"Dancing On My Own" by Robyn // Song Review

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A generational anthem of unrequited love, Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" captures the courage it takes to keep on dancing through heartbreak. She wrote it after going through a breakup and seeing her ex at a club with another girl. That moment of watching him, wanting him to notice her, and realizing he wouldn't, became the emotional core of the song.

"I'm in the corner watching you kiss her, I'm right over here, why can't you see me?" she sings in the chorus. "I'm giving it my all, but I'm not the girl you're taking home, I keep dancing on my own".

Musically, she pulled from the lineage of great sad‑disco icons like Donna Summer and Ultravox. She was also deeply inspired by club culture itself while she was making her three-part record Body Talk. "I'm fascinated by club culture at the moment,” she told Pop Justice. "Clubs are like the new church for people...it's where you go to feel a part of something bigger than yourself."

At the time of its release in 2010, "Dancing On My Own" was one of many club‑leaning pop songs coming out, but the difference was that she and her collaborator Patrik Berger didn't want to create an empowering dance‑floor anthem. They wanted something that captured the ache and loneliness of feeling alone in a crowded room. Patrik told Billboard in 2019 that the song for them was "...more about, 'It feels like shit and I'm not gonna be the best person now. I'm just gonna be miserable...' You can't stop yourself."



Robyn always knew she wanted to make a song called "Dancing On My Own", even before she knew what it would be about. "I just didn't know what it was going to be about," she told BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat in 2020. They obsessed over every detail of the song, writing hundreds of alternate lines, texting edits back and forth for weeks. "I have a notebook full of lyrics that we scrapped," Patrik told NPR.

They were able to capture such a specific, yet universal, feeling through this song. The entirety of Body Talk is what she described to Pitchfork at the time as an album "...about feeling really lonely," which was emphasized by this being the lead single. "So far away, but still so near, the lights go on, the music dies but you don't see me standing here," she sings in the bridge. "I just came to say goodbye"

"Dancing On My Own" has been massively influential since its release in 2010. It has been covered by countless artists, featured numerous times across film and TV, and cited as the inspiration for some of the best pop music of the past fifteen years. Publications like Rolling Stone, NME, and Stereogum, among others, have continuously ranked it at the top of their end of the decade lists. 

In that time, Robyn's personal relationship to the song has evolved as well. "'Dancing On My Own' sometimes felt like a teenage version of me that I was happy to let go of," she told BBC, admitting she felt "...tired of the broken heart". But with time, she's come back around to it. "I went through a lot of therapy, worked on myself and healed myself. Now I'm back loving it. I don't feel conflicted and I love performing it and playing it live."


 

Check out more from my song of the week series here. ☆ Thanks for reading!



Photo Credit: Nexus Radio, Robyn





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