Caroline Polachek

EO

You were dropped by your record label before your debut solo album, Pang, came out. What happened?

CP

I was increasingly knocking on a closed door with Columbia Records for a few months leading up to that. I’d been paying for music videos out of pocket and not getting reimbursed. I’d felt an increasing lack of support and was a bit lost in the system there. It only happens when you’re a small fish in a big bowl, especially when you’re launching a new project that doesn’t yet exist, and have no cultural momentum behind the work. At that stage, it’s all speculation and valuation. I had put all my chips on that project. And in some ways, it was a Hail Mary for me too: I was turning 34, I was going solo, I had just gotten divorced, I had just moved to L.A. Every structure in my life was sort of falling apart and rebuilding itself during this moment. So when Columbia Records gave me the option of having my masters back, it was a sign that they weren’t too interested. I wasn’t exactly dropped in the traditional sense. It was a gentler way of being dropped, that’s for sure. [Laughs.] But at the time, I didn’t understand that it was maybe the best thing that would ever happen to me.

EO

Can you break down the timeline of conceptualizing, paying for, and making the album? Then let’s get into going to the label and trying to negotiate a release schedule. How did everything play out?

CP

Chairlift, my former band, was with Columbia, who we had essentially signed a career-length deal with. When we broke up in 2016, that deal just passed on to me as a solo artist. So right away, I was still signed by them.

EO

And so was Patrick Wimberly?

CP

No, because Patrick wasn’t releasing music as a solo artist. I inherited the contract because I was releasing music solo. He went on to become a wonderful and successful producer, so we both landed on our feet after the split. Still, I entered this year and a half of really exploratory soul searching in songwriting. I started making what I thought was going to be a chamber pop album with a lot of influence from folk music and jazz standards. Quite far into the process of making this album, I did a session with Danny L. Harle. We wrote a song called “Parachute,” which was this drumless, almost classical piece of music, with four key changes, these really high and sustained vocal notes, and fraught runs. The lyrics came from a dream I’d had about falling out of a plane, seemingly to my death, and then surviving when I realized I was connected to a parachute. [Laughs.] That song felt like a complete break from everything I had made prior, and at the same time the sort of the culmination of all of my musical desires that I had ever had. It was obvious that Danny L. Harle and I had a lot more work to do. So I put aside everything I had already made for Pang, which didn’t have a name yet, and started writing with him very seriously, which meant going to London often.

EO

What year was this?

CP

In spring 2017, he reached out to me asking if I would make a song with him. We had 24 hours in New York together and we wrote a song called “Ashes of Love,” which was kind of funny and playful, like a big Miami freestyle track with trashy, clubby lyrics. That was kind of like an Iron Chef exercise for us, it wasn’t us really doing what we were capable of together. But when we wrote “Parachute” later on, it was clear that our collaboration could work. So I kind of considered that as track one in the process of making Pang.

EO

So working with him reorganized how you approached your solo music?

CP

Chairlift actually still existed when I first met Danny. We were doing our final tour as a band, but we knew we were splitting up. I wasn’t even necessarily in a very collaborative headspace at the time, but he just reached out to my manager, who passed it along with the footnote, “Yes, he’s part of the PC Music crew, but he’s not like the others,” which was funny. [Laughs.] That first session led to me meeting up with Danny, SOPHIE, and Hayden Dunham at Southwest in the spring of 2017. Watching Charli XCX and SOPHIE play the Vroom Vroom record live, it just felt like something really new was happening. My whole sense of what contemporary music could sound like was just blown open that week. That whole family of musicians brought me into the fold starting at that moment. It became clear I needed to go to London.

EO

Shortly after that you did “Parachute” with him? How did you continue building out the album?

CP

Yeah, we wrote it about six months later. I continued dabbling with a couple of different collaborators. I met Dan Nigro for the first time, and we made “I Give Up”, “Door,” “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” and “Look At Me Now.”

EO

The hits? [Laughs.]

