Caroline Polachek wears a lot of hats.
She’s one half of indie-pop duo Chairlift; the musical polymath behind the Ramona Lisa moniker; a songwriter who has penned tunes for the likes of Beyoncé; and, according to the stylist at a recent photo shoot, the owner of some quite greasy hair.
“I just got back to my apartment from a shoot with [a] magazine, which was hilarious because it was only supposed to take a couple of hours,” Polachek says brightly. “But I showed up and they told me my hair was too greasy. So they gave me shampoo and I had to go to the bathroom and wash my hair in the sink, which was totally humiliating.”
She laughs. “I was just standing there in my jeans and my bra with my head in a sink. And the ironic thing was, two hours later they had styled my hair to look exactly the way it did when I first walked in … I do like the way my hair looks when it gets greasy. But I guess [the] magazine has a slightly different idea on what women’s beauty looks like.”
It’s not the first time Polachek has faced such scrutiny. “I don’t shave my armpits,” she says. “I haven’t since college. And three years ago Chairlift put out a music video and the whole comment board was fixated on [that] fact. Which I thought was pretty dumb.”
‘Dumb’ is an understatement, particularly given the fact such surface-level concerns bypass not only Polachek’s fierce intelligence, but also her poppy yet strikingly nuanced skills as a songwriter. Over the course of a 15-minute conversation, she namechecks sources as varied as Prefab Sprout and Kate Bush, all while speaking with reverence of the creative period that spawned Moth, the latest Chairlift record.
“Working on the record was such a beautiful, beautiful year. Really living inside that music as we were making it, it was…” Polachek takes a breath. “I mean, I don’t know what word to use other than ‘nourishing’. I would come home at night feeling so excited and so satisfied and so excited to get back into the studio the next day.
“Patrick [Wimberly, Chairlift’s other half] and I for the most part would show up at the studio without anything written … We [would] start a beat together and then I could put it on my laptop and go in the next room and work on it for two hours and come back, and Patrick and I could sort of compare notes.”
Polachek is remarkably candid when it comes to the specifics of how Moth was written. Unafraid to lay bare the process, she speaks with searing honesty. It’s that self-same honesty and autobiography that has been present in her songwriting since the days of 2008’s Does You Inspire You, Chairlift’s very first record. In fact, in some ways, a departure from such autobiographical writing is what marks out ‘Romeo’, one of Moth’s lead singles.
“When we made that beat, I knew automatically the song wanted to be about running. I don’t have any great running stories myself. So I said, ‘Greek mythology is where all the best stories in the world come from … Let’s take a look and see if there are running stories.’ Hours later we had lyrics for ‘Romeo’.”
It’s not the lyrics to ‘Romeo’ that people have been poring over, however. Such scrutiny has been assigned to ‘Ch-Ching’, a song with a chorus comprising the numbers “27-99-23”. There are some arguments online that the string of digits is an HTML colour code; more still that it’s the reference for a Bitcoin locker.
“It’s actually a combination lock,” says Polachek, happily demystifying. She chose the figures after she had written the preceding line – “Now catch that combination” – and decided she needed a string of numbers to fit with the imagery. A nearby combination lock provided them.
Now out of Moth’s fruitful writing period, Polachek finds herself in the odd interim after the record’s writing and before its release. She speaks openly of the anxiety that gets interwoven with anticipation during such purgatory. “There’s always that worry: what if people don’t like it? What if people really love it? All of these situations are so alien and so outside of my relationship with the music. It’s kind of a trippy moment to be waiting for it to come out.”
Most of all, Polachek is concerned what Charlift’s long-time fans might think. “Part of me doesn’t want to let them down,” she says. That said, she’s aware that sometimes – not always, but on occasion – the most loyal fans are those who most resist the new. “Sometimes people don’t want to see artists change, which can be baffling. The fact is … Our first record is very different from our second, and our second is very different from our third, so you know, I think we’d be lying to ourselves as artists if we didn’t take risks.”
That said, Moth is in some ways like the closing of the circle. “It is sort of interesting at this point to go back and see how there are some uncanny similarities between this record and the very first album,” she says. “I think even if we do approach things thinking that it’s different, there’s a part of our writing that will fundamentally always be the same.”
There is something there, then; something that belongs to Polachek and Wimberly. Something relentlessly, unavoidably unique. Something quintessentially Chairlift.
