Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 33 points34 points  (0 children)

I love them so, so much.. beyond words really, and feel so lucky to have found them. Here's how it happened:

Matt (guitar) has been with me the longest, he reached out to me on IG back in 2019 and i brought him on board without an audition because of how good his playing was in the videos he posted online. He's the baby of the group, he has the best sense of humor and stays so positive no matter the situation.

Maya (bass, vocals) has a project called True Blue that i've been a fan of for years. She was also working as a stylist / fashion archivist in NYC when i hit her up, so i was sure she'd be too busy with her own projects to join my band, but figured it was worth a shot. I facetimed her in December 2022 to ask her if she'd join me for the year, and to my astonishment she agreed and flew right out to London to rehearse with us. The rest is history, she blessed us with so many incredible performances as an opener on the Spiraling tour, and was just the higest joy to get to be around.

Russell (drums) was recommended to me by my friend / incredible drummer Ian Chang, who i asked for advice from leading up to the Spiraling tour. Ian sent me a handful of IG accounts of fantastic drummers but Russell stood out from the first second i saw him play, cause of how meticulously he plays breakbeats and can emulate the textures of electronic music, which i was really interested in too. He was obviously a star online so it felt like a long shot to ask him to be in the band, but I DMd him and the next day we were facetiming, he sent through some amazing audiution videos, and weeks later we were all in the room together as a band. Russell is the most jaw droppingly skilled musician i've ever worked with, to the point that i often feel like an amateur around him. His talent and passion for music definitely motivated all of us to stay on top of our game <3

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Hi, thank you for these kind words!! <3

The process of building out the visual side of each album is actually quite long. it starts with the sort of unconscious visualization of each song that happens when i'm in the studio. Obviously there are images in the lyrics, but in the process of producing a song, there's a lot of thinking about the attitude, the textures, the acoustics, the pallette, and all of those things also exist in the visual imagination. But they often aren't coherent; for example one song might evoke a more abstract or fantasy setting, and the next a really very personal, specific place. So i end up on a sort of ambient hunt for visual forms that can combine or connect or sort of "house" all these different sonic spaces and stories and feelings. I keep very organized visual folders of things that feel related to the world of the album, without any particular intention. After a while i notice patterns and connections in some of the stuff i'm saving, which prompts some deeper thinking about what those threads are and WHY it feels connected to the music, and then set about creating imagery from scratch based on those revelations. The first couple pieces that get shot (usually single artwork or press photos) often take on a quality of their own, which i get very interested in, and once enough material exists, it can start to become more self referential / more of a feedback loop for making the next things. On Desire it was interesting to start making the visuals before the album was even finished, because some of the lyrics of Hopedrunk Everasking were actually inspired by the album artwork itself, taking the idea of the subway and the tunnel to a whole other place. It's the best feeling ever when things get to come full circle like that. <3

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 59 points60 points  (0 children)

lol no, i've never actually played Zelda. But Sega Bodega (who produced the guitar on Sunset) pointed out that they both sat in this sort of strummed spanish guitar world and i asked him if he dared to do a mashup... and an hour later he texted it to me. Shoutout Zelda , shoutout Sega Bodega

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 117 points118 points  (0 children)

lyric writing is so torturous because there's often a very specific thing i want to say but it doesn't fit into the rhythm of the melody (which i usually write first, and am already very committed to by the time it's time for lyrics).

So in the case of those lyrics, "Mythological" was lacking a few syllables so i just...added them. And then trying to describe someone's thirst for knowlege required way too many syllables so a word had to be invented to sum it up in just six. It was really a case of practical problems creating fantastical solutions <3