CP

[Laughs.] Yeah. I found a bit of a foil in Dan because he would work against a lot of my impulses to make things dreamier. The way I saw it was that Dan was interested in building really solid log cabins, while I was over here trying to make flying buttresses. He’d always be like, “can we make it simpler? Can we make it more solid?” I really enjoyed that friction of being with him in the studio because I felt like when we were at our best we would both have it our own way at the same time.

Meanwhile, on the side, Danny L. Harle and I were going full flying buttress, really chasing our visions of sound design and of unusual structures, which led to songs like “New Normal,” which had seven verses and no chorus, really blurring the lines between my voice and the synths, between the use of digital instruments and reverb itself. Meanwhile, my personal life was in a really tense, scary state. My husband and I broke up and I faced a lot of disapproval from my family over it. I also lost touch with some friend groups in New York over it. So I kind of packed up my life and became transient. I didn’t have a home during that time. I put everything into storage and was bouncing back and forth between L.A., New York, and London. I think I lived in Ethan Silverman’s [of Terrible Records] house in L.A. for like two months. And I met A. G. Cook, Felicita, and Matt Copson in London, who, with Danny L. Harle, became my anchor there. I barely got to see the city, we were always in the studio working on each others’ things.

Right around that time, the track listing for Pang was starting to come together. I brought it to Columbia Records in the spring of 2018, and presented them with what I thought was the final track listing. Rob Stringer, who’s the head of Columbia, and I listened together without speaking, and he turned to me and said, “Well, this is the best work you’ve ever made, but I’m still not hearing a single. I need you to go back to writing.” I went into the bathroom and I sobbed, because I didn’t think I was capable of making anything better than that. I was so scared of what to do and so depressed that this stuff wasn’t good enough. So I went back to London and then back to L.A., and six months later I had “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” “Ocean of Tears,” “Pang,” and “Caroline Shut Up” added to the album. Finally Columbia Records signed off on it, and I began the process of making the visuals. I got Hugo Comte on board for photography, Timothy Luke for graphic design, Liam Moore for set design, Matt Copson to co-direct the videos with me. I was styling myself because I couldn’t afford a stylist. I was relying very heavily on the L.A. costume houses to find stuff myself and put it all together. I moved to L.A. during that time and that’s when the process of sort of starting to question how the album would live in the world and what it would look like. I was trying to figure out how I could convey this cultural position of having one foot in a very digital, postmodern landscape, and one foot in a diaristic, surrealist, early Disney storybook feel. [Laughs.] I wanted to bring this sort of fantasy into an online language. It required a lot of aesthetic problem solving. I finished the “Door” music video. I had just shot the “Ocean of Tears” video. All of the artwork for the singles was done. The font world had jelled. I was starting to work out how to put this on stage using projection mapping and hand-painted backdrops. It was right in the middle of that period of it all starting to come together that I got the call from Columbia telling me that I was now an... “independent artist”. I think the fire that was lit not just under my ass, but under my manager’s ass as well, telling us that we were now in the driver’s seat of this project actually created a huge amount of spiritual accountability for us. It was suddenly all up to us. I think we both really bloomed under that pressure.

EO

What exactly did that mean in terms of getting it out into the world? Did you have to start from square one in terms of distribution?

CP

On a structural level, yes, it did mean finding some form of distribution. And because there were only five weeks until the album was coming out, and we had already planned the tour, it was too late to push it back.

EO

You had to map a new plan onto an existing timeline?

CP

We couldn’t really move the timeline because I had already sold tickets to all of the shows. If the album wasn’t out prior to those shows, I would be playing 14 songs for people who didn’t know them. So we had to stay on schedule. Unfortunately, the only option was to stay within the Sony conglomerate because Columbia was within the Sony umbrella. My manager put two and two together and realized that Sony had this program called The Orchard that sets up imprints for artists who want to be self-released. They handle all of the digital and physical distribution, but there’s no A&R, no creative team, no PR, you do it all yourself.

EO

We loved your manager for that one. That was a gangster move.

