FEATURE:
Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
Spotlighting the Magnificent Caroline Polachek
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I know Caroline Polachek…
is coming to the U.K. this year to play live. The digital version of her album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is out in February. The physical version comes out in April. The New York artist released her previous album, Pang, in 2019. There has been such anticipation for a new album. In this feature, I will bring in a few interviews from 2021/2022. It provides a bit of run-up and background to the album. If you are not familiar with Polachek or have not heard her music in a while, I would advise that you change that. She is without doubt one of the greatest voices and artists of her generation. Make sure that you pre-order Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. There are a few interviews from last year that I want to include, as they interested me and reveal a lot about the wonderful Polachek. I will end with a recent one from Rolling Stone, where she spoke about Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. First, and flipping back to May, W interviewed Caroline Polachek with the declaration and headline stating that she will always be an Alt Girl at heart:
“Caroline Polachek made her presence known as a powerful solo artist back in 2019, when she released her debut album, Pang. The former frontwoman of the synth-pop group Chairlift released a project that became an instant hit—especially the single “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” which ended up making her a household name (and inspiring a TikTok trend). For the past three years, Polachek has steadily been making hits, including “Sirens,” a collaboration with the DJ Flume; he brought Polachek out to Coachella this year, where she sang the song, performing for the very first time on a stage of her own. Below, the 36-year-old New York native describes the overwhelming feeling of performing on an arena tour, living two parallel existences, and “kneeling at the altar of alternative music.”
When did you realize that you wanted to pursue music in a serious way?
There were a few turning points: first, when I realized I was able to write songs; next, when I realized that people liked the songs I wrote; and then third, understanding that I might just have a shot at doing this professionally. That came much later. I grew up in the ’90s watching MTV and VH1, and I was really sold on this idea from reality shows that the music industry was this major-label mafia. Truthfully, it has changed so much since then. But I had this real sense that you had to get discovered while singing at a gas station or something. Getting discovered felt completely out of reach. So I really just approached music as a passion, but it was one that I increasingly dedicated more and more of my time to.
Is there a way that you want people to experience your music, or connect to it?
I feel like the music really suits being in motion, whether that’s in a more abstract sense within someone’s own life, or in a car or in headphones or on a plane. I think that’s a great place to experience it for the first time.
How do you feel about the term “pop star”?
I think it’s very slippery and interpretive. The biggest artist in the world could reject the idea of being a pop star or, alternatively, the smallest artist could claim to be a pop star, and they would both be correct. I grew up kneeling at the altar of alternative music. Björk and Kate Bush and Fiona Apple were my absolute heroes when I was a teenager. I also admire how they refused to play by the rules and continue to do what they do without limits. I aspire to do that in my own way in today’s music landscape—to create my own lane, rather than aim what I do toward radio or stats or the idea of the mainstream. It’s the idea of being as me as I can possibly be. In that sense, I don’t aspire to be a pop star. I aspire to be an alt girl.
One of the most detailed and fascinating interviews came from METAL, which came out around the time of the release of the single, Bunny Is a Rider, in 2021. I think it goes deep into Polachek’s career, heart and psyche. I have selected some questions and answers that are of particular relevance and interest:
“Have you had time at all to dream and think about the future over the past year?
It’s funny. I feel like, in a lot of ways, I’m still catching up with the present. I’ve felt this very extreme sea change in the way people exist online since the start of the pandemic and I think, just like anyone else, I have one foot in and one foot out. In this month in particular, I feel like I’m more interested than ever in catching up to the present moment. I think there’s a really exciting and interesting return to language that’s happening right now between podcasters, the prevalence of Substacks, a return to blogging and a new renaissance of poetry. It’s interesting to me because this record that I’m working on right now is defined by a departure from language. I’m more interested in texture, melody and abstraction than I ever have been before. So, it’s interesting to find myself at this juncture, and to reconcile with it, to be like, okay, am I going to double down? Or is this a wake-up call to reinvestigate my relationship with language?
PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules
When you’re talking about writing your new music and how it’s moving away from words, what is that sounding like?
