robyn has been out of the public eye. Following a breakup and a close friend’s death, she slipped into a depression serious enough that she had trouble getting out of bed and leaving her house. She eventually started recording again and recently released an album called “Honey.” (The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote,“the force of her conviction continues to hold together what often seems impossible, musically or otherwise: maximum sadness, felt as the bedrock of absolute joy.”) Robyn, who lives in her native Sweden, spoke with David Remnick about the many years of difficulties that went into making “Honey.” Plus, the pop-music critic Amanda Petrusich picks three favorites for 2018, and the fight director B. H. Barry gives a lesson in brutal mayhem with music. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For the past 25 years, starting when she was all of 14 years old, the singer Robin has been on the cutting edge of pop music. Her sound is sparse, complex, ahead of the trends, and she always seems like she's writing from a few years into the future. For most of those 25 years making music, Robin has avoided the big hit-making producers who somehow put their own stamp on an artist. Instead, she's become almost an oxymoron, an indie pop star. And while she's respected, even frankly adored by so many critics, she's also genuinely popular, with the top 10 singles and multiple Grammy nominations to prove it.

Robin was born Robin Carlson in Sweden, where she still lives. And her last album, Body Talk, came out in 2010. But for most of the intervening years, Robin has been pretty much out of public view. Following a breakup and a close friend's death, she slipped into a depression serious enough that she had trouble getting out of bed sometimes or leaving the house. She eventually started recording again and recently released an album called Honey. The New Yorker's Giotolentino said of it, The Force of Her Conviction Continues to Hold Together,

what often seems impossible, musically or otherwise. Maximum sadness felt as the bedrock of absolute joy. Robin talked with me from her office in Sweden last week. Robin, this is your first album in eight years. Is it strange to be back in the limelight after all that time? You're touring, and it's been a long time for touring too. What's it like being back out in the hot lights?

It's nice. I'm enjoying myself. maybe in a way I'm in a different place than I was. Last time I released an album in the sense that I'm, maybe not, is like, how can I put it? Not as like willing maybe to work as hard. Like I really enjoy my downtime. I really enjoy being in the studio.

I really enjoy like having my own time, basically. You wrote your first song when you were 11 years old, which is pretty darn early. What were you listening to? What singers, what music was meaning the most to you? You signed with a record company at 14. So a lot of music must have been coming at you, shaping this young voice, this young singer, this young composer. I wonder what was most important. I loved Michael Jackson. I listened to Off the Wall and Thriller a lot. I think I heard my first Prince album when I was about 8.000. It was the Batman soundtrack. And I loved it. I still do, actually.

I think it's an underrated. I mean, I think TOC made maybe the biggest impression on me as a teenager because they were young women and they were, you know, quite tough and, like, strong and still girly and cute and fun. I think they were probably the group, if you would have asked me as a 15-year-old, I would have said TLC. And when you listen to those early songs of yours,

that early music, and it's now quite a while ago, it's almost 20 years ago, what are you hearing in the young, young Robin? I think I'm hearing, you know, a lot of, like, will, a lot of willpower, a lot of, like, energy. Sometimes I feel like I can understand where I was trying to move in a different direction, but maybe really didn't know how. And it took me a long time until I actually created the environment

where I felt like I could make music that was more in my own terms. But I think the fact that I was writing still gave me like an outlet. When you were just 18, you released my truth. And though your first album was released in the United States, this one was not. What happened? Well, I just don't think that the label that I worked with at the time got it.

You know, it wasn't a commercial album. But you were writing about your experience in abortion, and that's something that most American pop stars certainly wouldn't touch at the time. And not only did you sing about it, you refused to make any changes in order to reach some imagined big audience. That seems a pretty tough thing to do, no? What was that episode like for you? Well, I don't think it was a tough decision.

I was more kind of amazed of like how narrow-minded the label I was with at the time was. Not here in Sweden, but in America. I think that song became an issue. That wasn't a big deal for me. actually. I'm happy that I wrote the song and that I kind of stuck by it.

What's your process like as a writer of songs? I think writing continuously, like having a routine is really important, at least for me. But then I really

believe also that some ideas, they just show up when they're ready. You might have to like get the engine like going and warm it up for a long time but like one and once it's like ready once you're like in the in the zone it's easier for those ideas to show up and I don't know where that comes from I mean I'm not superstitious in that way I wouldn't say that I think they come from God because I don't feel like I believe in God but I I believe in that they come from the unconsciousness like a you know a deeper place that's that's hard to

to get to by thinking. Well, something equally mysterious happened after Body Talk came out. After it came out, you were a huge success, a big star, five albums, and then suddenly you went, at least where the public was concerned, silent. Are you able to talk about what happened and why you withdrew from your public life? Well, I mean, I was ready to make an album in 2000. 2014, I was preparing to go back into the studio. And then, you know, I think, like, for a lot of people, life was just, you know, unexpected things happened.

