A few weeks ago on March 17th, Robyn Adele Anderson‘s cover of Limp Bizkit‘s “Rollin'” went viral. And not because it was another cover of the famous song. It’s because it was a standout cover of the song. Country style. So I reached out to her to get some time to speak about her music and her career.
“I basically took the song ‘Rollin” by Limp Bizkit and basically mashed it up with the song ‘Rawhide’, which most people know from either old Walmart commercials or movies that it’s been featured in because in the Walmart commercial people might remember the tune ‘Rolling, rolling, rolling, keep those prices rolling’. And I figured, you know that’s a fun song to take and play around with and the Limp Bizkit song ‘Rollin” has the same lyrics and I thought let me take the melody and chorus from this one song and mash it up with the lyrics from the Limp Bizkit song and it made it into the country/western kind of silly, fun cover.” And as I said in the interview, when I first saw the opening to the video I thought this was either going to go horribly wrong or it will be so right. And it is so right. But, Robyn commented that reactions have been mixed and she takes the good and the bad in good stride. Robyn writes all of her musical arrangements and then reaches out to her musicians to help bring it to life. When putting her mash-ups together she thinks, “What’s the weirdest thing I could do to this song?” And if you’re wondering whether she censored out the F-bombs. She doesn’t! “It wouldn’t be a Limp Bizkit song if there weren’t a lot of F-bombs or inappropriate lyrics!”
Robyn is well known for doing mash-ups of popular songs and they’ve received great praise for her amazing vocals and unique musical takes. We talked about one of my personal favorites, which was her take on Gorillaz‘s “Clint Eastwood” with the James Bond theme mashed in. Robyn explained, “There was a series of different accidents that led to that video happening.” She likes sing jazz standards when she’s performing live. “There was one time I was doing a gig and singing the song “Summertime”…it’s in a minor key and kind of has this moody kind of ominous vibe about it. And I attempted to mash-up the rap from “Clint Eastwood” over “Summertime” and it sounds so cool! And then I thought I should just like cover it and do my own arrangement. And it’s definitely not the same, as you know, chords as the original “Summertime”, but it inspired me to like play around with it and do my own version and that’s what came out. And it turns out that chord progression that sounds like the Bond theme is very common and I didn’t even realize until after the fact that I was ‘Oh that kind of sounds like the James Bond’ and people would appreciate that.” But when you want to talk about unique takes on songs, Robyn‘s version of “Chop Suey!” by System of a Down is definitely one to watch. She refers to that one as “my baby” because it is her most viewed video and it “helped propel me through the YouTuberverse”. And her mash-ups have been appreciated by the original artists as well. Bowling For Soup had shared her video of her version of “Girl All The Bad Guys Want”. Robyn describes it as one of her “fan girl” moments as she’s a huge fan of Bowling For Soup.
Robyn learned about mash-ups from the musical collective she tours with quite frequently Post Modern Jukebox. If you don’t know, Post Modern Jukebox was founded by Scott Bradlee in 2011 who worked with various artists into reworking modern songs into various genres, especially swing and jazz. “I was singing with them since 2013 before they were even on the map. It wasn’t until a few years ago when they [Post Modern Jukebox] re-located to L.A. and I live in New York and I realized I won’t be able to do videos on their channel anymore so let me start my own YouTube channel and do kind of the same thing because I love the concept so much and I built my whole brand around this vintage vibe so I kept it going on my own.” Her meeting with Scott was “pretty random and I was in the right place at the right time”. She says she always jokes that “If I wasn’t fired from my first three jobs at a college I never would have moved to New York. And I never would have gone to see this show where I met Scott Bradlee, who ended up creating Post Modern Jukebox and it was like a total Butterfly Effect kind of thing.” And that chance meeting with Scott grew into something bigger. “One time we did karaoke together and he discovered that I could sing. So one day he asked if I wanted to sing in a video for his YouTube channel and I had obviously not done anything close to this. Never really sang like solo or on camera or on the internet. Back in 2013 when the song “Thriftshop” was really popular, that was our first kind of experiment…Scott is an insanely talented musician and arranger. He’s actually been playing piano since he was a kid and actually studied jazz. He’s way better at this stuff than I am. He took this song and made it sound like ragtime and it was a very simple setup like my videos and PMJ videos and it was done live in one take and we put it on the internet and put it on Reddit. And the next day we woke up and it had gone viral and had half a million views and we were like ‘What just happened?!’ And that’s how we discovered this uncapped niche audience on the internet that we could cater to. And sure enough, we kept calling this formula and this pattern and every video was a hit for a while and eventually started touring the world! And that’s what eventually gave me the platform to start my own stuff and hopefully, I’ll be touring the world as a solo act someday.” Robyn is has written original music that she’s performed live and will hopefully be recording some original music soon.
