Caroline Polachek, onetime New Yorker, accepts the inevitability of languishing in line. Four parties back in the queue outside Veselka, the perma-busy Ukrainian diner in the East Village, the 37-year-old singer-songwriter seems unrushed as we wait for a table at the peak of lunchtime calamity. It’s a sunny Friday in March, and Polachek—who now splits her time between Los Angeles and London—is in town to play The Tonight Show, a breathless solo performance that appears to take place in the black void from Under the Skin. But back in the city, she’s just another girl in an Online Ceramics sweatshirt.
Fresh off spectating fashion weeks in Europe, Polachek expresses an admiration for the city’s ever-changing sense of style as we people-watch outside. Perhaps because she no longer lives here—and thus isn’t bombarded with turn-of-the-millennium trends thrifted in Bushwick—she has genuine awe in her voice when she says, “The New York girlies are on it.” She’s pretty on it herself, in a chic charcoal overcoat, dark wide-leg trousers, sneakers that would be best described as “future-ass,” eyeliner that does what it should, and a hoodie that reads, “Your time as a caterpillar has expired… Your Wings Are Ready.” How fitting for the quirky indie-rock singer who transformed herself into alt-pop’s reigning heady diva.
Veselka’s large dining room is loud, dense with conversation and utensils on white stone china, and Polachek pulls closer to the recorder that is positioned strategically between cups and plates and bowls. There are many—of arugula and goat cheese pierogi, vegetarian borscht, potato pancakes, matzo ball soup, salad with creamy dill dressing, chamomile tea, and constantly refilled coffee. The restaurant is decked out in Ukrainian flags, and in between topics like AI and her history of talk-singing, we discuss the war and the fractured nature of the Russian diaspora. “My heritage is as much the Austro-Hungarian empire as it is New York City,” she says at one point.
Later, we grab a couple of seats on a busy 6 train headed uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while tourists wonder who this fashionable person talking about Dua Lipa is. It’s another quintessentially New York experience; another reference back to Polachek’s dizzying creative universe: We couldn’t not take the subway, given the cover of her recent album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. On it, she’s crawling sensually from a crowded train car towards a beach, with sand under her fingertips. She talks about the connection between that image and the electro-pop daydream at the heart of Desire, “Pretty in Possible.” “Both have that feeling of being in this dynamic whirlwind in transit out in the world,” she says. “Without a plan, coffee stains on the dress. You’re on the subway—you could be on the wrong line, maybe the very, very wrong line.”
Inside the Met, our collective sense of direction goes out the window, as we look for a few small exhibitions that relate to the themes of Desire, its embrace of pop meta-ness, romance, and rabbits. It takes us a second to realize we’re observing the first one, Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, the point being that these garishly painted sculptures—reconstructed to resemble how they might have looked in Greek and Roman times—stand out in a self-serious sea of marbled, greige ass and balls. “I feel like a lot of this stuff doesn’t fulfill the role of art, it’s much closer to our idea of entertainment,” Polachek says as we take in an archer from a Greek temple, who’s painted wearing bright pants with a zigzag design. “I wanted to bring you here because I feel like that’s what pop culture is always doing. We like to pretend there’s this really clear-cut distinction between art and entertainment, but at the essence of any good entertainment, there is that other thing behind it.”
Polachek has made a career out of walking the line between commerciality and experimentalism, between niche pop celebrity (she wrote and produced the Beyoncé song “No Angel”), and, in her words, being “the girl from that band.” After ending Chairlift, her indie-pop duo with Patrick Wimberly, in late 2016, she made an ambient record under the name CEP before releasing a proper solo debut, Pang, in 2019. The record is a stylish slow burn, playful enough to be described as “PC Music-sponsored Disney princess gets really into ‘Magic: The Gathering’” but serious enough as to further establish Polachek’s songwriting signatures. Most notable are her boldly feminine themes, the narration of her own evolution and self-conception via dynamic hooks built around her trilling, operatic vocals, and verses littered with tidy but vivid phrases (my favorite: “burying the good girl I know I’m not,” on “Look at Me Now”).
The touring behind Pang was delayed by the pandemic, which meant she was playing shows and writing Desire simultaneously. The new album’s recording—largely with her go-to collaborator Danny L Harle—then butt up against preparations for her current tour through Europe and America. “I turned the album in two days before it came out,” Polachek says. “It was pretty wild because I’d be ducking out of rehearsal to go hear new mixes and masters as they came in, write down notes, and go back into rehearsal for songs before we even had mixdowns to work with.”