And you experienced some real losses at that time. Yeah, exactly. A friend of mine died, and I was in a relationship that ended around. the same time. I felt like the things that I was trying to, or the things that I was writing about were quite, you know, layered and complex. They weren't quick. Like, Missing You is a really good example. I wrote the melody and, like, the beginning of the lyrics in 2014 in July. And Christian died just right after that and my friend. And I really didn't know how to finish those lyrics at that point. Because it started out as a love song and then it became about my friend that had passed away

and then the relationship I was in kind of fell apart and then it became more about that. You know, so it was like this ongoing thing of like where my experiences were just changing all the time and I didn't know how to put all of that into the lyrics. So I just kind of left the song. I worked on other things even though it was slow and it took time. But I was, you know, I was preparing. I was exploring myself, I guess, in order to be able to put words on all those experiences eventually. you did something that's pretty unusual in the modern world a lot of people go see a therapist to deal with depression or loss or heartbreak or whatever it might be

you went into it in a way that in the modern world doesn't happen very much anymore as he went several times a week into real what I guess is some traditional psychoanalysis I wonder did you what was the effects on your life and what was the effects on your work of that of that of that psychoanalytical work that you were doing? I started it way before. I started making this album, like, years before. But it wasn't until all these things happened in my life, where I really felt like it started to kind of give, like, real results. You know, I think the therapy definitely had an effect on my music, but I also think that, you know, these things that happen in the...

My life basically also changed my therapy. It was like, you know, it's like it works both ways, I think. But the commitment of going to psychoanalysis is a big one. You have to kind of, you have to do it for some years. And I guess looking back at it now, I can kind of see how you never really know when it's going to start making sense. You just kind of have to commit anyway. I'd like to break down, if you don't mind, the musical elements of honey. So let's start by listening to a clip of that.

Can you describe the writing of that, the figuring out of the melody and the part that you're singing? So I was working with this Cassio synthesizer for a long time. And I was making songs on these chords that me and Marcus, who plays in my band. and it was really just about the beat for me for like a year or so. And you're playing around with kind of club music background here, right? That was what I was doing, but it sounded like something else. We had this idea of making this like gooey kind of soft production that was still relating to, you know, club music.

And Joseph decided to make his own sample. So we called it like the sauce. It's processed through lots of things to make it kind of feel like it's moving. And I think to me that's really what club music is about. So I want to ask a question that's more about pop music in general. Pop music, dance music, a lot of it is associated with sex, with hyper-sexualized imagery a lot of it. for years and years, and you've somehow avoided that.

You sing about love and sex, but you don't sexualize or over-sexualize your own image or who you are in these songs, and that seems a kind of magic trick, too. Is it something you think about a lot? I actually don't. I wish I maybe thought about it more. I think that for me it was always like when I was younger, very, very, like important or I just felt like I needed to kind of protect myself. I think today it's much easier to, you know, have pink hair and at the same time call

yourself a feminist. I think when I was growing up, being a feminist was like, you know, being a tomboy was or felt liberating to me. And I think I was. So I don't think that I like gave myself space enough to be a sensual person as an artist until way later. And I like things to be layered. I like things to be complicated and complex. And I think if you're allowing things to be, you know, somehow complicated, you can be as sexy as you want, you know. Robin, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thanks for talking to me. All the best to you. Good luck and everything. Yeah, you too. Thank you. Bye. Robin's album, Honey, came out in the fall. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Aaron Sorkin is probably best known for the West Wing, and he won an Academy Award for a screenplay for the social network,

the movie about Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. But Sorkin's roots are on the stage in live theater, and he's adapted Harper Lee's novel to Kill a Mockingbird. The show opens on Broadway this month, and I'll talk with Sorkin next week on the New Yorker radio hour. Well, it is that time a year again, and the lists are coming fast and furious. And thank God, I've got Amanda Petrusich here to guide us through the year in pop music. Amanda, what's the best thing you've been hearing all year? What just blew your mind? For me, the big kind of pop music story of

2018 was Ariana Grande. She was the first woman in three years to have a single debut at number one on the Hot 100. But what's really remarkable, I think, about her and about her kind of journey and story this year is, you know, she endured this extraordinary tragedy. There was a bombing at a concert she gave in Manchester in the United Kingdom in 2017, you know, 23 people dead. She returned home. Her ex-boyfriend and former collaborator, the rapper Mac Miller, passed away of an accidental overdose. She became engaged to SNL's Pete Davidson, and then that engagement was called off. And throughout all of this, she released a record sort of in the midst of all this turmoil in her life called Sweetener. And the record is sort of,

it's a beautiful pop record and I think just kind of inspiring and lovely in its embrace of, you know, the idea of survival and sort of remaining. And, you know, she's 25 years old and the kind of way in which she sort of approaches the things she's endured, I just find incredible. I mean, I think, God, at that age, I would have been collapsed by all of that. I would have been just totally destroyed by those events. But she released a single just a few weeks ago called Thank You Next. I don't know if you have had a chance to. It's a kind of kiss off to Pete Davidson. I suppose you kind of, you know, at least for me.

