Everything You Need Is in the Name

There’s a version of this story that ends badly. The famous father, the industry connections, the doors that open slightly too easily—and then nothing worth walking through them for. Eliot Pauline Sumner, nineteen years old and better known as Coco, is Sting’s daughter, and there’s no graceful way to bury that fact. She fronts a band called I Blame Coco, she models, she acts, and she carries that slightly composed, slightly distant look her father has—the look of someone who grew up watching professionals and absorbed something without being taught it directly.

What makes any of this worth writing about right now is that she’s recorded Cesar with Robyn—and Robyn at the end of 2009 is in the middle of a real transformation. The bubblegum era is behind her, the run of records that will eventually cement her reputation still assembling itself, and she has that particular cold northern clarity in her voice that makes her a collaborator worth having on any song built around sadness dressed up as something else. Coco holds her own against her. The video is genuinely good.

Whether this turns into a real career or one of those bright flares that burn out before the second album—it’s still open. But Cesar isn’t a vanity project, and in this context that’s the thing that matters most.