HEART’S DESIRE
On her second album, Caroline Polachek Distills the Magic of the Real World
“I FEEL LIKE I HAVE NO IDEA WHO I AM. BUT I AM LEARNING MORE AND MORE ABOUT WHAT I LIKE.”
“I ALWAYS FEEL A BIT ALIENATED BY THE TERM ‘WORLDBUILDING,’” Caroline Polachek tells Exclaim!, pausing carefully to gather her thoughts. “There’s something systematic to it. Like there’s a kind of J.R.R. Tolkien-style map, where everything exists and there’s rules and there’s a key.”
The term, she explains, suggests a kind of vacuum-sealed remove; a world outside the world, one bound by the strictures of sci-fi and fantasy that exists independent of texture or tactility. Polachek’s music, on the other hand, isn’t interested in fantasy, but rather in the endless possibility of reality — her world is our world.
“The picture is never complete, and there’s always exploration that can be done in any direction. The world was never built, so to speak,” she says. “I think interacting with the world that I’m in is kind of the essential key to this album.”
The album in question is February’s Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, a dazzling, kinetic statement of intent that’s placed Polachek at the furthest reaches of pop music’s rapidly mutating future.
Throughout the record, Polachek refuses linear narratives and literal interpretation in favour of truth in its most base form. When she says “Wikipediated” on “Billions,” or sings the topsy-turvy title of “Hopedrunk Everasking,” she’s not attempting to throw veils or drop smoke bombs; she’s trying, desperately, to explain things exactly as they are.
“I think it’s important to say that what I’m doing is not evading meaning,” she explains. “Because all of these lines are incredibly evocative and very meaningful. It’s just the best way that I can [convey meaning]. In some ways, it’s a more accurate way of depicting feelings and sensations.”
She continues, “When I’m looking to write lyrics, for example, I’m trying to do my best to capture the sense of dynamics that are in my imagination. ... And in that sense, it has nothing to do with embellishment and everything to do with loyalty.”
Loyalty to the world’s essential truths, the wild core of feeling, is also what guides Polachek’s genre-agnostic muse, her uncanny ability to smear her music through dozens of era-specific sounds and come out the other side with a previously unknown colour. One of Desire’s major sonic touchstones is the searching, feminine electro-folk of the late ’90s and early 2000s, a period that saw traditional musical forms being spliced with what, at the time, were the energies of the future. One of the stars of that era, Dido, appears on Desire, lending her voice to the urgent flutter of “Fly to You” alongside Grimes.
“It wasn’t so much wanting to go back to that time or wanting to evoke a genre, but actually studying what spoke to me about it, and then doing my own version of that feeling,” Polachek explains. “I don’t really think about the idea of pastiche. When I’m making music, I think about magic more, and there being these kinds of magic things that certain genres have nailed through various techniques and combinations of sounds.”
Polachek’s ability to recognize and extract the essence of these musical movements — devoid of taste-making cultural baggage or gendered dismissal — isn’t relegated only to those in the distant-enough-for-reevaluation past; as she explains it, there’s room to be moved by the ubiquitous, reality-contouring music of our own age, should you open yourself to its possibilities.
“I had this revelation a few years ago when Avicii died,” she says. “Because I was never really a fan of Avicii. His music, it was just stuff I would hear in cabs and in supermarkets.”
She continues, “And when he died, I remember hearing one of his songs on the radio and it hit me so hard, how when artists come in and invent the sound that becomes the sound of normality, we don’t often give them enough credit for this kind of emotional architecture they build for society. We just look at it and we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s just another face of a building.’ But it’s this hyper-creativity that completely sculpts our sense of what normal is, what normal culture is.”
If there’s one lesson to take from Desire, it’s to unlock a curiosity about the way things are, to abandon maps and explanations in favour of feeling.
The world was never built. The possibilities remain endless; the exploration unceasing. “I mean, I feel like I have no idea who I am,” says Polachek. “But I am learning more and more about what I like.”