At the time of the interview, the New York state lockdown mandate for COVID-19 hadn’t happened, but things were already impacted in the music community nationwide. When I asked Robyn how this was personally impacting her music career she said, “Not too much as changed for me as of yet. The only thing that happened to me is I do private gigs every once in a while…and I had one in May that had to cancel understandably. And I have another one around June that hopefully doesn’t get canceled. If it happens, it happens. That’s just the way things are right now. But, lucky for me I have YouTube videos and I was able to record a bunch in the past few months so I can keep putting those out for now as the YouTube studio is shut down. So I wouldn’t be able to make any new videos there until they re-open. So for now, I’m OK. I put out 3 YouTube videos a month. And if I get through the end of April and the YouTube place is still closed, I may have to get a little creative and start to make videos like in my living room like I used to do back in the day with PMJ at Scott‘s house…but, right now my little machine is running normally. It’s weird to have no gigs coming up, no tours, no videos. I’m just kinda sitting in my house watching a lot Netflix.” Of course, I had to ask what she’s been watching on Netflix. Robyn said she’s been trying to watch new shows, but has been re-watching The Office and Parks and Recreation over and over. She’s been watching Cheer the Netflix documentary about Navarro College’s competitive cheer squad. She strongly recommends it even it’s not your cup of tea. And I did recommend for her to watch Locke and Key based off the IDW (not Image as I stated in the audio, my apologies!) comic book so give that one a watch.
Making music isn’t the only thing Robyn spends her time doing. She likes to have some fun with photography. “So I do a fun thing every year, I make a pinup calendar, which I’ve been doing for about 5 years now and it ties into my whole retro vibe. So I now sell pinup calendars and also other glamour photos that are autographed and some even have lipstick kiss print. I sell those on my merch store and they’re cute momentos for my fans to have and the calendar is a functional, practical, helpful item. It’s basically every girl’s dream to play dress up, wear fancy lingerie…it’s a little fantasy for everybody. It’s something fun I like to do.” And she loves to do these because “it’s paying homage to this old art form”. And all of her pinup is as Robyn calls it “tasteful and cutesy”. Her pictures are beyond classy and absolutely worth checking out.
Besides pinup modeling Robyn also likes to do theater performances. “Once in a while, I will do some theatrical production here in New York nothing on Broadway, nothing like that. It’s usually smaller, independent productions and I’ve done a few immersive theater shows, which are really fun to do. Instead of me trying to memorize lines and act on a stage, I get to improvise everything I say, interact with the audience, and walk around the room and have people follow me. It’s way more fun.”
Since she mentioned it, and since I’m a huge fan, I had to ask whether or not she still does karaoke. “Something I’ve learned is once you become a professional singer you never want to do karaoke again. And I used to LOVE karaoke. I used to host karaoke when I first moved to New York and wanted some extra money. It was also the perfect time for me to practice singing and that was my only musical outlet, it was the only time I could sing in front of people…I used to really love it.” She did say that “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and “Clint Eastwood” were two of her favorite karaoke songs and she did mash-ups of both.
Robyn left us with these final words:
“Those of you who never heard of me or Post Modern Jukebox or anything like that, I think there’s definitely at least one video or one song on my channel that I think you would like. I think there’s something for everyone. I mostly cover a lot of metal/rock songs, but I also cover a lot of pop songs like Kesha and Whitney Houston. People like that. I try to make sure there’s something for everyone and I’ve probably done a song in every genre you can think of. I encourage people to check it out and see if there’s something they like and I would tell people there’s no such thing as a bad song. Even though you might think you don’t like a song or a genre, there’s always some redeeming qualities to a song. And I try to bring those out in the songs I cover. Give it a try!”
It was an absolute pleasure to speak with Robyn and please go check out her music and merchandise on her website and social media links below:
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