Red Robyn’s ‘Stargirl’ video shares her story of broken dreams and strength from sisterhood

By in Music News Videos

South African artists Red Robyn and The World of Birds have been cre­at­ing deli­cious indie pop fit for social­is­ing and play­fight­ing. But for their lat­est video ‘Star­girl’, they’ve told the bit­ter­sweet sto­ry of singer and gui­tarist Red Robyn and what led her to become a musician.

Red Robyn’s child­hood dream of becom­ing an Olympic fig­ure skater was crushed when she had to under­go a spinal fusion to cor­rect idio­path­ic sco­l­io­sis (a cur­va­ture of the spine). Fol­low­ing the treat­ment, she found heal­ing in writ­ing songs on her gui­tar and strength in her rela­tion­ship with her moth­er and sister.

Direct­ed by fel­low South African Katya Abe­di­an-Rawháni, the video tells this sto­ry through sweep­ing mon­tages, show­ing the artist reflect­ing, skat­ing and shar­ing moments of joy with her moth­er and sis­ter – who the song was writ­ten for.

“I think the most pow­er­ful thing any­one has is their sto­ry. I want­ed to tell mine. I had always been a fan of, and want­ed to work with, Katya. This was the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty. She was the per­fect per­son to help me tell my sto­ry,” said Robyn.

“Ash [Red Robyn] is such a big inspi­ra­tion to me,” said Abe­di­an-Rawháni. “Her tran­si­tion from pro­fes­sion­al ice skat­ing to music is inspir­ing for a lot of peo­ple to not give up if one dream doesn’t work out, because there is more than one dream, tal­ent, gift for you out there. And all it needs to come to life is your ener­gy and effort in its direc­tion, and to believe that what you’ve been giv­en is for you to use, and share, and hope­ful­ly do some­thing mean­ing­ful and help­ful with.”

Released short­ly after Inter­na­tion­al Women’s Day this month, Red Robyn and Abe­di­an-Rawháni added that this video is their ode to the women who make them who they are.

You can watch the ‘Star­girl’ video below:

‘Star­girl’ is part of The World of Birds’s debut EP, Before the Sun Comes Up, which was released in Octo­ber 2020. Robyn hopes that the song will inspire courage in women and girls everywhere.

Last year, Red Robyn released ‘I’ll Stay the Same’ and the ter­rif­i­cal­ly sum­mery ‘Got Me’.

We spoke to Red Robyn back in 2017. She’s come a long way since then, includ­ing mak­ing fes­ti­val appear­ances and win­ning Afrop­unk Johan­nes­burg 2018’s Bat­tle of the Bands con­test. You can hear Red Robyn, and many oth­er inde­pen­dent artists, on our week­ly new music playlist, The Fresh List.

You can see more of Abedian-Rawháni’s work on Vimeo.

Image: cour­tesy of Red Robyn/Katya Abedian-Rawháni

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