Music: The indestructible Robyn

She was a teeny-bop star in the late '90s, split with her label in 2004 and seemed relegated to playing gay discos for the rest of life. And she's Swedish. So how exactly did Robyn became pop music's great savior in England and America circa 2010?

The pint-sized 31-year-old singer from Stockholm has neither Lady Gaga's flair for outrageousness nor Britney's sex appeal. In fact, she barely bares any flesh onstage and might be mistaken for a tennis player offstage. Yet she's earning more critical raves this year for her music than those two pop tarts, and she's turning a lot of heads in the industry for her rather messianic -- as in: miraculous -- feat of releasing three albums in one year.

On Nov. 22, the real-life Robin Carlsson will issue the last in a trio of 2010 records that started June 1 with "Body Talk, Pt. 1," the album that landed the club hit "Dancing on My Own." The first disc also opened with a song interpreted as Robyn's middle-finger to the music business, "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do," although she now says it's more about the general demands of life. A month and a half later arrived "Body Talk, Pt. 2," featuring another synth-heavy Euro-dance hit, "Hang With Me." While all of these singles were bouncy enough to light up the dance floor, they also were weighed down with dark undercurrents and smart, wounded lyrics.

Now comes "Body Talk" -- weirdly, there's no "Pt. 3" -- featuring five new songs, plus updated versions of songs featured on the preceding albums. The new single, "Indestructible," was offered in an acoustic form on "Pt. 2."

"For me, anyway, I do see it sort of as the big finish to this whole project," Robyn said by phone while enjoying "a lovely day" in London last week.

She would qualify many of her answers with "for me," which may be a tactic she picked up when her record company, Jive, didn't see things her way after the buzz wore off from her 1997 hits "Show Me Love" and "Do You Know (What It Takes)." That's when she started her own label, Konichiwa Records, which became the turning point in a career that's hitting overdrive as Robyn finally makes it to the Twin Cities for a very sold-out concert Sunday at the Fine Line.

Q: The main story told about you is you could have become another forgotten teen pop artist, but you successfully came back on your own terms. Are you comfortable with that being the synopsis?

For me, it was never about having to correct my career. I was interested in Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince and Madonna and all these amazing pop artists from the '80s, and then in the '90s, I was into club music. And at the same time I grew up in a theater family and learned to express my creativity in my own way and to be my own person. So for me, those things all kind of came together naturally, even in artists that I was listening to like Kate Bush. There have always been pop artists that can blend these worlds together -- it doesn't have to be contradictory. But in the music industry -- especially in the '90s, when I started working -- it was hard for people to see that. I just had to break out of the structure.

Q: Was starting your own label key to all that?

A: That was the most important thing I've ever done. This three-album release cycle is a continuation of that. It wasn't just about, "I'm starting a record company. Fuck you!" It was about being able to explore things on my own and trying to have fun.

Q: So would you recommend that every pop artist try to do three albums in one year?

A: Yeah, I think I could recommend it. It's fantastic to have an idea and find a way to make it work -- especially an idea like this, which sort of goes against the marketplace and the formula that the industry has created. For me, it was never a conceptual idea; it started more just as a practical idea. But the more I kept working on it, it started to influence the visuals and the tour and the way I make the music. So it sort of has turned conceptual.

A: It might look like that to someone, but that was never in my mind when I started to think about it. It started in this very simple space where I didn't want to be in the studio for another two years without touring, and I don't want to go back on tour and not be able to record again for three years. The last album was like a five-year cycle, and it was way too long for me to be away from the studio. So that was the only reason for me to do this.

It definitely wasn't about trying to set some kind of world record and impress people with how many albums I can release in one year. It was always just about becoming more organic with recording, and doing something that felt more real.

Q: What can we expect of the new songs on the third record?

A: There are five new songs, and they're all pretty hardcore pop songs. The song structure is very traditional pop. I felt like we did the "Fembot" thing and we danced the beat in "Don't Tell Me What to Do," so Klaus [Åhlund, her main producer] and me just wanted to write good, traditional songs, and I feel like that's what we did. There are five beautiful pop songs.

Q: A lot of people still like your late-'90s hits. Are you still proud of them?

It would have been really easy for me to take the easy route and make the album really tricky and more obscure, but I wanted to do like the big pop finale and show people that I'm not afraid of that. Maybe I'm intellectualizing it a little bit too much, but for me it's like taking that world back and coming back full-circle to where I started it.

Q: How do you look back on your teen years, living by yourself in New York at 17?

A: It was a lot of fun, actually. It was every teenager's dream. My parents were never these kind of pop-star parents who came with me and made me buy houses and cars for them. They were like, "You do what you like, and we're here if you need us." So I went off on my own to see what it was about. And it was fun, but then I also reached a point where I said, "No, this is not for me."

Q: One of the more surprising moves you made was recording a cover of Prince's "Jack U Off." Are you big enough of a Prince fan to be excited to perform in Minneapolis?

A Oh, yeah, of course I know he's from there. I'm a super Prince fan. I even know like his birthday and everything like that. So I'm excited to come there. The "Jack U Off" cover was really just a coincidence, because I'm always listening to Prince. When we released the album in Sweden, I wanted to do a B-side that wasn't just a remix to another song; I wanted it to be a cover. So I brought some records to the studio that day, and I had that song with me, and we put it on and thought it would be so funny to do it. And it was fun.

A: I have family in America, far-off relatives, like my grandma's cousins who went there when people emigrated from Stockholm to America. I don't think there's any of my family in Minneapolis, but I do know the fact that there are a lot of Swedish people there. One more reason to be excited about coming there, I guess.