The 23-year-old British singer-songwriter Robin Skinner has a listenership devoted to his sensitive (but not despairing) music.
If you want to get Robin Skinner to open up, ask about his cat. In conversation, the musician who records and performs as Cavetown is soft-spoken and cautious. But he excitedly recounted Juno’s growth from a timid kitten who hid for a week when she arrived at his London apartment to his affectionate companion who presides over the windowsills of his current house in Cambridge. Then he apologized for rambling.
Juno makes frequent appearances on Cavetown’s social media channels. She also shows up a few times on his new album, “Worm Food,” due Nov. 4, most notably on the song that chronicles their bond in its devastating chorus: “I do it for Juno/Pretend her life is on the line/Manipulate myself into staying alive.”
For almost a decade, Skinner, 23, has amassed a following with his melding of the whimsical and the weepy, revealing his vulnerabilities over melodious alt-rock. Though he’s a sensitive soul, he doesn’t wallow in misery. As a result, he’s found a natural audience in teenagers and some even younger children who are drawn to his kindness in an often cruel world.
“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” he said during a video interview, his usually red hair dyed black and thin-framed glasses dominating his face. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”
Skinner sometimes takes his own struggles with depression and anxiety and turns them into characters in his songs. For “Lemon Boy,” from his 2018 album, he transformed his bitterness into a persistent garden creature in need of a friend. More recently, he’s returned to the bully who lives in his head as a representation of debilitating self-criticism. “It’s helped me to personify that as a separate thing, because often I forget that I’m more than that,” he said.
Skinner was born in Oxford to two classical musicians. When he was 8, the family moved after his father got a job at the University of Cambridge, where he still leads a choir and teaches early music history. His mother gives flute and recorder lessons privately and in schools. The couple divorced when Skinner was 14, but he wasn’t upset by their split. On “Devil Town” from 2015, which remains one of Cavetown’s most popular songs, he nonchalantly sings, “Mom and daddy aren’t in love/That’s fine, I’ll settle for two birthdays.”
But on “1994,” the crunchy and tuneful lead single from “Worm Food,” Skinner sounds wistful for a period in their lives that he never witnessed. “From pictures and from memories that they’ve shared with me, that sounds like a happy time for them when they were really in love with each other,” he said. “Part of me is curious about what that could have been like and I feel like I missed out a little bit.”
Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. “I grew up pretty fast, for various reasons,” he said. “I missed out on the childhood that I would want to have. Then there’s also missing the freedom that I had then to be a kid. I didn’t realize that I had that freedom at that time.”
When he was younger, Skinner’s parents encouraged his interest in music as he tried out instruments like the trumpet and violin. He resisted his mother’s attempts to teach him theory, and remains largely self-taught and self-sufficient, producing all his songs and playing most of the instruments himself.
He didn’t have many friends at school during his early adolescence, but found a community online through Twitter, using the platform as a diary for his thoughts. He started a YouTube channel in late 2012 and eventually began uploading ukulele covers of songs by artists like Twenty One Pilots and the Libertines. As Skinner grew as a musician, the ukulele was replaced with guitars, the covers turned into original compositions, and the sparse arrangements were filled in with drums and shimmering electronic textures. His YouTube channel grew to over two million subscribers.
In 2018, the musician Chloe Moriondo became one of the many teenagers who found the online Cavetown community, and when she posted a cover of “Lemon Boy,” Skinner left a supportive comment. They eventually became frequent tourmates and collaborators, and Moriondo, now an amped-up pop singer, contributes guest vocals to “Grey Space” on Cavetown’s latest album.
“A lot of Robin’s writing is incredibly honest and relatable in a strange and a universal way,” she said. “He really puts himself out there completely and shares his heart with people. That is a really beautiful thing.”
After several self-released albums, sold mostly through the digital distributor Bandcamp, Cavetown signed to Sire, and his major label debut, “Sleepyhead,” arrived at the end of March 2020. Skinner has mixed feelings about the LP, which was completed on the road and under stress.
But “Worm Food” was made at his own pace and in cozier spaces. The process included a pivotal songwriting trip to San Diego, where he connected with Vic Fuentes, the lead singer of the post-hardcore band Pierce the Veil, Skinner’s favorite group when he was a teenager. They recorded the dynamic and serrated “A Kind Thing to Do” in Skinner’s rental house on the beach, with Skinner in a chair and Fuentes seated on the bed. “You can just tell he is just one of those natural talents waiting to explode,” Fuentes said in an interview.
In October, Skinner, who is transgender, also created the This Is Home Project, which aims to give more than a million dollars to the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the next three years. It’s named for a Cavetown song that many fans interpret as being about Skinner reconciling his own identity. For years he has received GoFundMe links from people looking for help, but with This Is Home he hopes to formalize his contributions to foundations that can fund top surgeries, safe housing or other needs.
It’s become an unofficial tradition at Cavetown shows for someone in the crowd to pass Skinner a trans flag, which he ties around his neck and wears like a cape. The first time it happened, it just felt like the natural thing to do. “I am part of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and it’s not something that I necessarily talk explicitly about very often,” he said. “I find it hard to find the right words to use and so just holding a flag or having it around me onstage is a silent way of being like, ‘I love you, I understand, and this is a space for us.’ It helps me feel like we’re part of the same world together.”
Self-examination remains a major part of “Worm Food,” but Skinner’s also working toward self-forgiveness. On the anxiously peppy “Heart Attack,” he sings, “I’m measuring up against the wall again/It’s always the same, but maybe this time I’ve changed.”
In the months leading up to the release of “Worm Food,” Cavetown has been performing the new song “Frog” live. With its blatantly romantic endearments (“I feel wrong/My head’s gone funny, princess/But I’m your frog/Kiss mе better all night long”) it’s already become a favorite, and young fans have thrown stuffed frogs onstage or come wearing frog hats. Skinner thinks a large part of the song’s appeal is just that kids like frogs, but maybe there’s something bigger happening too: “It’s the only happy song on the album that’s genuinely written about a happy thing.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