CP

It was absolutely a gangster move, and he had a new contract on the table in 10 days. I called it Perpetual Novice, which was a lyric from the song “Door,” but it felt like it was sort of describing my entire career, if not life, of always feeling like I was learning on the go and out of my element, but in a way that felt familiar and weirdly like my comfort zone.

EO

Throughout all of this, how were you feeling about the project? How were you feeling about the music?

CP

At that point, all we could do was keep the release schedule on the rails. I was really, really scared that this music wasn’t going to feel real when it came out. The new team were doing a great job with the handoff but I was terrified. I was really, really scared. I wasn’t able to sleep very well during that period, because I just felt as if I was throwing a little pebble into the ocean. I also felt as if I had no role models at that point. I was looking around for women who were beginning solo pop careers in their mid 30s, and I couldn’t find anyone. I had no financial resources to speak of at the time. In order to get the music videos made, I relied on a couple of brands to provide modest budgets to help fill in the gaps. I was living in a thimble-sized apartment behind a gas station in Hollywood. It was just all anxiety. I was thinking a lot about what my backup plan would be. Am I going to attempt to get into film scoring? Or would I follow one of my other passions like color grading or mastering and enter a more technical field? I was thinking about what life would look like not being an artist, because I was not convinced it was going to work.

And then the pandemic happened a couple months after the album came out, just as I was about halfway through my first tour. I had played 10 shows, and then the world stopped. Suddenly I had a captive audience, because the other channels went silent. So I remained a new release in the public consciousness for about six months. Typically you get about two weeks before people’s awareness of recent releases are steamrolled by the next thing. I got to linger there on the horizon for so much longer than I had any right to. Also I’d released this album that was so much about vulnerability and fear and about trust and faith and luck and humor. I think that combination of feelings really spoke to people who were feeling isolated or anxious and needed to be reminded of the capacity for inner dream worlds. I think I managed to connect with a lot of people by sheer luck. The music just found people during that time, and I felt this sort of wave of support and love swell under me. I couldn’t believe it was real.

EO

What was it like to experience the reaction after the initial release in October of 2019 and then to experience the second reaction once the pandemic hit?

CP

The initial release happened within two communities. It existed within the Chairlift fan base, people who knew my work already, and then within the PC Music fan base, who sort of accepted me as an extension of their Marvel Extended Universe of the pantheon of PC stars, of Charli XCX and Hannah Diamond and A. G. Cook. I felt very lucky to be able to have one foot in this sort of Pitchfork indie sphere and another in this very futuristic, very queer, very visual, very pop culture-oriented audience, who were in some ways even more interested in the cultural side of the project than the music side. I felt a real sense of novelty in getting to release something to these two parallel communities. But there was never a sudden jump in the needle at any point in the process, which was quite unusual. It felt like a constant and steady arrival of new listeners, the fan art that was getting made, the streaming stats. It was just this continual slow growth.

EO

Because of your state and the state of things, you had to take it day by day, kind of walk it to the finish line each day, right?

CP

At that point, I felt as if it actually wasn’t in my hands anymore. It came down to word of mouth and people sending each other stuff and people circulating the album out in the wild. I wasn’t able to do late night shows, I wasn’t able to play live, I wasn’t able to collaborate with other artists in the studio. I didn’t have all of these other promo tactics that you typically get. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop every day, like “Alright, today is the day it’s going to be over,” but that just never came.

EO

Can you describe the process of realizing the world of Pang versus the process of realizing the world of Desire, I Want To Turn Into You?

CP

I think there were really two fundamental differences. One was that having come from an indie band, making Pang an album that was purely electronic felt like a big gesture. It was disseminated through quite ephemeral digital postage stamps, through Instagram, through YouTube, through these little glowing colorful squares. Because of the pandemic, those little postage stamps were the only way that I had to communicate with people, and it felt appropriate to the music. It felt like a very tight, closed system. I wanted to try something completely different with Desire. I wanted to feel like it wasn’t only existing online; after the pandemic we all desperately needed to become physical again.

