Swedish pop icon also revisits “Show Me Love” and “Ever Again” for NPR mini-concert
Robyn performed stripped-down takes of her Sexistential songs and revisited past classics during the Swedish pop icon’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
The singer opened her four-song set with a laidback rendition of “Ever Again,” the powerhouse closer from her 2018 LP Honey. She followed that up with “Light Up,” the penultimate track from Sexistential.
“For me, this is where it all started, in a way,” Robyn said before she and her band launched into a reworked version of her 1997 single “Show Me Love” which, along with fellow Robyn Is Here hit “Do You Know (What It Takes),” introduced the singer to America 30 years ago.
After telling the NPR crowd that she had to cut off a jeans leg because her son threw up on her on the way to the performance, Robyn closed out her Tiny Desk set with Sexistential’s “Sucker for Love.”
In Rolling Stone’s Musicians on Musicians issue, Robyn and fellow Swedish pop singer Zara Larsson sat down for a conversation about finding success outside of Stockholm. Robyn — alongside songwriter Max Martin, who co-wrote “Show Me Love” with the singer — is considered a pioneer in Swedish pop music.
“It was a special moment at that time, also with Max Martin starting and everything that came with it,” Robyn told Larsson. “It was really hard to navigate it, actually, because no one else was doing it. So it felt very lonely. There was a total culture shock for me coming to America at that time, not having anyone else to look at from where I came from. Because the cultures are different, it was definitely lost in translation.”