Who would kiss off Pete Davidson? Imagine that. It's kind of unbelievable. I know, I know. But she released this single thank you next that you would have assumed would have been this kind of malevolent, you know, I'm moving on. The title seems to suggest as much. But what's incredible about it is that the chorus has this line and I will keep this clean for the airwaves. I don't want to work blue.

But it's basically I'm so grateful for my ex. I just think who is grateful for their ex, you know? Again, at 25, I certainly did not have the generosity of spirit. Neither at 35 did I have the generosity of spirit to be grateful for my exes. But she is. She remained. She's a tough woman. That's something to think on. Yeah. That is something to think on. Let's hear it. Thought I'd end up with Sean. But he was in her match. Wrote some songs about Ricky. Now I listen and laugh. Even almost got married. I'm going to say thank you to Malcolm because he was an angel One taught me love

One taught me patience And one taught me pain To love to I see I thought me Yeah for that I say it Thank you Next

What if we got next What else is on your mind And what else is on the list? I hope that phrase really works its way Into your editing vernacular I don't think that's going to be a good style flying off the desk. I don't think they'd appreciate it.

Well, my favorite pop single of 2018 was Malamente by the Catalonian singer Rosalia. Her second album is based loosely on an anonymous 13th century poem about the psychic perils of jealousy. So she sort of had me there. It's a record about desire, when desire

goes wrong, and particularly the kind of ramifications for women when love turns ugly. So the title translates to badly, and the song itself mixes these kind of traditional flamenco rhythms with elements of pop and reggaeton and hip hop and R&B. She sings in Spanish, but the lyrics are really spooky, really foreboding, really dark, which for me was in line with, you know, much of 2018, where you're just thinking, God,

what awful and terrifying thing lurks around the next corner. And I feel like this song really sort of captured that feeling. It's the sort of cascading series of bad portents, you know, a broken light voice on the stairs, a dream about a bridge. Stop, you're cheering me up. You're cheering me up. Happy holidays. So why don't we listen to a little bit of Rosalia's Melamente? Oh, I've heard this.

It's cool. I have heard this. She's cool. I think she's going to have a big year next year. Well, most times. Top 10 lists are, you know, 10. But, you know, in the age of diminishing expectations are shortened detention spans,

here's our final one. The final big hit of 2018 from Amanda is... See, now you have built me up in it is what I'm about to play is, in fact, not a big hit, but a little under-the-radar gem, which I figured out we've got, you know, we've got two... If you say it's a big hit, it's a big hit. Yeah, okay. I declare this, the jam of 2018.

This is by a banjo player named Nathan Bowles. Did I lose you at Banjo Player? I'm right there with you. You're with me. The album is called Plainly Mistaken. He is a North Carolina-based musician, known primarily for his drumming, but every once in a while will release one of these extraordinary banjo records. And he is equally informed by a sort of traditional Appalachian song,

kind of old-time mountain music, but also a sort of avant-garde New York City experimental kind of drone minimalist thing. So it hits all my walls in that way. It's the kind of Roscoe Hockel meets John Cale. And one of my favorite songs from this record is called, if you remember. An Appalachian trance music. Yeah, exactly.

Love that. Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, happy holidays to you and happy holidays to everyone. This is at least a beginning of a revelatory list from Amanda, who I think will probably write a longer list online pretty soon. I will. Absolutely. Amanda Petrissich, music writer, extraordinary for the New Yorker. Thanks so much.

Thank you, David. Amanda Petrissich, with three of her favorites this year, Ariana Grande's Sweetener, Rosalya. as Malamante and Nathan Bowles, whose album is called Plainly Mistaken. In the operatic canon, there is no shortage of tragic deaths. By any measure, one of the most awful is the murder of Desdemona by her husband, Othello. The themes of Verdi's opera, like the Shakespeare play it's based on, remain sadly all too contemporary, racism, power, jealousy,

how resentment leads to bitterness and appalling violence. A production of Atello is at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and while the show is in rehearsal, the New Yorker's David Cortava got a look behind the scenes at how violence makes its way to the opera stage. Into the powers of the neck. B.H. Barry is a fight director at the Metropolitan Opera. Who knew such a job existed?