I always tend to write non-lyrically. At least at first, even songs of mine that are the most on the nose like So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings. That song started with a melodic motif – a synth and keyboard motif – and then everything got written over and then spliced together. I realised that a lot of songwriters are the opposite – they’ll start with a text – but, for me, it’s always either groove, structure or melody, and then words are the last thing. So, in that sense, the stage three of the song-making process has changed, not stage one and two. I guess what it means is that I’m more curious about pursuing the mood in its own right rather than the mood as it relates to external events.
What do you mean by that?
For example, when I write lyrics, it usually feels like decoding, a little bit – like I’m listening to what the melody is already expressing and then I try and put words to that expression. On my last album, I did a lot of very personal work because there was so much going on in my life that I wanted to talk about, but I was very rarely showing up in the studio with the bravery to talk about these things. So, I would write melodically and then listen and say, okay, well, this song is very clearly very sad. What can this be about? And then, well, actually, this was going on and this is very sad. So, obviously, this is where the song came from. It’s like a detective process, but this time around I’m more interested in describing the moods themselves rather than linking them back to ontological events.
PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules
Does lyricism still exist at all within what you’ve created? How are you mapping out any sort of words or lyrics when you’re writing these new songs?
It absolutely exists. It’s just looser, more playful and abstract. And this is a mode of writing that I’ve gone in and out of my whole career. There’s a song called Amanaemonesia that I did with my former band called Chairlift which is, completely, free association, but still has a very strong character. And then, Bunny Is A Rider is a song I did just a few months ago now, and that song follows the same methodology as well.
In Bunny Is A Rider you used the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as a foundational story arc within the video. What did the Minotaur represent for you in that story?
The Minotaur represents the camera very literally – we made a few allusions to that. There’s a shadow of the Minotaur that’s thrown by the camera at a few points, and then it charges through the wall, and the video ends with a matador sequencer where I kill the camera. I was very inspired by videos showing paparazzi following people. The body language of this person walking, running, being pursued and sometimes having a f lirtatious relationship, allowing the camera to catch up and then shrugging it off, and then hitting it away, kicking it or swinging a hip bag at it or whatever. I felt like this tension with the camera was going to be something that I felt very stressed about in returning from the pandemic as well – feeling so physicalised, feeling so not in my own body and not ready to be on camera. And yet the demand of being not even ‘just’ a musician but a person in 2021 is you have to be on camera. So, I think that song was about letting off some steam there.
But every aspect of that video was a bastardisation of different narratives. Obviously, I’ve never studied proper bullfighting, I was just doing a cartoon impression of a matador’s movement. It’s the same thing with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur because the best part of that myth really is Ariadne’s thread, how Ariadne gives Theseus a thread that he unspools behind him – much like the Hansel and Gretel tale of the cookie crumbs –, how he uses it to find his way out of the maze after killing the Minotaur. But we completely abandoned the thread aspect. I liked the idea of being completely lost and disoriented and not having an escape plan.
PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules
How did it feel to take control of the idea of the lens of the camera in that way?
It was quite exciting, actually. Mostly because the process was unlike any other I had ever worked with behind the scenes of a music video. Because I’m mostly moving backwards, the labyrinth had to be planned out in a very exacting way so I would know how many steps and what my timing was. I was rehearsing with my choreographer playing the camera so that I knew where my eyeline was going to fall, where my head needed to be facing at any given point. Just to execute this very simple, natural walking pace required really, really precise choreography, and that was fascinating to me. Again, after a year of not being a physical person, to really break down such simple things such as where your eyeballs are looking at and how many steps behind you have before you have to turn around and shift your gravity from one foot to the other just in time. These things were very exciting to do under the circumstances.
PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules
Do you feel that to be able to cope with the world you have to sit with the idea of those contrasting things with a sense of awareness?
No. In fact, I feel like there are a million siren songs calling you away from that awareness constantly. So, you have a whole restaurant menu of coping mechanisms but the one that I find to be the most compelling is just thinking about the flow of things, where things are from and where are they going to.
You see it as a coping mechanism rather than the way things are?
It’s the same thing, I guess.
In what way?
