Eighteen years after her professional debut with the synth pop duo Chairlift, the American Caroline Polachek presents today Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, a luminous fourth solo album that will be judged as the peak of his career. Already recognized as one of the most brilliant pop singer-songwriters of her generation, Polachek now seems destined for popular recognition, “but I’m not looking for status, I’m not looking for the top of the line. scale, I just want to make powerful songs,” she said in an interview with The duty.
Powerful? Captivating, too. Bold, yet inviting. The refrain Bunny is a Rider first, its percussion like little bubbles that the slap funk bass bursts, the vocal melody becoming embedded between our ears. The slow breakbeat of trillion at the end of the album, accompanied by a children’s choir to melt hearts like snowbanks. The magnificent Sunsetwith a surprising Spanish guitar motif, Caroline daring to vocalize without ever forcing the note.
The musician’s kaleidoscopic pop vision knows no bounds — bagpipes will even be heard on Blood and Butter ! She describes herself and her friend and co-producer Danny L. Harle as “two chameleons, never fixed on a specific sound. Our sound is evolving, constantly changing. Also, we are not interested in the barriers that are erected between pop music and experimental music; I am often asked if I seek to break the codes of pop music or to provoke its evolution, but in truth, who cares. We do what we want to do. »
We join the musician in London, the day before Valentine’s Day, the day chosen to launch her album, when her new tour has just started. “Everything is going very fast these days, too fast maybe, but in any case, I am very excited and proud of my album. I can’t wait for the public to hear it — is that the right word, “hear”? »
Our videoconference had barely started when we already discovered two things about him. First, Caroline speaks excellent French, “but I don’t have the opportunity to practice it, which is why I give few interviews in French,” she laments. The rest of our conversation will waltz between French and English. Two, Caroline Polachek lived in Montreal in 2013, she reveals to us when we talk about her last visit to us, opening for Dua Lipa at the Bell Center last July.
“I lived in Montreal during a very important moment in my life,” she elaborates. It was there that I developed my project Ramona Lisa”, an approach which she then described as “pastoral electronic music” – or a song soaked in ambient sounds – resulting in the album Arcadiapublished in 2014, and revisited on Drawing the Target Around the Arrow (2017), published this one under the name CEP. “I feel like I grew up there, which is why Montreal will always hold a place in my heart. »
Praise of sensuality
Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is fascinating that none of his twelve songs resemble each other, but he is remarkably coherent, the artist possessing this power to suggest epic stories with his complex melodies and his strong and warm voice. However, it is less a narrative frame than a tone that guides us on the album.
“Each song is born out of some kind of energy, and each song on the album has to agree with the one before it, that’s how I imagined the course of the album,” she explains. . But there’s also a common thread that ties the songs together: the relationship we have with our ego. This record is, in a way, a journey away from our ego, and in the direction of what I call sensuality, what I define as our sensations, our perception of the world around us. This sensuality that reminds us of all that we do not control in our lives, as opposed to the desires of our ego. »
We follow her without resisting in this exploration of tone and sensations, of this sweet and rhythmic first half of the album, with the ballad Crude Drawing of an Angel coming to bring us back to earth. Rendered to the garage house rhythm of I Believethen to the drum&bass groove of Fly to You (collaboration with Grimes and Dido), Polachek takes us on a tour of the London underground, then concludes with a string of bittersweet songs, including the fragile and minimalist ballad Hopedrunk Everaskingwhich contrasts with the rest of this exuberant album.
In the hollow of the tunnel
In recounting the birth of this song, Caroline Polachek lifts the veil a bit on her creative process: “I always start with the melody, unfortunately, since it can take years before I finish a text, it’s sometimes a nightmare, she explains. Because, by starting to sing a melody at the beginning of the process, I detect a tone, an intention to which I want to remain faithful. For Hopedrunk EveraskingI had to write four different texts before I found the right tone”.
“And in fact, she continues, it took me a kind of revelation to write the final version of the text, which I had while dwelling on the cover of the album – moreover, n isn’t it strange to have the cover of an album before having finished it? Finally, I thought to myself: the music of this song does not resemble the image of the cover at all. It forced me to ask myself: what is this metro car, where does the tunnel lead? I started the text again without knowing if it was about how I feel when I’m deeply in love or if I was talking about death, since I’ve been through some bereavements lately”, including that of his father, who died at the beginning of the pandemic, to whom she addresses a few stanzas at the beginning of the album, on Welcome to my Island.
Caroline makes a connection between death and love when these two ideas “make us want to beat a retreat, to detach ourselves from the rest of the world. To sink into a tunnel, a bit like in the Chet Baker song, Let’s Get Lost. The need to be forgotten, and to forget our responsibilities for a moment. That’s what I understood while looking at the cover: this very deep inner retreat zone. I ended up finding: this is what the song will tell. »