There’s madness to her methods, but Polachek pulled off what few of her generational peers have with Desire: Fifteen years into her recording career, she made her best album yet. There’s even a sense that she’s still unturning sides of herself—her humor, her divadom—and just getting started. “Ultimately, where I aspired to go with this album was towards more fluid song structures,” she says. “It feels more like the weather, it feels like sailing.”
Caroline Polachek: It feels quite surreal to me to have there be this strange, invisible wall in my career, where some people have found their way across it into the back catalog. And some people haven’t. I actually don’t have any agenda at all. It’s quite cool that I get to be a new artist and a career artist at the same time.
One of the interesting challenges for me is creating layers. Most people don’t go below the first layer, but I want to make it as rich as possible for people who are down to go all the way there with me. Mystery is one of the most compelling forces ever, but social media has created this desire to form an opinion as fast as possible. And we, unfortunately, have programmed ourselves to only want to engage with something for as long as it takes for us to form a cool take. When it becomes very clear that an artist or a body of work has something that’s hinted at but we don’t understand yet, that is a really important way of resisting the quick indexing process.
Well, when you’re in a band, everyone has to be on board if you’re going to actually make a real gesture. And in the case of Chairlift, the boys were not on board. They just wanted to wear their T-shirts and their jeans, and I always felt quite awkward. Our final show was really emblematic of that: I showed up in a black spandex catsuit covered in rhinestones and stilettos, and the boys were wearing their work boots and their T-shirts.
There was only so much I could do. You can’t really control the picture without everyone on board—even how we would run Chairlift as a business. I wanted to put our money back into visuals: music videos, our live show, invest in fashion. And Patrick was like, “No, we need to buy this mixing board,” or “Let’s get these speakers.” There was no correct answer—obviously, he and I had great chemistry as studio partners and writing partners. That’s why it worked for so long. But as soon as I got to go solo, I was like, “I am putting the money from this project into the visual side.” I had never gotten the carte blanche to do that—which isn’t to say it was much money to work with, it wasn’t—but it was such a priority for me. And it was really gratifying to see and feel that people have connected with it as well.
Yes, actually: I could imagine it but I couldn’t imagine it actually happening. So much was about not knowing, taking a big risk. I was already in my mid-30s. I had no role models. I looked around and I couldn’t find examples of any woman at my age who’d managed to pull off a solo career after leaving a band, especially a band that hadn’t managed to transcend any sort of mainstream status. So it was a big ask. Even women who’d managed to start a career at my age—I think Debbie Harry and M.I.A. were kind of the only ones in that regard.
But I actually thought it was gonna be much harder to shake being “the girl from that band” than it was. People didn’t bat an eyelash about the new thing. If Chairlift had been bigger than we were, it might have been harder. So that might have been a strange mixed blessing. I still feel in a lot of ways that I don’t have role models, though.
Here’s the thing with mentorship generally: The landscape of how people consume music changes drastically every five years. So what advice, really, does one generation have to give to the next? Very little. Discovering yourself is the only thing that can be taught in that way. Because every generation and microgeneration has to rewrite the rules and come up with new ways of navigating and creating meaning—in a way that previous generations not only can’t advise on but maybe even can’t understand. So we have to stay kind of humble here as well. Like, I don’t think I can actually advertise myself as a mentor. What the fuck would I say, start a band and go on tour for 10 years? You can’t even afford to do that now.
I characterize Charli and Chris as artists who are walking this really unique edge between being pop stars and being experimental artists, or even conceptual artists. Watching them both navigate that, and the struggles of it, and their own internal goals and how slippery those goals can be—it’s very precious and special to me to get to mutually support each other. And also just get to fangirl or fanboy out.
It’s very interesting to compare notes on how people’s cultural backgrounds play into things. Charli’s obviously playing with subverting a lot of the ideas of music media and the mainstream, whereas Chris, you know, he’s French. He’s also dealing with the politics of being trans and being French—the discourse in France right now is so different than within America, and it requires a real strength and sense of self. The waters that we’re swimming in are very different colors, but it’s interesting to get to hear about each other’s experiences.
Beyond just Charli and Chris, I feel so lucky to be in creative dialogue with so many artists—A. G. Cook, Danny L Harle, Arca. I recently made friends with Lorde and Phoebe [Bridgers], we were on tour together in the fall. I feel so grateful to get to be an artist right now because there are so many soulful artists working, who are really very human and following their own sets of challenges by themselves.
