Caroline Polachek: 'Beyoncé told me: Girl, that beat is hot'
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If there is one term that Caroline Polachek cannot stand, it’s “female artists”. Whether referring to painting or pop, she explains, “gender is not a genre. Kate Bush, Björk and Fiona Apple were foundational to me, in terms of redefining what music could be. But no more so than Brian Eno, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Radiohead. What all these artists have in common is a very vivid sense of subjectivity. You see the world through their eyes, they bring you into their minds.”
Polachek’s own mind has a quicksilver quality: a one-time art student at New York University, she talks fast, gravitating towards big ideas, visibly energised by the cut and thrust of intellectual debate. At 37, she has been making music in public for almost 20 years – from fronting experimental Brooklyn band Chairlift, to writing beats for Beyoncé, and collaborating with such colourful left-field pop stars as Christine and the Queens, Grimes and Charli XCX. A marginal if critically admired indie artist for most of her career, since going solo in 2017 Polachek has accomplished a daring shift towards the mainstream through a combination of vividly original songwriting and extraordinary vocal ability with the glossy values and slick visuals associated with commercial chart pop. It would be tempting to call her a Kate Bush for the smartphone age, if she weren’t so resolutely herself.
She certainly has momentum: in September 2019, Polachek’s archly sexed-up dance track So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings became a TikTok sensation. Her debut album, Pang, released the following month, drew comparisons to such visionaries as Bush, Björk and Annie Lennox. She won new fans touring with dance-pop sensation Dua Lipa. Then in February this year her fantastic, genre-bending second album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, met universal acclaim, hailed by Rolling Stone as “what happens when pop sets out to transcend its own limits”.
Polachek, who is headlining the one-day Wide Awake Festival in south London next weekend, attributes this late-blooming success to a change less in her approach to music than in the wider perception of it. “Coming up in a band on the Brooklyn scene, everything I did was seen through the lens of DIY ‘indie rock’,” she says. “No matter how pop or polished our music became, the industry refused to view it any other way. I felt a lot of freedom going solo, to finally be seen without that kind of thick, distorting lens.” Her aim, she tells me, is to create music that is “a bit unhinged and chaotic,” adding, “like life”.
Polachek is video calling from Atlanta, Georgia, where she is midway through an American tour. During our conversation, she barely stops moving, carrying her laptop around the room, stretching, adopting yoga poses, leaping up, taking off her sweatshirt, fixing her hair. At times, when particularly engaged by a question, she leans forward into the webcam as if she is going to push right through my screen. She has named her current tour Spiralling, and after an hour in her company it is not hard to understand why.
Chaos, she argues, can be a boon to creativity. Looking back now on the relative calm of the Obama era of American politics, she sees it as “an illusion, a period of imagined placidity”. Then along came “years of drama and chaos” – Trump, Covid and all that jazz – that fitted more neatly into the disruptive pattern of human history, and was grist to her creative mill. “The tumultuousness really got me thinking about the role of the artist historically throughout other periods of war, famine, drought, migration, disease,” she says. “The parallels between Covid and the Plague were abundantly obvious – and the Renaissance came on the heels of that.”
Artists, she suggests, are not here to make life comfortable. “Through history, the role of the artist has been to remind people of our sensuality, of our vitality and sense of humour,” she says. “Good pop has always been wild.” Writing and recording her latest album throughout the pandemic, she became “really bored by this narrative of reminding people to look after each other in trying times, and ‘we’re all gonna get through this’. It’s, like, no! This is what the precarity of being alive in the world is, and it’s always been this way, so let’s get on and make the colours bright and make the jokes land, you know?”
Polachek grew up in Manhattan, Tokyo and Connecticut. Her parents – her father, an academic turned financial analyst; her mother, a classical musician – moved around for work and divorced when she was nine. As a “hyperactive kid” she found music a balm; her parents would play Enya or opera to help calm her down. “A lot of my favourite music isn’t sung in English or doesn’t have lyrics I can understand,” she says. “I’m so compelled following human emotions through vocal expression without the need for narrative. It feels connected to dreams and to the pure beauty of music.”