EO

In Desire, you’re definitely not telling a story, it’s more chopped and screwed, and that doesn’t cater to being a nicely packaged token. Pang is a series of executed ideas and Desire seems more like a manifestation or aura. Something that’s sexy.

CP

Exactly. In some ways, Pang was about the effects of passion, whereas Desire is about the cause of it. I wanted it to be as close to a portrait of that force, that energy, and not what it leaves in its wake. Of course, I can never fully stick to my own prompts. There are songs that are the dust settling and about a more distanced perspective, songs like “Sunset,” or “Hopedrunk Everasking” which have a wisdom to them, where I’m stepping back and playing more of an observer. “Welcome to My Island” is just full-on id.

EO

How did working with Danny L. Harle change your songwriting? Did you have to learn how to inhabit a new songwriting zone? I have this philosophy that there are people who sing with songs and there are people who sing against them. It’s different from rapping but it shares the same logic and sensibility. Not a lot of people are smart enough to know how to sing against a beat.

CP

100%. I’m so excited to speak about this with you because I think our relationship to rhythm is actually very philosophically deep. The beat is giving you a grid, and the issue is finding your physical relationship to these chopped intervals of time. Are you dragging behind it? Are you pushing ahead of it? Are you making it feel comfortable? Is the struggle itself comfortable?

EO

Are you satisfying the beat? Are you framing the rhythm? Are you dancing with the lyrics?

CP

Are you a victim of it? Or are you creating all of these things? I think some artists have an amazing vocabulary with which they can move between different ways of relating to the beat. Some people, on the other hand, just have one mode. Sometimes it feels as though any sort of rhythmic singing is actually an incredible kind of dancing with which you can communicate your body’s relationship with time itself, using just waves. And that’s what music is: just waves through the air.

EO

It’s like you’re inhabiting someone’s consciousness by virtue of being in the song or rhythm. As opposed to witnessing music that you just listen to. Then there’s music that invites you to dance.

CP

Yeah. I sometimes lovingly think of that as kinesthetic empathy. It’s like when you watch a tennis player hit the ball, you know what the movement’s going to be. You know that they’re going to swing for it, but you actually get the feeling of satisfaction in your own body because you can imagine doing it yourself. You imagine what it would feel like in your own body, and you feel pleasure from witnessing them do it. Which is why I think Adele is such an amazing singer. You can feel her injuring her own voice in those vocal performances. You can feel the damage she’s doing by singing so hard. You feel that pain in your own body when you hear her regardless of the lyrics. And that is very poetic. It’s a form of catharsis that’s so universal and so timeless. When you hear someone hurting themselves, you hurt. I think our relationship to rhythm is a whole other kind of kinesthetic empathy. It’s a time-based thing as well. Of course, I’m very aware of my own tendencies, which are to be fucking surgically precise with my own rhythmic singing. And what am I conveying with surgical rhythmic precision? I’m conveying that I’m a fucking nerd, that I’m really type A, that I’m paying very close attention. And I often want to convey the opposite of those things in my music, but I don’t really have a choice. [Laughs.] But it’s ultimately the things a singer doesn’t have control over that make their voice interesting, isnt it?

EO

It was funny to hear that your favorite song on Desire is “Pretty In Possible.” It’s like a stream of consciousness and it's inciting these not fantastical, but very random but precise surgical cuts. I remember when your album came out, that was my favorite song because it felt like you were singing from different perspectives. On the song, it’s like you’re changing the channel on the TV or something. I can always kind of sense the hit on a record and I think I clocked that it would be that song, because it doesn’t seem to be a reference to anything else. I also like the little play on words because it sounds like “impossible.” Which reminds me of Beyoncé’s “Formation,” like “C’mon ladies, let’s get in-formation.” And also, Roger and Hammerstein’s “Impossible” in Cinderella. [Laughs.]

