This song was transformative for me when I was a teenager. It was the era when I was beginning to establish my own music taste, and while Robyn didn’t figure as largely as some other artists I’ve written about, she was still influential in her own way. I believe I found her through 8tracks (RIP!). Someone I followed had “Hang with Me” on one of their playlists, and I explored Robyn’s other songs after that. Body Talk is full of these poignant dance jams (“Dancing on My Own,” of course, along with “Call Your Girlfriend”). But it’s “Cry When You Get Older” that resonated with me the most.

The line from “Cry When You Get Older” that spoke to me in particular back then was, “I need some kind of miracle ’cause I lost all my faith in science/so I put my faith in me.” When you’re a teenager, you’re starting to figure out what’s important to you. What your values are. Without going too far down the trauma dump rabbit hole, let’s just say there was a lot of faith for me to lose back then. And I was starting to wake up to that. When Robyn sang about wanting and imagining “more to life than this,” it got me dreaming about what more could be out there for me, too.