The Grammys Spotlight: Cavetown

An interview Robbie did for the Grammys that I'm putting up on youtube

Original video: watch.grammymuseum.org/spotlight-cavetown/videos/s…

Original description:
"The GRAMMY Museum welcomed Cavetown to the Museum’s intimate 200-seat Clive Davis Theater for an evening including a conversation discussing his album, worm food, his creative process, and more, with a performance that followed.

For singer/songwriter Cavetown, making music typically involves excavating and exposing his most deeply hidden thoughts and feelings. “It’s a weird dynamic because a lot of the time I’m taking something that it’s hard for me to admit even to myself, then putting it into a song and sharing it with the entire world,” says the London-based artist otherwise known as Robin Skinner. Since self-releasing his debut single at age 16, the Cambridge-based musician/producer has proven the disarming power of that outpouring, steadily amassing a devoted following and bringing his extraordinarily close-knit live show to venues across the globe. On his new album worm food, Cavetown delivers his most elaborately realized body of work to date, shaping his idiosyncratic storytelling into songs that ultimately give voice to our own most intimate emotions.

The follow-up to his 2021 EP Man’s Best Friend, worm food arrives as Cavetown’s latest full-length since his major-label debut Sleepyhead, a 2020 release that inspired NME to hail him as a “bedroompop hero building worldwide community.” As with all his output, Skinner produced the album on his own at his home studio, holing up in his garage and infusing his understated alt-pop with a powerful new vitality. “All these songs were written with the live set in mind, which I hadn’t thought about much before,” notes Skinner, who performs live with a full band. “It was fun to imagine how something might come to life onstage, and to think about how I might interact with the audience at different moments.” But while worm food encompasses a more expansive sound than his past work, each track sustains the raw sincerity that’s earned admiration from the likes of The 1975 and found him collaborating with such acclaimed artists as chloe moriondo and beabadoobee (who teamed up with Cavetown for his early-2022 release “Fall In Love With A Girl”).

While worm food in many ways marks a major leap forward for Cavetown, the album took shape from the same instinctive approach he’s embraced since earliest days as a songwriter. “Most of the time I think up lyrics without really trying—they just fall out, and then I realize that they’re expressing something I’d been having a hard time trying to articulate,” says Skinner. “Over the years I’ve had people tell me that my songs have had the same effect on them, where there’s something going on in their head that they haven’t been able to verbalize but then the song helps them to finally understand it. So even though I write songs for myself, as a way to process the things I’m struggling with, it’s really nice to know that they might end up helping people in some way.”"