Maybe that’s arrogant for me to say. We know one version of a coping mechanism is vision, right? Seeing what’s going on and trying to create a sense of understanding. Other coping mechanisms are the opposite. It’s like retreating. I guess the reason I say it’s arrogant is because, who am I to say that what I’m seeing is macro? I’m a tiny speck of a consumer; I’m not like Elon Musk. My access to data is extremely limited and very micro. So, I guess I’m still operating on very peasant terms (laughs). But it certainly is, at least emotionally, a coping mechanism”.
Let’s wrap up and move onto an interview from Rolling Stone. In addition to promoting Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, I wanted to salute Caroline Polachek. A modern-day icon who is preparing to release an album I think will go down as one of the best of this year, she is someone we are very lucky to have. As we can read from the interview, her previous album and new one have this strange coexistence:
“Polachek hopes to have her own diva moment, of sorts, with her upcoming album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, due February 14. Polachek wanted to create something physical, songs that can spread through your whole body and make you feel the way she felt when she first heard Matia Bazar. “I want to push back against ephemerality,” she says.
Polachek is on the third — and arguably best — act of her career. In 2008, her group Chairlift struck indie-pop gold when their single “Bruises” was featured in an Apple spot. The singer later set out on her own, releasing cerebral solo experiments and writing for stars like Beyoncé. Polachek’s first album under her given name was 2019’s Pang. It’s become the most celebrated work of her career, for good reason. She partnered with producer Danny L Harle, an early signee to label and musical collective PC Music. As the label carved out a space for pop’s true maverick weirdos, Harle became notable for his classically pristine pop production, evident on collaborations with Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen. Working with Harle, Polachek operated on the outskirts of pop trends, showing off her nearly operatic range amid catchy hooks and experimental production.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nedda Afsari
Pang almost fell victim to horrible timing: It came out in late 2019, and Polachek was just heading out on tour as the pandemic struck. On March 11, 2020, she played what would be her last show for a while, at London club Heaven. “I came down with Covid two days later, before lockdown even began,” she recalls. “By the time I was well again, travel was impossible.”
That new musical world Polachek was building was one driven by feelings, first and foremost. The title Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, she explains, has a dual meaning. “One, it can be read as being about the ‘you,’” she says. “We all know that feeling of falling in love, of wanting to obsessively learn from and become that person. But on the other hand, maybe desire is the thing you want to turn into itself.”
For a while, Pang and Desire had a bizarre coexistence. Although Pang is more than three years old, the album has had a long, steady run with her growing fan base. When she finally hit the road in the fall of 2021, the venues had doubled in size from her previously scheduled dates. Then, Pang single “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” became a sleeper hit, thanks to a viral TikTok dance where fans re-created the soft choreography from its video. “I feel like I connected with my listeners so deeply during [the pandemic], and I can’t even explain why,” Polachek reflects. “I feel like a key turned at that time.”
Polachek released Desire’s lead single, “Bunny Is a Rider,” in July 2021, before her Pang tour even began. The sly, sexy bop became a fan favorite, at once slick but extremely fun. Effervescent track “Billions” and flamenco-inspired stunner “Sunset” followed suit this year. While opening for Dua Lipa for six weeks this past winter, Polachek and Harle rented studios along the way. They would start recording at 9 a.m. and go until she had to perform. “The funny thing was, that on that tour, I was like, ‘I don’t know if what we’re making is that good. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the album,’” she says. “And then, in hindsight, that’s my favorite stuff.”
Polachek wrote the triumphant “Welcome to My Island” with Dan Nigro (who co-wrote most of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour) toward the end of the Pang sessions, making it the oldest song on the album. Polachek left the song off her previous album because it represented a whole new character (“brash and bratty and funny and chaotic and manic,” she says) that she’s only become ready to show off now.
“Welcome to My Island” marks the official, long-delayed end of two albums’ worlds colliding. But Polachek let that experience open her eyes to a whole new universe of creative potential. “It feels like a more contemporary way of working,” she says. “Rather than disappearing, you stay present and let people in on the evolution”.
Out digitally on 14th February, then in physical form in April, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is going to be one of the biggest albums of 2023. I am a big fan of Caroline Polachek, so I wanted to spend a bit of time spotlighting her. There are many more great interviews with her, but the ones I have sourced, I feel, give us more insight into a singular and extraordinary talent. The wonderful Caroline Polachek is…
A tremendous force