CAROLINE POLACHEK
By Emily Easley
Caroline sings and plays keyboards for Chairlift, whose album Does You Inspire You is out now on Columbia Records. I'd seen Caroline at shows and parties for years, but the first time we really bonded was at a small New Year's gathering on the eve of 2008. We did some reggae dancing, tried on vintage sunglasses, and compared stories from our teenage years. Caroline is sharp, hilarious and one of the most warm and affectionate people I've ever met. Her presence on stage really is inspiring: zero posturing, all heart and energy and true joy. And a voice that makes my boyfriend cry.
I interviewed Caroline in two parts, the first in June of 2008 at a sidewalk cafe in Greenwich Village and the second (the majority of this interview) in a loft she was subletting in South Williamsburg, in February of 2009.
Photos by Matthew Asti in the studio of Kathe Burkhart.
EE: How did you first get into music and start singing?
CP: I was always singing as a kid, the way any kid sings. I would listen to pop songs on the radio and try to copy them on the piano – I remember trying to cover like, Savage Garden and Alanis Morrisette and Spice Girls and Hanson.
So you were playing piano pretty early on?
Yeah, we had a piano at my house cos my dad plays piano. I started singing in the school choirs in elementary school, I played violin in middle school, dropped off the boat with that, and then high school was when I like REALLY started getting involved in music, that was all I cared about. At one point I was in seven different music groups at one time and I was getting really bad grades in all my classes.
What kind of groups were they?
I was in an all-girl a cappella group that I arranged all the music for. We played a lot of benefits, cos Greenwich, Connecticut is a town where there's a lot of – how can I put it – bored, rich women that have nothing to do except social initiative. And then I sang in a choir, which was like, early music, Medieval stuff, and it was awesome. And I was in a kind of Nu Metal band that I was the singer of. I was in the band with my boyfriend, and that was really fun. I had really long hair, like down below my waist, and I'd thrash around and sing these songs. It was really silly shit.
Wow. What was it like the first time you went crazy performing like that?
We played at our school talent show, and I remember I was really nervous. We started the song and I started, you know, making a big riot on stage and thrashing around singing. I had the mic in my hand and the mic stand was behind me, and I kicked it and it FLEW off the stage. Everyone's seated – you know, there's like judges – and it's so awkward. I had my back to the audience and I was bent over singing, and then I turned around and everyone's laughing. I had no idea what was going on, but I just rolled with it. We got second place.
So people must have been pretty impressed.
I was kind of an outcast in high school. I was a real loser until junior year and then I started dating these like, pot-head guys.
What was it like being an outcast?
My first couple years, I was hanging out with a bunch of really kind of slow, reclusive girls and we were all really into hardcore music – like Korn and shit like that. I wore water bracelets with the glitter in them up to my elbows and big skater pants and had this attitude like, “Yeah, there's a reason why I'm not good at school or friends with the cool kids, it's cos I don't like them! I don't like any of it, that's why!”
Did you secretly want to be accepted?
Yeah, but I wasn't willing to go through the paces that I thought it required. I think everyone wants to be accepted or appreciated in school, but a lot of kids do it via assimilation or trying to normalize themselves, and to me it seemed like – those were the kind of people I really hated, were like the insidious ass-kissers. It was only after becoming part of the kind of like, rock and drug crew of my school that people recognized me, but by that time I didn't give a shit.
How did you get involved with them?
Through music. Because a lot of those guys were also in band and in orchestra and were super-talented musicians. I guess it was all via like, cracking smart-ass jokes in class, and then like, “What's your number?” and then hanging out and hooking up and smoking pot in people's moms' SUVs. And then starting bands.
Did you like smoking pot when you first did it?
YEAH! I was kind of that girl, in the hoodie. When I first got into it, I was dating this Vietnamese guy, who was up to a lot of trouble. He had tattoos and long hair.
How'd you meet him?
I met him through a friend. He was their weed dealer – I know, totally lame. He'd take me around to do his trips with him in his CRV – his like, Honda CRV, with huge speakers in the back.
What kind of music were you listening to?
When I was with him, a lot of techno. And then I started dating another guy, who – at the time, I thought he was really cool. He was just like, THE electric guitar guy of our grade. Now, looking back, I'm like, “God, he was such a loser.” But your world is so small then it doesn't matter, you're like, “Whatever, I've got the guitar guy.”
That was also the time that I started getting really into electronic music and ambient music. I would listen to Medieval music, like Perotin, and thirteenth, fourteenth century chant, Gregorian chant, all that stuff – and then listen to Bjork or Sigur Ros. That was the same genre of music to me at the time.
There is a kind of similarity.
In terms of vibe – that was the vibe I was introduced to in high school and did not have an outlet for, because the people I knew to make music with were just into flashy-assed shit. And I didn't even know where these sounds were coming from. Like, listening to Bjork, I knew all those electronic sounds had to come from computers somehow, but the way they got made was like rocket science to me. I had no idea, and no desire to learn in some ways, because it seemed like no fun at all.
I wanted to access that vibe through voice or through soft guitar or stuff like that. Which is kind of how Chairlift started, later on. We didn't know anything about electronics but liked that vibe and just worked with what we had, and what we knew how to do. And we were real slackers, like we didn't read the manuals or go on the blogs, like “How did they get that sound? How does Aphex Twin do that? What kind of modulator are they using?” Like, nothing.