What was so interesting was that they run it like a military operation—you have exactly half an hour and not a second over. So we had to re-speed some of our songs and cut them down in order to fit—chopping verses, chopping bridges. That meant even my talking breaks were on the clock, and I had to script out what I was going to say. You learn at what points you can start talking over the outro of the song and when you need to cut out just long enough to catch your breath before you start singing the next song.
I was sure that after two weeks of doing that set, I was going to be bored of it, but I wasn’t like that, not even by the end of the two months. It was actually not so much a musical challenge but a physical challenge—of holding that much space with my body. I got really into it, testing out different ways of moving or holding my face. It was quite a psychedelic assignment, because on most people’s optical field, I’m like a tiny ant in a 20,000-person arena. But at the same time, my face was massive on the screens. So it was having to be really huge with my body movements and really precise with my facial movements, down to little things about where my eye movements look and which lyrics I’m responding to facially. It was an experiment for me, learning how to get not just much more comfortable, but really articulated and juicy and having fun in my performances. We played an almost-20,000-person show of our own at Primavera [after the tour], which would have been terrifying to me if I hadn’t come off the back of shows at the same scale. It gave me a lot of confidence.
It came from a funny two-chord progression that Danny L Harle had made, going back and forth, with a little synth line that goes [sings] bum-bah-bum-bah. I always write melodically first, using a mash of vowels and consonants that feels right, and then pencil in lyrics often much later. But in the case of this song, I started to feel frustrated by structure and the need to work within a verse-and-chorus template. I had this idea to make a song where, once you enter it, nothing repeats. There are no sections, you just flow.
“Pretty in Possible” was one of the toughest lyrical songs on the album, because there’s so much attitude in the vocal portion. And it really wanted to resist narrative. I wanted to feel like not only was it not about anything, but that it feels the way spacing out feels, like when you’re looking out the window and daydreaming. Keep it constantly tumbling, ricocheting between being internal and external.
[singing the chords] DUM. DUM. DUM.
That’s like a really classic sample style, it’s called an orchestra hit. It’s on a lot of synths and samplers, and it was used a lot in the ’80s and then even later, in Miami freestyle dance music and in hip-hop. It’s a sound that has so much cultural connotation, it’s so loaded that it’s tough to use it unironically. It’s the kind of sound that’s really at the heart of a lot of studio jokes, but I’m using it without any irony at all.
It actually started with an acid trip. I was in southern Italy and I had just taken acid in Amalfi with a bunch of friends. In this Airbnb that we’re staying at, the only source of music was this circular boombox from like 1995 and a collection of really beat-up, crap CDs. And one of them was some kind of bootleg Celine Dion compilation that was very clearly printed out on someone’s home computer—all songs I’d never heard of, like really deep cuts from her early catalog. There was one song that I heard from the next room and it was an absolute revelation. It’s like I saw her voice in the form of this beautiful sailboat cutting through the waves with this white sail billowing out behind it. Hearing all of the liquid soul and the vitality and strength in her voice, I just wept.
That got me obsessed with not just thinking about that as a mood but making very righteous diva pop as a format, and how open-hearted and hardcore it can be pushed. It got me excited to step up to the plate and vocally try my hand at that, despite not seeing myself as a diva.
Maybe also because I associate the diva [in opera] with the glittering glamor of mega-fame as well. But I started thinking about it in a more spiritual way, about what a diva really means, and there are two essential things. The diva is essentially a woman character and not a girl. There’s this sense of commanding strength of adulthood in it rather than, like, sexy ingenue. It’s very different. The second thing is that the diva inherently holds this contradiction of being able to destroy and heal at the same time. That’s what makes a diva so precarious. Like, you serve her the wrong kind of champagne, and she will cancel the gig. Also, she has the power to make every single person in that room be at peace with themselves. You have the power to do both. And that kind of unpredictability is why diva is a pejorative term. Like, “Oh, she’s a fucking diva.” But you wouldn’t call somebody that if they didn’t have the power to do something really incredible.
At the same time, I was processing the loss of Sophie, who had died a few months prior. And as I was working on the beginnings of “I Believe,” it hit me very hard that Sophie is an exact embodiment of the diva that I was talking about. That she had so many contradictions within her and within her music, and even how she existed as an artist. I wanted to not only dedicate that song to her, but embody those contradictions myself. Having it feature these stabs within the production, it’s like you’re throwing thunderbolts. Ultimately, this song is about protection, protecting someone. It’s about faith—you believe that you’ll never be apart—and it’s about immortality, that someone’s legacy and what they do here can go on.
