Rogueish

“Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart” is Alicia Keys’s best song by some distance because, in adopting a synthesized pop sound, she drops the tiresome emoting of her previous work, and lets the music actually carry some of the affect rather than being a mere backdrop to it.

I was thus a little worried when I saw that Robyn had covered the track on Radio 1’s Live Lounge, a venue which has traditionally imposed the most reactionary and emotionally incontinent understanding of live “authenticity” (the most tragic example being a cover of a Robyn song, by Girls Aloud). Luckily, Robyn has exquisite taste, and so produces a beautiful version in which minimal instrumentation is matched by a vocal performance of perfect restraint.