CP

Yeah, that efficiency is good. But Beyonce’s “in-formation” double entendre is more clever than mine is. Mine is just kind of a half asleep, badly executed pun, but that’s kind of the vibe of the whole song anyway. [Laughs.] I learned something really important while making this album, and that song is the most emblematic of it. I realized that the more adventurous I want to be with the vocals and the songwriting, the more static the beat has to be. You need to have a solid structure to doodle around.

EO

How did it feel to be embodied in a new way recording and making Desire? Because it’s such a huge departure from the slow processing of Pang. It’s almost like you’re processing the experience of actually experiencing and witnessing yourself–seems like a form of catalysis, a reaction to yourself or something. The whole record is almost like, “I don’t need to talk about it. I just need to go somewhere and do something. I need to dance, move.” It’s full of that energy.

CP

Yeah. It felt like more of a presentation of my body.

EO

In a performative sense? Are you doing it all for real?

CP

Yeah, all of it. I think even within the photos I’m using my body much more expressively.

EO

In one of the interviews you did, you were talking about how the Desire live show is so much more intimate than your previous shows. When I saw you at Radio City Music Hall, it was weird to be in a venue of that size because it was like I could hear you, and felt near you, even though you were so far away. Seeing music live feels different now.

CP

Yeah, and the show’s also much longer, which is a thing that happens when you have more than one album. [Laughs.] As a vocalist, a longer show is a lot more demanding, but also for the audience, the longer shows created a further sense of closeness. I think there’s a reason why the average film is 90 minutes. I think you need that amount of time to really share a moment that feels significant with someone. But on top of that I just felt like my body suddenly became a really important tool for communication.

EO

How does that differ from your time in Chairlift or performing your first album as a solo artist?

CP

When I was on stage with Chairlift, I was always behind the synthesizer, sometimes even beyond two synths which blocked my body, so I never thought about what I was doing with my body. I was just standing behind this rectangle and I was singing into the mic and I would think about what I was going to wear, but that was about it. I never thought about facial control, even during festivals, when I knew that my face was going to be on a big screen on the other side of the stage. I never thought about it.

EO

It sounds like a different mode of performance and band culture. You guys really were cemented as a band during that era of early aughts bands. I’m from L.A. and growing up music was integral to the social fabric of my network of friends. We grew up going to shows at the Roxy, Echo, El Rey, and Coachella. Can you talk about the moment? You’re in a completely different musical world now.

CP

There is a cynicism to it, because I think that back then, the idea of being in a band was in opposition to what was considered pop music. This was before the big Poptimist reckoning of 2014 or 2015. I think there was also an agreement with your audience that in the same way that we have decided to not think at all about the visual presentation of a live show, they’re also there as listeners or for the scene. The contract was a two-way agreement. Both of those things, the sound and the scene, were taken very seriously.

EO

What was the scene like when you first entered it? And the reckoning in 2014?

CP

When I first entered, I was very enamored with the DIY scene. I was going to Todd P shows under bridges and in illegal parking lots where no one was taking pictures. It was all about having been there. It was about the experience of being there and seeing something and feeling this stank in the air and recognizing that it was fucking cool. Recognizing that it was rebellious and interesting and specific and completely divorced from the need to make money or the desire to spend it. It was also very cool to make things happen on your own, even on a very small level. It was cool to throw your own party, produce your own show out of your kitchen, make a music video for nothing. It was a very punk ethos, but in fact was totally divorced from the legacy of punk. It really felt like its own thing. Chairlift was born in that environment, but what we were bringing to it that was new was that we were essentially just cuter. [Laughs.] We were doing something that felt very tongue-in-cheek, very twee. This was especially true in Colorado, where we started, but then also in New York when we came over.

The Denver noise scene had venues like Rhinoceropolis, which was run by Pictureplane. I remember one night in Denver seeing a girl perform in a bombed out loft, naked in a full bathtub with a parrot, screeching into a mic that sent to huge distorted amps in the kitchen. What we were doing was something definitely cuter, but cuteness felt subversive at the time, and more related to folk music. We were very much inspired by projects like Hot Chip and Grizzly Bear’s first release, which was just a four-track cassette record. We were like, “Oh, we can do something that’s composed and twee, but still firmly situated in the DIY landscape.” Which made it different from aspiring to be like a Cat Power or Regina Spektor. We wanted to situate it in something that might be on a bill with John Maus, which of course a couple of years later we were.

