Robyn Performs 'Hang With Me,' Praises Gay Fans -- Video Premiere

At this year's Grammy Awards, Robyn's 'Dancing on My Own' is up for the best dance track against artists like Lady Gaga. While the two share some similarities, Robyn's lack of dancers, videos and fancy sets is a stark contrast to Gaga's trademark giant spectacle.

"It's just us, playing the album, to an audience," Robyn tells Spinner. "We just try to make them dance."

They're still small audiences, to be sure, though the buzz around last year's series of 'Body Talk' releases means more people are paying attention -- in fact, Robyn is slated to play a high-profile gig at Coachella this year. Check out her new video featuring a performance of 'Hang With Me' and her thoughts on her fans below.

Does it feel as if your audience in the United States is growing?

I don't know. It's very hard for me to tell. I know that the audience is getting a little bit broader, but I don't know what that means. It's very hard for me to have that kind of outside perspective, but when I talk to people now or I'm interviewed, people let me know that's what it looks like to them. I think I've sold more records with this album than I did with the last one in America, but it's still pretty small.

Does that bother you?

No. Why should it? It'd be great if more people knew about what I do, but I really like my audience, so I don't feel unhappy with how things are now.


Who is your audience?

All kinds of people, really -- very mixed crowd, and that's something I'm proud of. It's cool to have an audience that consists of so many different kinds of people. It's people that know me from my first album, people who are into a more traditional picture of what pop music is and then people who got to know me over the Internet or people who might be on Pitchfork or things like that. There's everything from those typical 35-year-old white males to kids that might not listen to pop music at all. There's a huge gay audience.

How important has the gay audience been to your career?

I'm happy about my audience, whomever it is, but the gay audience is a very loyal audience and they tend to pick up on things before other people do, and that support is very important.

Some pop singers lip-sync on stage. How do you feel about that?

For me, that would be really weird, but maybe for other people, that would be ... I don't think whether it's the same live or not is important. It's about whether it's good music. But if I lip-synced, my whole thing would fall apart. There's nothing else to look at.

How much does your show change based on the size of the place you're playing?

Even though we play bigger venues now and then, it's still not very often that we do it, so the show is mostly adapted for a club-size venue. We're starting to develop what the stage looks like a little bit more. It's going to keep developing throughout the whole year -- we have shows booked all the way up until August, so it's going to keep evolving. But the idea of the tour is to be pretty basic, just like the idea of how I released the album in three parts. It's kind of based on the idea of trying to be practical and not trying to be too polished, so the basis of it all is the band and that we are very well-rehearsed and we know what we're doing. and then we add stuff.

Why the emphasis on practicality?

It's how I feel. I don't feel like what I do belongs in a polished space. It's still pop music, so it's quite easy to understand, but I wanted to do something that felt real and that felt personal on this album. In the beginning, it wasn't a concept at all, it was more a practical solution to a problem: it was me trying to figure out a way of making music and releasing music in a way that enabled me to stay really close to the process throughout the whole thing and not really have these breaks in between studio periods or breaks between tours, but to be able to do both of things at the same time and talk about music that I recently made instead of albums that might have been recorded a year ago. That meant releasing it quicker, so making shorter albums. The idea came out of that, and then going back on tour quicker than I usually do as well.