“Pretty magical”: Robbie Robertson’s favourite song of the 21st century
From life on the road as a touring musician to finally sharing the spotlight when The Band emerged from the shadows, Robbie Robertson’s journey in music was a rather more winding one than most. The late, great guitarist was far more than simply a band leader or musician, he was a bastion of the 1960s counterculture that spawned him, bristling with artistic intent and creative freedom.
At the end of his life, you could forgive him for finally putting his feet up and basking in the harvest of his toil. However, if The Band were anything, it was a culmination and thus, it simply wouldn’t be Robbie Robertson if he didn’t remain at the forefront of his own musical momentum. He was always looking ahead, to coin a fitting quote from Jack Kerouac: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
So, it was no surprise to see a hint of modernity when, in 2019, he crafted the critically lauded album Sinematic, and unlike many artists in their autumn years, it was still fresh enough to celebrate without any hint of glossy-eyed nostalgia. While the legendary musician was promoting the album, Robertson caught up with the Los Angeles Times to discuss his life in music. He heaped praise upon an artist breaking through who added to the sump pile of his ceaseless inspiration.
As he reflected on the music that moves him, he was keen to profess a love for Billie Eilish’s 2019 chart-topper ‘Bad Guy’. Perhaps this finger-on-the-pulse approach to music is what made his sound still so fresh on recent albums, as he said of modern music, “I’m curious, yeah. But I like her more than many of the others.” Adding, “I went to the season opener this year of Saturday Night Live. She was performing. I really like her, and I think this thing that she and her brother do is pretty magical.”
The song itself was excellently innovative, whether you’re a fan of the genre or not. Just as Robertson helped to blend folk into rock ‘n’ roll, Eilish is blending elements like ASMR into her soulful take on pop. What is ASMR, you ask (as though you’ve never heard of it)? Why, it’s those whisper-perverts who appear on your YouTube feed sometimes and pretend to give you a daft haircut. Short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, the practice uses visual and vocal techniques to try and induce a tingling sensation, and Eilish firmly parks herself in your lughole with a feather duster on tracks like ‘Bad Guy’, finding innovative inspiration in an era where it appeared that there was nothing new under the sun.
In some ways, this is tied to how attuned Eilish is cognitively. She experiences something called Synesthesia, which Frontiers in Psychology medical journal defines as “a rare experience where one property of a stimulus evokes a second experience not associated with the first.”
“It means nothing,” she adds. However, it can’t be escaped when it comes to her creative output. As she continues: “But it inspires a bunch of stuff. All of my videos, for the most, part have to do with synesthesia. All of my artwork, all of my—everything I do live. All the colours for each song is because those are the colours for those songs specifically.” This is part of the reason why much of her work is minimalist. Eilish doesn’t often throw in a needless middle eight or break the musical texture of a song for the sake of something new. She stays in the groove, and that captivated Robertson.
After his winding life in music, was Robertson really not going to be impressed by a track that re-established the boundaries of pop at a point where everything he had already achieved with the likes of The Band and Bob Dylan was simply being regurgitated?