EO

And this was around 2007, which was a crazy time for music. Bright Eyes, Modest Mouse, all of those fucking bands. 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 were insane years for music.

CP

They were. I think if we’re being real, the people who were the best at it, and who actually maybe came to define that period, were the people who were very conscious of the visuals of the project and the optics of it. But that wasn’t what people were talking about. And it certainly didn’t exist within the ‘creative director economy’ that is standard now.

EO

[Laughs.] Yeah. People weren’t brands, yet.

CP

People weren’t brands as much as NME wanted them to be. But then this shift happened where artists like Rihanna and Kanye and Beyoncé were reaching out to artists who were in this indie sphere and bringing them in. Rihanna brought in Tame Impala, Beyoncé brought in people like me, like Father John Misty, Kanye brought in Arca and Evian Christ. James Blake and Tame Impala were probably the bridges between the two worlds more than anyone else. Suddenly all of these boundaries were being broken down. And interestingly, I felt like it was more from the top than from the bottom. And it caused a big reckoning. It was happening around the same time that streaming really took off. Everyone was now using Spotify, not downloading MP3s anymore. I think it really changed perception about what it meant to be a collector. What it meant to be a music head. At the same time, the blogosphere began promoting the idea that listening to Katy Perry and Ariana Grande could be done through a postmodern and very intellectual lens.

But I think this came with a sinister side which was that the intellectualism was actually all in the reception and not in the production. I think it created a way of looking down on pop artists from a lofty, superior place, which secretly had a lot of embedded misogyny. It was taken for granted that female popstars were unaware of the more interesting conceptual aspects of what they were doing. But Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Gaga–they all knew exactly what they were doing.

EO

Yes, Katy Perry was dominating Top 40 at that time. What was the experience of watching and being a part of the whole trajectory of massive artists bringing indie artists into the fold like? What was it like to be behind the scenes while that power was being renegotiated?

CP

It suddenly felt as if all of the boundaries between genres were melting down, and also between platforms. It felt like it was the end of an easily definable monoculture. At the same time, trap had started coming up and people were doing such experimental forward-thinking things with trap, that it really threw a lot of the values of the indie sphere away. It made us look extremely conservative, both musically and artistically. Around that time as well was when I started to feel an insane plurality in my own output. I was making the last record with Chairlift as well as an album as Ramona Lisa, which was super lo-fi. The way that project existed live was more within the realm of cabaret or Dada theater. It wasn’t a standard gig, because it felt like it sat somewhere between the tonal atmospheric stuff that had existed in indie music prior, and the more conceptual realm that was closer to how big Pop operated. But it had zero commercial aspirations. At the same time I was getting invited to do sessions for Madonna and Christina Aguilera after having done a song for Beyoncé,, and I was totally overwhelmed. I didn’t know how to be in sessions. I was scared of being in rooms around strangers having to write songs.

EO

What was the Beyoncé experience like?

CP

It was completely insular in an amazing way, which is one of the reasons she is such a good and successful artist. “No Angel” was a song that I had written for Ramona Lisa one night after a show in London in 2012 or 2013. I was staying at an Airbnb and was unable to sleep. So I just got out my MIDI controller and was under the covers writing, making this beat. It was a big moment: Frank Ocean had just dropped Channel Orange. Chief Keef had just come out with “Don’t Like,” which I was obsessed with. I was pushing up against this kind of sparkly palette with these really hard beats. I penciled in this chorus, “you’re no angel either,” but the verses were just melodies, no lyrics. I knew I loved the song, but it clearly didn’t belong on the Ramona Lisa album. So I decided to just keep it in my pocket. And then a year later, Beyoncé’s team reached out to Chairlift and asked us to come to Jungle City, which is the Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz studio compound in Chelsea in New York. It’s a beautifully fancy studio overlooking the Hudson, and Beyoncé had booked out the whole building for her album and just had different producers and writers holed up in there like a literal hive all working at the same time. She had made physical mood boards that were passed around on a rotation throughout the studio.