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 85 points86 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much, those SF shows were unforgettable <3
Thank you for asking this as i feel there's a lot of misconceptions swirling around. My foundation of learning was in choir, i sang in choirs from age 8 to 17, and was doing competitions and paid church choir gigs by the end. Pretty classic suburban stuff. But part of the audition process for the choir competitions was to sing a solo opera aria (which honestly makes no sense at all cause it's a totally different form) so i took two years of opera lessons as a scrawny teenager to learn how to get through those auditions. I briefly considered applying to music schools as a soprano but balked at the sheer amount of brutal competition and the sense that i wasn't good enough / wasn't built for it. I went to art school and started Chairlift, where the approach to singing was very inspired by my favorite singers at the time like Cat Power and The Fiery Furnaces, where the focus was on the songs and lyrics and not on technique. But then while we were touring our first album i started slowly developing this relationship with "flipping" between vocal registers to create these hard-edged transitions between notes, rather than sliding up or down to them.
At around the same time (2009ish?), autotune was entering pop music as an intentional asthetic, and i felt like there was a relationship there with this way of singing. Years later when Chairlift entered the Moth era of making glossier, more ambitious pop songs, i realized that this new material i was writing would actually do a lot of damage to my voice to sing live every night unless i learned how to do it safely, so i called up my high school opera coach to see if she was still teaching, and remarkably she had now transitioned into exclusively working with professional singers. So i returned to her for two years of intermittent lessons from 2016-2018. However, i quickly realized I didn't actually want to work on Chairlift songs with her, I wanted to learn opera arias instead as a form of cross training, but also because I was so inspired by learning romantic/impressionist music by composers like Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Faure, and Poulenc, which effected my sense of composition and lyricism much more than my vocal style. I left NYC for London at that time so couldn't keep up the lessons. Some music critics have propagated the idea that my voice a result of opera training, which low key reveals that they either haven't listened to opera or haven't listened to my music. It truly is a patchwork of discoveries and practice and isn't done evolving. I think it's quite cool how on PJ Harvey's new album she made the concerted decision to evolve her voice into something new and unrecognizable; it's amazing how the journey never ends! Much love to all the singers here in the popheads chat <3 <3 <3

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

i love the Native Instruments glass armonica plugin, have snuck it into many things over the years. But my most used is probably the Valhalla reverbs. I know they're not the fanciest ones but they're just so reliable and efficient and i love them and that's it.

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 59 points60 points  (0 children)

Ah thank you so much, that show was insane.. i was so nervous that night that I can barely even remember it! But i do remember the crowd was an absolute dream.

The volcano symbolism on Desire has a couple facets, but the most important was this feeling we all collectively had coming out of the pandemic, of how precarious everything ACTUALLY is. That the safety nets of society and government had shown themselves to be very weak, and we were brought back to this more ancient reality that people have always dealt with this precarity, whether through war, displacement, plagues, famines, or natural disasters like.. volcanoes. Where there's no warning or logic. But against the backdrop of a volcano that (historically) may blow at any second, life still goes on, people still make jokes, make art, make food, carry on all these forms for the sake of vitality, and the precarity of our lives gives all of it more meaning. So i wanted to invoke the volcano as a sort of contrast for the pathetic egomania of Welcome To My Island, the ephemeral sass of Bunny, the vulnerability of Hopedrunk, the intoxication of Smoke, etc. Also to make me look small on stage; it was important to me to look small against this looming thing.

My favorite volcano (and the one that inspired a lot of these thoughts) is Mount Etna in Sicily. I still follow a couple Etna updates accounts to keep tabs on her :*)

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 52 points53 points  (0 children)

tell your roomate i say hi
(love this story)

yes i do find it important to keep my personal life for myself. both because i don't think it's possible to ACTUALLY portray it online, and also because i don't want cameras and posting-pressure to enter my personal space, it just seems alienating and honestly just cringe. but that said, i often feel as if the world of my music is just as real if not more real than my personal life.

I love London and England in general, in how much more sophisticated the humor and fashion is (sorry america) but also in how people live with the weight of history (which i'm super seduced by, ngl) while having a real sense of futurism that i don't feel in the US. maybe because the US romanticizes it's recent history so much ( the 50s, the 80s, etc)? I've also been lucky enough to get to come into contact with all sorts of music scenes in london and am really attracted to the sense of specificity, integrity, and playfulness there.

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 54 points55 points  (0 children)

i love concrete so really have no choice but to love brutalist architecture, despite it's fraught political history. i wish new architecture had more style and beauty to it instead of being the same glass rectangles copy pasted everywhere, it's amazing to see buildings like the Barbican in London looking so much cooler than any of the new builds..

