2010 SUMMER YEARBOOK: Most Likely To Keep Us Dancing: Robyn

 
It may have taken 15 years and five studio albums, but New York gays are finally ready to hang with Robyn and her Body Talk trilogy.
 
For some of us, Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” from June’s Body Talk Pt. 1 will forever be associated with summer 2010. It was an indisputable contender for Song of Summer, burning up dance floors and blasting from pretty much every house on Fire Island. But the Swedish pop star doesn’t see it like that.
 
“For me it’s not a seasonal thing,” she says. “For me dance music is the shit all the time!”
 
And it’s a good thing too, because as summer 2010 wraps up, Robyn is set to release Body Talk Pt. 2. It’s the second in a series of three albums that she’s releasing back to back, with Body Talk Pt. 3 due before the end of the year. The singer says she actually considers the material to be one whole album, released in three parts. But as much as the Body Talk series sounds like an old-school concept album, Robyn is quick to point out  it’s not. In fact, it’s entirely new.
 
“It’s something I decided to do because I was trying to find a new way of working that would allow me to go back on tour quicker and come back into the studio quicker as well,” she says. “So it’s more of a selfish decision to try and have as much fun as possible while I’m making music.”
 
At the same time, working in this accelerated way had its challenges, too. “It’s a lot of work, and you have to be able to make decisions quicker and be more intuitive with certain decisions. But I’m really liking it,” she says. And, Robyn says, once she’d made up her mind about this new way of releasing her work, she realized it could have wider implications for the changing environment of the music industry. “[Nowadays] people consume music in a different way. We don’t have that old structure where the record companies market albums and people are told what to buy, what to like. People find their own music on the Internet. They know what they want. So to me, it’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone knows that this new structure is there, but no one is really recognizing it as the new way of doing things.”
 
So with the Body Talk series, Robyn set out to single-handedly reinvent the way an artist records, releases and promotes her material. And so far it seems to be working out just fine. She’s spent the summer on the road, co-headlining the All Hearts Tour with Kelis while simultaneously putting the finishing touches on Body Talk Pt. 2. “I love having the ability to release music when it’s just recorded. I love the fact that you guys don’t know much more than I do. There’s an authenticity to the whole thing. It’s very, very real and organic.”
 
Robyn has come a long way from the seeming one-hit-wonder who sang “Show Me Love” way back in 1997 and then disappeared from the American pop landscape for the better part of a decade. But this seems to be the moment for innovative female pop stars, and Robyn is poised to make her mark.
 
“This is an environment where people expect you to be different,” she says. “They don’t think that that’s a weird thing. They actually want you to do something that is unlike anything else. Before there were always one or two girls ruling the scene. You’d have Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, or you’d have Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. But now there [are] all kinds of girls at the same time and there’s room for everyone. That’s not a bad thing at all.”    N
 
Body Talk Pt. 2 will be released on Cherrytree Records on Sep 7. Body Talk Pt. 1 is available now. Visit Robyn.com for more info.