We’d show up there everyday and there would be a different mood board of images curated by Beyoncé for us to get inspired by. She was never in the studio with us. She would do these crazy late night sessions because she had just given birth to Blue Ivy. She was coming in between like 3:00 and 7:00 AM with the baby when no one else was around. It was just her and her engineer. She would listen to what everyone had made that day and she’d try singing on top of some of it. She’d try mashing people’s songs together, taking them apart, but on her own time. No one else was around her to create any pressure. We weren’t allowed to be in the studio at that time. Then we’d come back in the morning and keep writing. Patrick and I wrote six songs for her, and two of them, “Show U Off” and “Ch-Ching,” ended up on our next record because she didn’t use them. At the last minute I realized that the “No Angel” sketch that I made by myself on my laptop a year prior, could be a good fit for the project. So I wrote the lyrics, inspired by her mood boards and where she was at in her life, and gave “No Angel” to her. We didn’t hear back for about six months, until I got a call from her engineer at 2:00 AM while I was at an Ariel Pink concert. The engineer asked for the stems right away cause Beyoncé wanted to try it out. So I ran home from the show, got on the laptop, printed out the stems, sent them off, and then didn’t hear back for like another six months. Then I got brought in again to approve her vocals on the song, which is insane because no one ever has to approve Beyoncé. Was I not going to approve Beyoncé’s vocals? [Laughs.] Obviously, no. That album was the first of its kind to do the secret unannounced drop.

EO

She changed the world with the digital drop.

CP

It appeared on iTunes, and people started texting me saying that my song was out. I had no idea it was coming.

EO

How old were you when this happened?

CP

I would have been 29 years old. The Ramona Lisa album had come out a few months prior and I was in the studio working on the Chairlift record, so it was a bizarre confluence of things. It just felt like it was urgent to keep moving during that time. Culturally, this meant just following the shit that I thought was good and trying not to worry too much about the lack of context. It felt safe to abandon context at the time. I knew I was always going to be pigeonholed as an indie person no matter what I did, so there was no risk in doing all the other stuff. Identity crisis wasn’t really a risk. It’s interesting to have the perspective of where we landed as a band, because like a decade later, in 2024, I feel like everyone is fighting tooth and nail to have any sense of context at all, to have any sense of identity or to have any sense of individuality. But we wanted so badly to dissolve all of that stuff at the time.

EO

Still, you came up in such a specific yet musically important time. “Bruises” by Chairlift was used in that 2008 Apple advertisement for the 4th generation iPod Nano, which was a cultural phenomenon. That was shortly after Feist’s “1234” was used for the 2007 Apple iPod commercial, right? That dominated the zeitgeist.

CP

Yes, it was. The Feist ad really created shock waves when it introduced the idea that indie music was seen by the tech industry as a friendly product and not a conceptual threat. And do you want to know what’s even wilder? Chairlift’s song “Bruises” was released by the ad. Apple got a hold of a demo that was unreleased. At the time we were touring out of Patrick’s mom’s van. Before every show, I would get together a collection of our demos, anywhere between five and seven of them. I would change the track list literally every night, and I would burn them onto the CD and then put one of the CD stickers through a typewriter and write the track list one by one, stick it on and sell them for $1 at our merch booth, because we didn’t have merch. One night in L.A., a girl bought one of them and showed it to her boyfriend who had a radio show on KCRW. The next morning, someone at Apple happened to be listening to KCRW on the way to work and heard the song and decided that they wanted to license it for an ad.

That song only existed on those $1 CDs and on our MySpace, but it wasn’t actually released anywhere. But Apple sent us this contract and we assumed that they were sending the same contract to 100 people just to give themselves the right to use anything. We didn’t think they were actually going to use it. Then the ad came out while I was in finals in school at NYU.

