Robin Kraen

In 1968 Robin left her native home, the village Östersund in the heart of Sweden, and made her way to America. After a short stint teaching Angampora to underground resistance groups in Harlem, she found her path to Greenwich Village, where she became a fixture (with her 1930 C. F. Martin 00-21 Flat Top Acoustic) of the lively coffeehouse and poetry jam/martial arts scene.

In the spring of 1970 Sun and Thunder Records producer Roberto Miguel Alonso discovered Robin at the now defunct Burning River Cafe, a home for freaks, weirdos, beats, hippies, artists, poets, and vagabond philosophers. Roberto fell madly in love with Robin, but their torrid affair lasted only a few weeks. An anguished Roberto pleaded with Robin to marry him, but she wanted none of his conventional life. One dark night Roberto stormed off and dramatically threatened to leap to his destruction from the Williamsburg Bridge. He was never heard from again, and his body was never found. A local eel fisherman named Jed Harrison claimed to have seen a man fall from the sky and splash into the river. Jed also claimed to observe a swam of large sewer alligators swimming to the body’s water entry point.

Robin stayed on in Roberto’s apartment in the Village, which was rumored to be filled with the latest 8 track recording equipment. Throughout the summer and late fall of 1970 she recorded her masterpiece, Daydream Leaves. In December of 1970 SNT Records held a listening party at the Burning River Cafe, and made available early pressings of the album to the attendees, which included Stone Beat’s Music Editor Ryan Yun Chiang Fitzpatrick. The beauty of her voice and the depth of pain in her songwriting broke everyone down to tears and severe emotional distress. Ryan was rumored to have said of the album:

“Robin has invented a new form of music, a soul breaking music, a salvation, a cure for the human condition.”

At the end of Side 2 Robin set fire to the cafe and burnt every known copy of the record. She was last seen riding down an alley at high speed on her Canary Yellow Triumph Bonneville T120 with the last (and only) remaining set of the master tapes of the now legendary Daydream Leaves Sessions.

A freelance reporter claimed to have seen and spoken to Robin in the mid-1990s, living amongst a tribe of Kurdish freedom fighters as a singer and sniper.

Note from SNT Records: Robin, if you are out there. We would still love to release your amazing album.