Back in ’97, Scrolling Eye columnist Marc Weisblott interviewed Robyn for EYE WEEKLY at the dawn of her pop career. Here’s an excerpt:
Straight outta Stockholm, the sugariest voice on the airwaves belongs to Robyn, whose “Do You Know (What It Takes)” represents a fraction of the insouciance the 18-year-old flaunts on Robyn Is Here (RCA/BMG).
“Back at home, the candy is more... healthy,” ponders Robyn on the two-block walk over to Sugar Mountain. “Marble chocolate is my favourite.”
She’s soft-spoken, like any girl navigating her way through a grown-up world. Robyn is the offspring of a couple of stage actors, and spent her childhood touring her homeland with their theatre group. “Shakespeare, Strindberg, some Russian playwrights. It was very experimental and bohemian. And seven months per year, we’d go around to different places, living on almost nothing — except the passion that they shared for their art.”
Well, in the process, Mr. and Mrs. Carlsson lost their passion for each other, and their precocious daughter pursued a career to call her own. Indeed, there is an apparent parallel between herself and the other blonde pixie on the charts, Jewel — while Robyn never lived in a van down by the river, she does write most of her own material.
Anyway, between the packages of Power Poppers, Pop Rocks and everything else, the till at Sugar Mountain rings up $48.32. On the stroll back to the record company office, Robyn explains how her main influences are not ABBA, Ace of Base and the Cardigans, rather Aretha Franklin, Dinah Washington and Edith Piaf. No need to argue with her, I figure.
We plunk down to discuss ethnicity and socialism. But that stuff is boring.
So I split with my little bag of Bottle Caps. Whoever said I was a glutton?