Robyn's 'Body Talk' Saved My Life

This month marks the fifth anniversary of Robyn's 2010 album, Body Talk. To celebrate, THUMP contributing editor and middle-age music curmudgeon Joshua Glazer looks back at the time this pristine pop record helped him get through his divorce.

At the end of 2010, I found myself at the end of the road. My career as the editor of a once significant Los Angeles-based music magazine had slowly ground to a halt in the face of the new media economy. At the same time, my eight-year relationship, capped off by two years of marriage, rapidly unraveled when my partner resolved to take a job in Toronto—and move there alone. As if that wasn't enough, our 10-year-old cat succumbed to kidney disease the very week of our marital dissolution, as if to say, "If you guys aren't sticking this out, why should I?"

This unmistakable omen occurred while our family was decamped to Vienna, ten days into a three-month sojourn. With two and a half months to go until the return flight to Cali, I absconded to Berlin to seek refuge with old friends from my salad days in the Detroit techno community, and began to explore the German capital's infamous party scene.

After several weeks camped out on sofas and in spare rooms, I secured a two-month sublet in the now critically hip district of Neukölln, still several years away from eclipsing neighboring Kreuzberg in the cool-hunting stakes. The one-room flat was as minimal as the collection of early Perlon records that filled the Ikea shelves that divided the bed area from the living area. In an odd bit of kismet, the lease on this random room rental (found on a pre-AirBNB short-term housing website) was held by a gentleman who co-owned a boutique design shop in Mitte with the wife of Perlon founder Zip. On a love seat sat a branded tote bag from my friends at Paxahau, the promoters of the Movement-Detroit techno festival whom I came up with throwing parties in the D. Berlin is a company town, and that company is techno.

And keep me company it did. The next few weeks were a blur of Berghain sessions that would be considered heroic by most standards, but were par for the course amongst my rapidly expanding #squad of music-loving misfits, more than a few of whom had also found their way to Berlin amidst major romantic upheavals. This bitter Berlin bachelors crew, set loose in the extra-long Northern European autumn nights, was a strong salve to stave off the emotional chaffing my mid-30s psyche would undergo whenever I returned to that lonely flat.

My life may had become unmoored from its West Coast harbor, but I was not completely adrift. Euros still had to be earned, even to maintain the legendarily low-overhead Berlin lifestyle. To keep the coffers from completely depleting, I took to writing music reviews for a since-defunct Hot Topic online offshoot called Shockhound. Among these mostly forgettable online missives was a write-up of Body Talk, the fifth album by Swedish songstress Robyn. Looking back on what I wrote at the time, I chose to focus almost exclusively on the sales strategy of the record—two previously released EPs assembled with a few new numbers to pad out an LP entry. What I completely ignored—or wasn't yet ready to admit—was the emotional impact that Body Talk was having on me.

This was not the stuff a musical snob like myself was accustomed to responding to. But respond I did, even to verses I would typically cringe at. Lines like "Don't fall recklessly, headlessly, in love with me," ("Hang With Me"), "I let the bad ones in and the good ones go." ("Indestructable") and "Protect yourself cuz you'll wreck yourself / In this cold hard world, so check yourself" ("Love Kills") went from being trivial concerns to the empathetic musings of a genius when heard under my circumstances. Using commonplace pop music tropes as an antidote for heartache is generally generally only seen as acceptable in the adolescent-thru-young adult demographic, more mature individuals being expected to handle such trials in a manner more becoming of their age and experience.

But once I heard Body Talk, none of that mattered to me anymore. It didn't matter that songs like "U Should Know Better" (a boast-off with Snoop Dogg) and the plainly titled "Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do" carried clear girl-power undercurrents as they lifted my spirits. Alone and depressed, chain-smoking cigarettes in the shoebox-sized kitchen, I was as much a "scientifically advanced hot mama" ("Fembot") as the next fella.

Still, I would not have been caught singing embarrassingly along at full-volume in my companionless quarters had the music not also captured something significant. Robyn's cohorts—which mainly included executive producer Klas Åhlund, but also Diplo, Röyksopp and Savage Skulls—mete out minimal house and electro beats with synthetic melodies that stick in your head song after song. The most irresistible are the arpeggio bass and bleeps found on many of the tracks, recalling the prototypical techno-pop of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder.

And perhaps the most singular example of Body Talk's brilliance is the Grammy-nominated "Dancing On My Own," with its propulsive low-end pulse and subject matter concerning a jilted woman dancing alone in a club while watching as her former lover kisses another woman. In an interview at the time of the album's release, Robyn told Pitchfork, ""The whole album is about being really lonely, but I think it's interesting to put that idea in a club where a lot of people are crammed into a small room." Given my situation, no wonder Body Talk offered an almost limbic resonance with my sleep-deprived nervous system as I stared blankly into space while wandering between one club and the next on the crowded U-Bahn.

Five years on, and I'm happy to report that things have normalized in my life. I stayed in Berlin for almost five years, making many new friends and having life experiences outside the sometimes seemingly inescapable orbit of the club scene. I dated a little. Then a lot. I watched friends in similar situations start to settle down into relationships, or move away, often back to wherever they left off before Berlin.

Every few months, a new expat would enter our circle, determined to take in all of the hedonist pleasures the city has on offer. It was a familiar cycle that, while I sympathized, no longer held my interest.

I recently returned to Los Angeles and—surprise—a new romantic situation, far healthier than the former one (although I can say that me and the ex are also cool). The drama so succinctly soundtracked by Body Talk has, in retrospect, become one of the most warmly regarded chapters of my life for the personal growth it engendered. And the album has risen to the rarified status of a record that can evoke an emotional memory response that I hope not to lose, even as the acute trauma of my initial Berlin landing becomes a faded memory.

Make no mistake: I do not seek such turmoil in my future, nor do I wish it upon anyone reading this all-to-typical tale. But if one of the benchmarks of classic music is its ability to be universally relatable (at least at some point during our lives), than a more distant milestone might be its ability to return us to those charged emotional states—be they elated or agitated—from a safe distance. The feels, without the folly. Everyone should have a few visceral parcels on their playlist to unpack occasionally. Half a decade on, Body Talk still takes me there.

Follow Joshua Glazer on Twitter here.

Check out Josh's painfully honest new DJ interview podcast for THUMP, Rave Curious, on iTunes.