It happened during this massive gold rush in indie music. We shared a rehearsal space with MGMT, and they were getting signed to a major label. Other bands like Yeasayer and Amazing Baby were receiving a big wave of press and money.

The rehearsal space that we worked out of was a mold infested basement on South 11th in Williamsburg. It was us, MGMT, Black Dice, TV On The Radio, and Grizzly Bear.

EO

You moved to New York after two years in Colorado at school. And then after that you started going on tour and opening for The Killers, MGMT, Phoenix, James Blake, Micachu & The Shapes. Was that all you were doing at the time?

CP

Whenever we were home from tour, we were still working side jobs in order to afford all of the tours because we weren’t being paid enough to even pay for our food and hotels and gas. Patrick was doing window installations for all the Ralph Lauren stores in New York. I was working for visual artists. Aaron was working at Matador Records doing administrative stuff. We were doing all of these jobs in order to support our main job, which at the time, we were completely confident in. We never questioned the economics of it. We would do anything to tour and play these shows. But it was insane. I recently found a spreadsheet from the first ever European tour that we did. It was 28 shows in a row with no days off. We were paid $100 a night. It was Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg. Every day was a different international border crossing. All for only $100 a night.

EO

How does one even survive that? The math ain’t mathing. [Laughs.]

CP

[Laughs.] It was not mathing. When I look back on that tour, I just remember being so sick, having a fever, not being able to sing. I was drinking shots of hot sauce before shows to clear out my sinuses. I would get about 30 minutes of clarity on the hot sauce, and then the congestion would kick back in and it would be so, so hard to sing. It was a really scary time as well. It was only a couple of months after the Apple commercial had come out, so there was a big A&R feeding frenzy where Universal and Columbia were scouting us. We felt that we were firmly in this identity as a DIY band, but it was so difficult being so broke and working so hard that signing to a big label felt like a desirable option. We watched MGMT sign to Columbia, so that felt like a safe place to go. We signed that contract on the altar of a church basement in Philly after a show there one night.

EO

What was touring with so many different bands like? They all had different shelf lives. Phoenix was at their height at that point.

CP

It was incredible. Both Phoenix and The Killers were really kind to us. They were very validating. Both Thomas from Phoenix and Brandon from The Killers were both so encouraging and were genuine fans as well, which was crazy to me. But there was still a fundamental gulf between how they operated and how we operated. We were so scrappy. The Killers, on the other hand, had a recording studio that was set up for them every morning in the stadium that we were playing. They’d wake up and just have a full recording studio with a full-time engineer with all the instruments set up and ready to record. They didn’t use it once the whole tour. We would go hang out in their studio room and just jam because they weren’t using it.

At the time we just wanted to do something that was cool, that felt mysterious and outside of place and time. In some ways, I had nothing to learn from Phoenix or The Killers, because their resources and fanbase were so vastly different from ours. It was confusing to watch Brandon say the same thing on stage every night. I thought it was so artificial. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to have a script when they could improvise instead. But I now understand, cause literally 20 years later, I went on tour opening Dua Lipa, and we had to play a set that was exactly 30 minutes each night. They would literally shut us off if we went over time. We had to speed the songs up to fit them all onto a baking track- which filled in the electronic instruments- and had to learn to contract my speaking into the tight little gaps between songs, where I’d have a countdown going in my earpiece. So just for that tour, I scripted it, cause it’s scary when the next song isn’t waiting for you.

EO

Did you see Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour? I wonder how it works for her.

CP

I was on tour at the same time, so I was never in the right city at the right time! I was so gutted. But every artist runs it differently. For my own headline show, I would never put it on a strict grid like that. Never, never, never. I change the order of songs all the time, and make decisions live. I never script what I’m going to say for my own shows. But what I’m saying is that it was interesting to find myself on the other side of the fence, looking back on what The Killers were doing and understanding it without judgment. It caused a big shift in perspective.