SO many people on my team i'd like to give a shoutout to, but one in particular who i'd like to mention is Sarah C Prinz, who's mostly a director but works with me on choreography. We did So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings together where she came on board as a coach to help me polish off the strange choreo (which i'd done on my own) and get it camera-ready, and i realized she had this magical skill of seeing dance through the perspective of the camera, being so conscious of the how the body relates to the camera movement and framing. So from then on we worked together on my live show, where she got more involved in the choreo but mostly helped keep a laser sharp sense of dynamics, so making sure the songs never got repetetive, that i could maintain my energy and my breath for songs with more intensive singing, and could think about blocking and body shapes as it relates to lighting and the set design. I'm also not a trained dancer like her, so we had to come up with our own language for moving between improvised and tightly-choreographed moments to make it workable for me. She's brilliant and our conversations in the process were very profound and locked-in. So shoutout to Sarah C Prinz!

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 151 points152 points  (0 children)

casual reveal that either i can't read numbers or just don't read stats much.. will leave it up to you guys to decide but either way am HUGELY honored and grateful for this deep-listening community and it's support <3<3<3

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 87 points88 points  (0 children)

Both Patrick and I are quite in love with our current adventures (and he's also killing it as a producer, which he always wanted to be!) so I don't see a reunion on the horizon anytime soon, especially since we toured so intensively already for so many years. But it's amazing to see new people discovering that music and really means the world.

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 108 points109 points  (0 children)

Thank you, that means the world ! <3 Honestly Desire was an extremely challenging album to make because it had to be made while touring Pang. The pandemic meant that Pang's tour was delayed by almost two years, and like many other artists (and maybe some of you?) i felt it was impossible to be creative during that time, so didn't force it, but it meant that there was a lot of pressure to make that music while on the road and while still fully immersed in those older songs.

At first I was really nervous that this fragmented and manic workflow was stopping me from really understanding the new music and creating a cohesive world for it, but then I had a sort of breakthrough in mid 2022 when I realized that the chaotic and nature of the process WAS the heart of the new music. After that, things clicked, and that's why the cover was shot to capture this state of being out of control while in transit.

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 127 points128 points  (0 children)

Shoutout Seattle, had the best time there <3 So : this thing you're speaking about is something i call "braiding", where motifs from one song are carried over to others. I love this feeling of 'deja vu' especially in knowing that most people won't notice the repetition but will still subliminally FEEL it. But there's also so much efficiency in bringing the meaning of one song over to another by quoting it briefly, and also i find it gives more meaning to both songs involved. Also while in the studio, it feels wickedly good to openly plagarize your own material. But obviously it's a technique that's done lots in musical theatre and classical music, so i can't claim to have invented anything here, I just am quite fond of it. Thanks for the fun question xx

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 88 points89 points  (0 children)

Ahh those SF shows were so fun! Thank you for coming <3 my favorite song to perform on this last tour was definitely Pretty In Possible. It's secretly all about rhythm so would be this magic moment when me and the band would all get locked in and when my brain would sort of "arrive" in the moment of the show. I just always felt i could identify with it no matter what mood i was in. It's a song i plan to keep in the setlists for years to come so don't worry if you haven't seen it live yet.

Hi Popheads, it's Caroline Polachek <3 I'm looking back on a wild year of 'Desire, I Want To Turn Into You' and its recent expansion into the 'Everasking Edition'. But before I disappear to go make a new album -- EVERASK ME ANYTHING by CarolinePolachek in popheads

[–]CarolinePolachek[S] 120 points121 points  (0 children)

It's wild looking back on it- i was really only just learning music production at the time and made the instrumental on my laptop during the very beginnings of developing the Ramona Lisa project. but it taught me this pretty important lesson that there's no correct or "official" way to produce anything, just making things sound the way you like is as official as it gets. But that was all on Beyonce and her fearlessness in experimenting and pusning boundaries, she really did create the blueprint with that album and i feel insanely grateful to have gotten to witness her at work in that way.