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Around that time, she started perhaps the most demanding form of self-care: psychoanalysis. Her therapist, a woman in her 70s — “I wanted an older person,” she said, “someone that wasn’t impressed” — is now retired. They spoke three or four days a week, 45 minutes at a time, for six years.
“I didn’t feel progress for the first four years,” Robyn said, then broke out in a loud laugh. “That’s funny when I think about it now. But it wasn’t until I totally crashed that I started making any progress.”
The dark period started with Robyn’s split from Max (last name: Vitali), who had directed one of her most beloved videos, the one-take dance-like-nobody’s-watching “Call Your Girlfriend.” Then came the death of Christian Falk, a producer she had worked with since “Robyn Is Here,” from pancreatic cancer. Mr. Falk had been more than a mentor: He modeled a philosophy of making music that spoke to her soul. “He always did things on his own terms, he couldn’t do it any other way,” Robyn wrote when she released “Love Is Free,” an EP they worked on together as La Bagatelle Magique, in 2015. “It was all on feeling, all on desire.”
From 2014 to 2015, she was in her bleakest place. In the beginning, she didn’t get out of bed. “Then, getting out of bed to get a coffee. Maybe going to therapy. Maybe seeing my brother. Maybe going for a walk,” she said.
Eventually she started venturing to the office studio she keeps a few floors downstairs from her apartment. Songs started to take shape, but she was spending an enormous amount of time on them. “I was like, you may as well just move into my studio,” Mr. Ahlund said. “It’s better if you’re in there doing things forever, and if you want me, stick your head out.” So Robyn took a sliver of a room in the back of Mr. Ahlund’s all-white space, which has an oversized round wooden chair swinging from the ceiling, where Robyn said she records many of her vocals.
“Speeding back up” after this period felt good, but “I can also sometimes miss being really sad, because I was so in tune with my feelings,” Robyn acknowledged. “There’s a closeness to your feelings — it’s special, and maybe a spiritual experience in some way.” The therapy yielded concrete results, too: Her parents, who hadn’t spoken in 20 years, resumed communication. And after two years of separation, she and Max reconciled.
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