Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ changed the sound of pop, indie and dance, argues Dave Fawbert
The idea of grouping artistic output into years and decades is quite an odd one. Inspiration doesn’t follow a clock and the creation of music happens continuously – yet the human instinct is to try to find order and patterns in the messiness of existence.
When looking to crown the most influential track of the 2010s, it turns out that it came after just six months, on 1 June 2010. Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” arrived so early in the decade that it had another nine-and-a-half years to slowly unleash its tentacles and hook itself around the music world.
Back in 2010, pop was at its biggest, boldest and brashest, with “The Club” – glitzy, VIP-filled, champagne-drenched – featuring prominently in the lyrics of a great many songs. Having tasted success three years before, when “With Every Heartbeat” beat a sorrowful path to number one, Robyn repeated the trick with “Dancing On My Own”.
Co-written with Patrik Berger, it reached number 8 in the charts, which is arguably the perfect position: high enough to acknowledge its excellence, yet not too high that it was overplayed.
“Dancing On My Own” took us to The Club and it was startlingly familiar: that brutal feeling when a night out goes wrong. Clubs are places of shared euphoria, fantasy lands where dreams come true – or so we are told. That’s certainly the case some of the time, but less often acknowledged in song are the times when, a few drinks in, you encounter that ex, or finally make that move on a long-term crush which is rejected, and your whole world falls apart to the soundtrack of throbbing beats, anguish compounded by the fact that everyone else is having the time of their lives.
By virtue of its devastating lyrics, perfectly complemented by its relentless, pounding electronic production, “Dancing On My Own” would have been an incredible song whenever it was released, but it set the template for so much of what was to follow in the rest of the decade, both musically and artistically.
The hit was a direct influence on many – female songwriters in particular. Lorde, who released her debut album Pure Heroine in 2013, wrote that “it’s happy and sad, fiery and independent but vulnerable and small, joyous even when a heart is breaking”. Over the last 10 years, Carly Rae Jepsen progressed from the candyfloss pop of “Call Me Maybe” to the nuanced synth pop of 2015’s Emotion. Tegan and Sara changed from indie to electro pop, with the flawless 2013 album Heartthrob and 2016’s brilliant Love You to Death.
More recently, the likes of Muna and Shura have taken Robyn’s sad-lyrics-to-a-banging-electro template and run with it. There is even a Spotify playlist called “Sad Bops”: “For all of us dancing on our own”.
But it had a wider influence, too. “Dancing On My Own” heralded the end of “The Club” era of songwriting – ironically, just as brainless EDM started taking off in the US.
More subtly, if any pop star was worried about baring their soul and admitting that not everything was perfect, Robyn made it possible.
The decade saw the behemoths of straight-ahead pop – Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Katy Perry – become more experimental, with Beyoncé, Joanne, Anti and Witness.
Meanwhile, pop in general became a more mournful and introspective place with the likes of Drake and Frank Ocean moving towards minimal, emotional work. Artists such as Charli XCX have acknowledged their debt to her too, saying: “Robyn has definitely been part of paving the way for pop stars who fall a little to the left of the Top 40 norm.”
She achieved these things not just through the song itself, but because she released it on her own label, on her own terms. (She left a major-label deal after they disagreed with the edgier direction she wished to take.)
It was part of a then-unusual series of releases, the first single on the first of a trilogy of mini albums released over five months – way ahead of the curve of bite-size consumption that now dominates. Her fellow Swede Zara Larsson, who was born in 1997 – just two years after Robyn released her debut album – has said: “She’s what I strive to be in a sense of making my own choices and staying true to myself.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the song even helped contribute to one of the defining musical trends of the decade: the slow-and-mournful, stripped-back piano cover version. Fifteen days after the song’s release, Robyn performed it pared-down on Radio 1’s Live Lounge. While she was by no means the first to perform a track differently live to on the record, this was so memorable that five years later, Hull singer-songwriter Calum Scott performed an identical version on Britain’s Got Talent, earning a golden buzzer straight through to that year’s final. After failing to receive a record contract offer, he took another leaf out of Robyn’s book and released the song himself. It slowly became a huge hit, peaking at number 2.
The deep, enduring love people have for “Dancing On My Own” could be seen in the huge anticipation there was for Honey, Robyn’s first album in eight years, which arrived last October to an avalanche of critical praise and reverence for a returning icon. On her subsequent tour, the song was a religious experience: thousands of people in thrall, dancing on their own, together.
