Interview: Caroline Polachek of Chairlift

Posted by Max Quinn in Features, Latest, Touring | 2 comments

Max Quinn speaks with the ultra-cool Caroline Polachek, of New York indie-popsters Chairlift (more like Chyeahlift! Geddit?), on the eve of their appearance at the 2012 St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival.

Caroline! Hello! How are you?
I’m going well! I’m just getting home from finishing our brand new album cover.

Holy dooley. How’s that going for you?
Yeah. Amazing. We’ve been going back and forward with a million ideas for the last week, but finally we just settled on one.

Do you try to be as involved with that process as you can?
Definitely. It’s even weirder for me too, than just being involved; I know the record so well and we’ve been working on it for over a year and a half now, so it’s reallyhard. It’s like naming your child after it’s already been living for eighteen months. It’s like ‘what can I call you!?’

What have you called it?
The record is called ‘Something’, which lends itself to all sorts of different kinds of covers. It kind of makes any cover work, so it’s been difficult trying to whittle itdown.

The worst thing would be to put it out and then realise that you’ve got something better [NB: Pun totes intended].
Yeah right! That’s why you just make another record.

Tell me about where you’re calling from at the moment.
I’m in Brooklyn, and it’s rainy and windy and cold, and you should be lucky that you’re in Australia.

I’m in Byron Bay and it’s rainy and windy and cold here too. Wanna trade?
Oooh! Challenge! That’s actually not far from where we’ll be for the Laneway festival in a couple of months, is it?

Not far at all. Are you excited to be coming back?
I am very excited. It’s actually kind of ironic that we’re starting this new tour for our second record in Australia, because it’s where we ended our first album tour. It’s kindof symmetrical – we’re picking up exactly where we left off.

Have you had a chance to look at the line-up for Laneway?
A couple of times. There are quite a few bands that I am so excited to be sharing a bill with. Particularly with friends of ours – I’m so excited to wreak total havoc hanging out with them between the shows. I can’t wait to hang out with The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart!

I love that band.
Totally. The drummer for POBPAH played guitar on a couple of songs on our record, and I’m going to be on a couple of songs for his upcoming record. They’re definitely good bros of ours. There’s one other band as well … um …

I reckon you would get on well with Twin Shadow.
That’s exactly who I’m thinking of! They’re good friends of ours too.

Those bands that you mentioned, and I guess yourselves as well, seem to be atthe forefront of this new crop of underground indie-pop that is just coming to prominence. Do you feel that way too?
Definitely. I feel like that’s what festivals are for – to showcase the best of what’snew.

Are you comfortable seeing yourself mentioned in amongst that collective?
Only by accident. It’s because of the time that we happen to be alive and the time during which we’re making music.

That’s interesting, because it seems that one of the inescapable comparisons that gets thrown at Chairlift in particular is with ’80s synthpop.
Yeah, for sure. I think that’s something that people pick up on first, and then once they interact with the music a little more they see the scene where the action is set,rather than what it is about.

Were you a fan of that kind of music before you started Making Chairlift music? Are you a fan of it full stop?
Actually, I wasn’t, which is the ironic thing. Lots of people started comparing us to bands from that period that I had never heard of, and, funnily enough, I ended up discovering some bands through those comparisons that are now my favourites. For example, I’d never heard of Art Of Noise until people said that we sounded like them.
I haven’t heard what people think of the new album yet. In some ways, it’s more formally ‘80s; it’s much more of a synth-intensive record. A lot of people who hear it without listening to it are going to cry ‘80s, but I have a more digital, internet perspective on it. It’s different to the kind of ‘crying in a fog in a cemetery full of roses’ angle that was popular back then.

Can we talk about Aaron [Pfenning, guitars] no longer being in the band? Do you think that the new album being more synth-heavy is a natural reaction to his departure?
Um! Well that’s hard to say, because I don’t know what it would have sounded like if Aaron was still in the band. I think the synth-heaviness actually comes from touring.We toured the first record for a year and a half, and during that time I was constantly tweaking the synth programming, and making it more specific. I was getting to know programming better, so by the time we were done touring I had a lot of different ideas about new sounds I could create using the synthesizer. We would have days where we would arrive in the studio and I wouldn’t have any ideas, but I could play with the programming and it would come.
Kate Bush always talks about her piano being her best friend and her writing partner,and I kind of feel that way about my synth.

Do you get a lot of Kate Bush comparisons?
I think I do. It’s hard to say, because she’s a go-to comparison for so many female singer/songwriters. I take it as a compliment generally.

I would too. And a justified one.
How so?

For me it’s all about similarities in songwriting. You both have this distinct voice to your writing – without even singing, really – that I wish I could bottle and sell. It’s chameleonic – you can both adapt and change to suit the song. Do you think about yourself that way?
Not really. I think about the world that way, there are so many different facets to living and being in general, so there’s no reason why singing and songwriting shouldn’t be like that too.

In that vein, I guess it’s fair to say that you’re quite a narrative writer.
Even moreso on the new album. Definitely.

I love narrative songwriting, and I’m always curious about what it is that steers writers in that direction.
In my case it’s a desire for there to be tension. If you were to just write a song about the outcome, then you kind of miss the journey. I like the idea of songs as little journeys – like a video game. I think about songs pretty cinematically: setting the scene, and sometimes there are characters in it, and setting the mood. And sometimes what happens goes along with that and sometimes it doesn’t. I think about performing live and listening to my favourite songs that way – like when you know that the bridge is coming, and you anticipate the melody or the story, and then all of a sudden, there it is, and it sounds amazing and you know all the worlds. I think that the time-based nature of songs lends itself to narrative writing.

Are there people that you admire who approach songwriting in that way?
There’s a band that I recently discovered called Microdisney, and they’re from – ha ha, again! – the mid eighties, and their lyrics are some of the best in existence. I alsoreally love the second newest Cass McCombs record called Wits End. He’s really cryptic and moving.

Are you a fan of being cryptic as a lyricist?
Certainly not for its own sake. I find that annoying. But I do enjoy decoding, especially when there’s something real to be decoded, or a reason for it being encodedin the first place. It might be about somebody the writer knows or something.

Is there a song that you’ve written that follows along those lines?
Definitely on the new album. There’s a song called ‘Take It Out On Me’, which is about a very gruesome nightmare. We wrote the first set of lyrics and the label said that it was too graphic, so we changed it. The storyline is still buried in there, but it’smuch more open to interpretation now.

Gruesome in what sense?
In the same way that any nightmare can be gruesome. The song was about having thanksgiving dinner with my family, and the house being approached by Nazis. I negotiated with them, essentially by giving them me in exchange for the rest of the family. The song is called ‘Take It Out On Me’ because it’s about that negotiation.
But now, having re-written the lyrics a little, a friend of mine heard it and was convinced that it was about my break-up with an ex-boyfriend. It’s still narrative, and people are still understanding it as emotional, but it’s not literal. It’s a really amazing thing that only music can do.

Chairlift are one of the many amazing acts heading our way later this month for St Jeromes Laneway festival! More info is here, and tickets are available here.