Everything you read about Peaches seems enamoured of momentum.
The near-unquantifiable Canadian provocateur has been “moving forward” and “pushing boundaries” ever since her second release back in 2000, when the artist born Merrill Nisker ditched avant-garde folk rock and became the Peaches that we all know and love. Even the term ‘provocateur’ doesn’t quite do the job; it’s not just reaction that Peaches is trying to achieve, no shock for the sake of it. She is a performer with something to say.
Which is all well and good, but usually that’s the kind of empty platitude heaped on every artist when they release something new. Hell, releasing an album solely on eight-track these days would be considered ‘moving forward’, and transgression is about as polished as a Grammy. But of all the performers who actually live up to the romanticism of the artist standing at the edge and singing into the void, Peaches has a real claim to shaking things up a little. There’s very little bullshit, no legerdemain to be shocking for notoriety. Peaches’ often explicit message comes right from the guts.
“You know, I definitely work very organically,” she says. “Just to give a little history, I never thought I would be a professional – not that I like to use that word – but a career musician, or whatever it is that I am. It’s all organically happened, which is the same with anything I’ve done. It’s evolved, the same with writing the music and how I got into it to begin. In that way I’m not very calculated in general, and so a lot of times when I write these albums, I don’t even know what it will be called. It’s funny, because it always presents itself, it makes a statement when I put the name on at the end, and I go, ‘Oh! It’s all come together now.’ The retrospective part comes after all the work is done, so I sort of work externally, and then it becomes an internal critique afterwards.”
As retrospection goes, Peaches has found a unique way of looking back to her most recent record, 2015’s Rub. Over a year old, the dust of its release has now settled, and such distance grants her a perspective impossible to fathom in the depths of the studio or in the dervish of touring. But in June this year, Rub Remixed appeared, the entire thing reimagined through the eyes of others, which sounds both exciting and nerve-wracking. Not that Peaches herself suffered any trepidations.
“I trusted those people, and I was curious. I also had enough distance, enough confidence to know that the original songs were fine and held up, that I still liked them and was ready for them to have a new life on their own. You have to let them go.”
Contemplating the life of any piece of art once it leaves the nest is a curious thing. Where does its fidelity to the artist end? Were the artist’s intentions ever noteworthy in the first place, or once it is released, is a song – or poem, or painting – already untethered and in the hands of strangers? At least Rub Remixed allowed Peaches to see these songs keep evolving in very real, visceral ways. For most artists, any reinvention is probably only going to happen onstage. However, as a songwriter who is not tied to a particular work routine – composing instead whenever the inspiration presents itself – Peaches gets the best of both worlds.
“Well, I’m not a person…” She pauses for a while, musing over her words. “I don’t write every day. I’m no Nick Cave who just goes to the office to write. Because I’m such an arduous performer, I kind of take time to go and write. I don’t give myself a deadline, really. It’s more of a place and time than it is a position.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this evolution of Rub seems entirely fitting with the nature of Peaches’ music. Shock, amazement, outrage, inspiration – whatever the response, the idea is transformation. Watch the extremely NSFW video for Rub’s eponymous track, and it’s impossible not to walk away without having an opinion. Peaches is like a musical John Waters, an influence she has cited in the past. You can see the cult director’s shadow not only in Peaches’ lyrics and tone (and what lyrics they are), but in the striking visual style she has been developing, particularly since 2009’s I Feel Cream.
“In the end, the songs [are] all very connected, and I revel in that,” she says. “My last album, I made a video for every song, and for this I really wanted to make every song interconnect. It could almost be seen, loosely, as an abstract movie or something. I still have one more video to make, and there are connections. There are reoccurring characters, things like that. I think I didn’t have enough money or time to plan it from the beginning, because as I say I work so spontaneously. So I can’t say these videos were completely spontaneous, particularly with the song ‘Rub’. There were two months of me and two friends working out what to do, what can go wrong. But I feel there’s definitely always a connection with me.”
We have been given precious little time for this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it chat; hardly enough to get a true sense of the person and the art. The best you can hope for is a sense of the pleasantly ridiculous – if, for instance, Peaches suffered any injuries from the video for ‘Diddle My Skittle’ (after watching it, you’ll never look at silver balls the same way again) – and of what might be coming next. To that end, further work with long-term pal Feist seems a certainty.
“No, I didn’t hurt myself,” she laughs. “Collaborations with Feist, well, she was the only one on my first album, because I didn’t know how to overdub vocals so I asked her to sing. That song, ‘Diddle My Skittle’, she was there in the background. And she’s on Impeach My Bush, and [Rub]. We’ve done a lot together, and hopefully we’ll do a lot more.”
Rub is out now through I U She; and Peaches performs at Metro Theatre on Friday December 9.