But if somebody is attacking somebody else while somehow singing at top volume, B.H. Barry has work to do. And to see how it's all done, he took David Cortaba way, way down under the big stage. There are people still trying to get out of here from two years ago. The ladies are just incredible about it. B.H. Barry is one of the leading fight directors in the world. He's a kind of master of a lot of different kinds of violence. Huge barroom brawls, intimate knife fights, stranglings, slaps, beheadings,

This fights a pogrom and fiddler on the roof. But he's not a bruiser. He's not a barroom brawler. He's a very elegant-looking gentleman in his 70s. He has a bouncy tuft of silver hair. He seems like an old-timey action movie star, like an Errol Flynn or a Douglas Fairbanks. And like those people, he is very good with a sword.

Good. What happens now, Brad? Do you do that again? Normally whenever there's action in a play that involves actors, I'm asked to come in to protect them, to build a choreograph scene in which they won't get hurt. And so that's part of the job. The other part of the job is, as a fight director,

is being able to teach because a lot of people can't do this stuff. And a lot of opera singers are not necessarily physical people, because to be an opera singer you really have to work incredibly hard on training your voice and it's a total life it's not like an actor you can go away and drink and get in the pub

and have fun and do this stuff these guys are it's a delicate instrument they're thoroughbreds these are the best in the world so teaching is a vital part of fight directing so point at your targets point

point point point Point. Now as you do it look at me the whole time. Think of down. Right. You know when you're singing those high notes? Yeah? Yeah, there you go. Down? Now think of looking you watch. You look at your watch when you do the left. Because you watch. Perfect. And again. Back again. There. There. Look at you watch. There. Look at you watch. There. Look at your watch. Close your eyes. There. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Good, nice stuff. Yeah, perfect.

Are the skills that your actors learn on stage transferable? In other words, if one of these opera guys went out to a bar and got into a brawl? No, no, no. There was an actor I think of Michael Redfern and got into a fight in the bar, and I've been teaching him fights and whatever. And this guy came out of him and he blocked it,

and he pulled the punch. And the guy looked down and went, Jesus, and ran out the bar because he thought Michael could actually heard him. And Michael just pulled... No, no, no, no, no, don't even go there. Do not try this at home. It's theater.

It's make-believe. What is the scene we're about to observe? There's a... In the play and also in the opera is the moment where Michael Cassio, who is the lieutenant to Othello, is... gets drunk and gets into a fight

with the... one of the captains of the guard. Within that, there are lots of things that happen. Michael Casio has a group of people that move with him. Their job is to try and get him out of there before he does some real damage, and they don't succeed. That's where the director part comes in, like looking at the story and how I can move it forward.

Also, I look at the actors in the fight, and I often will say to them, what would be missing if your character didn't fight? And then that answer will give me what I need to do to choreograph it. What, Jaddy, what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to create now is the thing that we couldn't do before when we're working on the initial action, which was your guy's involvement with Passios. I never knew what that was. You came in with him and then you're fighting him. Chris was saying, you had a point yesterday, I wanted to kind of... I was like, why am I not stopping him right here?

Right. And I think the answer to that question is he is the captain of the guard. He is the person who you came in and you thought he's going to, and maybe one or two of you thinking he gets like this when he drinks or maybe that apprehension when he drinks can be there early on. No? Yes? Actually, can we do that move from Swipe of Chris? Swipe of Chris? But he doesn't even need to swipe.

I mean, come in and just look at him. There, and you move away from it, yeah? It says something about the character, and it says something about your position. position in the role of his guard. We have to give him an enormous degree of importance because he has to lose all that when the terror comes. I would imagine some scenes require realism

and others a bit of theatricality. Yeah, you have to be careful because if you get too real, the audience gets scared for the performers. the fine line between being theatrical and being real is very fine. And so I think that we don't look for reality in theatre. We look for the representation of reality. And if we're pushed too far in that direction, we're moved out of the theatre into something entirely different.

So that kind of helps a little bit, huh? All right, go. See, that's a moment in which the sword went near to the performance. and we went, whoa, that was the reality moment. And that's, we have to take that out because otherwise the audience would think when you got hit. Can we do that one more time and not have Chris Todd?

Was he going on my shoulder and my head? I mean, it's... Have you been in any real fights? No. Not since I was 13. I put a kid in the hospital and that was it. I never lost my temper since. I walked out. I walk out. I don't know what I would do if I did hit somebody.

Are there any real... Real world examples of violence that have informed your work on stage? Oh, God, the world is so full of violence. I don't know. I don't, I feel unsaid. Yeah. Boy, that was a moment. I don't want this violent stuff to be hanging around.

It's stupid. People beating the crap out of each other. They talk, and it works. But just fighting is wrong. Wrong. Shooting, God, I don't know. But I am, in a way, it makes me feel better that I've said something. And violence, you can say something about not violence. If I thought for one moment somebody picked up a knife to stab somebody, but had an image of something that I created, and they stopped, I would feel wonderful. That would be tremendous. B.H. Barry, a fight director at the Metropolitan Opera. He talked with David Cortava of the New Yorker. The Mets production of Verdi's Othello opens this week.

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