She played synthesizer from an early age and took opera classes but chose to study fine art because – unlike music, which felt like “a pipe dream” – it “had a direct pipeline to a career. I even had a job lined up as a gallery girl, out of pure pragmatism. Meanwhile, I was playing in coffee shops with a DIY college band.”
That band was Chairlift, formed with her then boyfriend Aaron Pfenning. When Bruises – a dinky synth pop track from their independently released debut album Does You Inspire You – was featured on an iPod ad in 2008, they found themselves courted by major labels. “I never took that job I had lined up at a gallery,” notes Polachek. “But my background in visual art gave me a massive advantage as a young DIY artist. I was up to 2am last night reprogramming lighting for my live show. I’m involved in all the details of the presentation of what I do.”
Polachek’s videos are invariably a delight, set at tangents to the music, with vivid colours, sly wit and provocative choreography. “I think a lot about how the music will exist online, in terms of bringing the physicality of theatre into a flat digital space,” she says. She wants each video “to make things feel evocative and dimensional and physically embodied, even though people are ultimately experiencing it through a little glowing square on their screen.”
As a live act, she is something else: unafraid to use provocative costumes or her physicality to put across her music. She believes we can all benefit from “living vicariously through experiencing another human being doing something well, which is why it’s so thrilling to watch figure skating or listen to opera. By witnessing, we have an extraordinary sensory level of empathy. I think about the way I present my body to express tension, or sensuality, or things that feel alien.”
Yet, even setting aside the spectacle, Polachek is an extraordinary performer; a soprano whose voice can swoop from melismatic highs to sonorous lows. Her most recent album opens with a ululation that sweeps unbroken down a two-octave pitch drop. “What start as very intuitive, playful things I do in the studio end up being something I have to learn to execute on stage every night flawlessly,” she says. “I used to work with an opera coach, which gave me a great foundation for learning how to maximise the sound I can make. I’m not a very big person, I don’t have a traditional opera build, so I’ve had to learn a lot of breath control and how to take care of my voice.”
Desire, I Want to Turn into You is an album with a vast sonic and stylistic range, encompassing the minimalist chopped-up electro funk of Bunny is a Rider, the limber acoustic flamenco of Sunset and even, in Butterfly Net, a Bowie-esque prog rock power ballad. Lyrically, it is nimble and clever while also being impressionistic and hard to pin down. “I was interested in loosening up my own conception of song structure, breaking away from very architectural, anthemic, focused pop writing styles and letting things bleed out in a way that feels similar to daydreaming. I was really trying to evoke spaces and images and sentiments, accessing feelings from different angles, taking almost a kind of cubist approach rather than a time-based one.”
It was no easy thing, she admits, “to get away from narrative and logic, but I realised this feeling of too-muchness, of fragmentation and chaos, is something that other people can relate to. It’s what living right now feels like.”
In the laid-back drum’n’bass of Fly To You, the album finds a moment of calm – and a surprising guest vocal from Dido. Polachek still sounds awestruck as she describes working with the English queen of chill-out. “We sat on her lawn in Californian sunshine, drinking tea, writing her part,” says Polachek. “It was remarkably easygoing, none of this high production formality you’d expect around artists of her legacy and stature. I got chills because she really does have a singular voice that hasn’t changed at all.”
On the subject of collaborations, a peculiar standout on Polachek’s earlier CV is No Angel, a slice of slinky R’n’B recorded by Beyoncé in 2012, after her team heard a demo Polachek had concocted, as she put it, “at 5am in a hotel room singing into a laptop after a Chairlift show in London”. The finished version retains her original lo-fi synth production, with the Texan superstar closely following Polachek’s dramatic vocal swoops and leaps. The two only met for the first time at the release party for Beyoncé’s album. “I said thank you for taking a chance on someone small like me,” recalls Polachek, “and she took off her sunglasses, looked at me and said: ‘Girl, I didn’t take any chances. That beat was hot.’ It might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me!”
Caroline Polachek headlines The Wide Awake Festival in Brockwell Park, London SE24 (wideawakelondon.co.uk) next Saturday. Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is out now on Sony Music