So that kind of ethereal but electronic but also kind of Medieval sound – you feel like that led to Chairlift in some way?
Or at least to the musical aesthetic that I had and will always have. Also at that time I was really into science. I have always been really into science, biology in particular, and I wanted to be a marine biologist, or a biology major. That's why I ended up applying to school in Colorado in the first place – I wanted to study biology. And in the meantime I got caught up studying art in Belgium, and was like, “That's all I want to do now.”
How did you end up in Belgium?
I applied to a couple schools and I only got into my safety, Colorado, and I was really upset about that. The prospect of going out to the land of beer drinking jocks kind of freaked me out. And since my stepdad's Belgian, he suggested, “Listen, why don't you take a year off? You should go to school there and learn French for a year.” Like, “Get out of this meat-grinder path that you're in, get some interesting experiences, grow up a little bit and reapply to school.”
So I did, I went to art school there. It was a really shitty school and they let me shadow for free for a year. And that was great, cos I was going to school with like gutter-punks and hippies and it was perfect. That's kind of where everything started, cos when I got there I was really in like, my suburban mindset, you know?
The kids I went to art school with were all like – kind of the equivalent of Williamsburg, but because Belgium's so close to Africa, there's a lot of African culture there. So the equivalent of hippies is kind of like, “world people” – like the girls I went to school with wore turbans and shit like that.
I've noticed that in Europe.
Yeah – I kind of didn't get it at first, but I had a turban phase for a while.
Did you feel like having a stepfather who was Belgian kind of gave you a European influence when you were growing up?
He became part of our family when I was a sophomore in high school, so he was kind of a new addition to our family. But I was raised with a really international background. Both my parents were travelers and can speak more languages than you can count on one hand, so I was always raised around the understanding that there's tons of other cultures out there, that we're one of many. I think going to school in Colorado I got real culture shock, cos kids I met there would talk about other countries as if they were brands or exotic gimmicks that exist in terms of the restaurants around here and not as like, viable options for life in the world.
So it wasn't a big shock to move to Belgium in that sense. It was more just being alone that was awesome. Like, not having a solid group of friends for the first four months I spent a ton of time alone as a complete night owl. I'd wake up at three PM and stay up til seven or eight in the morning, and that was my daily schedule.
And were you being really creative?
Yeah, I was kind of allowing myself to just obsess about things for the first time. Because being in a high school situation, you're always supposed to be on the academic track, and for the first time I was doing whatever I wanted. I think a lot of kids aren't given the chance to do that, and if more people with creative tendencies were allowed to really obsess about things in an uncontrolled environment, they'd discover what they're into really quickly.
For a while I started hanging out with this other American girl that I met there named Caroline, which was so fucked up because it was like two American Carolines running around in Balfour together! She was half-Swiss and her family was ridiculously rich and she was into fashion and I remember there'd be these nights when we'd go to the weird mixers or balls that they had there together.
She'd take me to the back room of her apartment in her family's building, and she'd have a room of unworn black tie dresses, like designer shit with tags still on. It was so intense, like I remember one time cutting a $10,000 tag off a dress and putting it on and wearing it out. We got to this ball and we had drunk so much champagne by the time we got there that we couldn't talk to anyone. We went to this back patio where they had all these topiaries and fountains and sat in our dresses and smoked cigarettes and stared at the fountain all night.
And then one day I got put across the table from a guy who was talking to me about metal. I didn't speak a lot of French, but we totally bonded, and started hanging out, and then we ended up making a band together and I never hung out with any of the other kids again, and that was it.
I started hanging out with a bunch of guys that were like twenty-seven and twenty-eight and I was eighteen, so I felt like their little sister. Oh my God, it was great. And they were all like SUPER skinny – never ate, never shaved, chain-smoking, never slept. They were all musicians, they were serious jazz musicians.
Were they into drugs at all?
They got stoned a lot, but as far as hard drugs, you know – they didn't touch that. It was like a nice, soft kind of musician circle that I got abducted into pretty quickly. I spent most of my time over at their place.
So I was also curious about what it was like when you and Aaron and Patrick first started playing, or first met.
The two of them never met in Colorado. I was in a band with Patrick and then I was in a band with Aaron. And then my band with Aaron and my relationship with Aaron moved to New York, where Patrick had also moved, completely by coincidence. And then I ran into Patrick at Union Square and I was like, “Oh, hey, I didn't know you lived here now, my band's playing at Cake Shop tomorrow night, you should come.” And then he came and was like, “I wanna join.”
So it was just you and Aaron at first?
Yeah.
And was it the same material?
Yeah. “Bruises,” we were playing. “Garbage,” “Don't Give a Damn.” Those were the three that made it on the album. It was really twee – like really, really folky twee songs.
Was there a Colorado scene you were part of?
There wasn't. We were trying to influence the Colorado scene and make our own niche of an underground scene, cos we were both really frustrated by how many music snobs there were around and how little of a scene there was to actually be snobby about.
Did you guys come together on like, mutual love for certain things or music or books?
It was more of a vibe. Like, we were both really into subtlety. We were both really into prettiness. We were into things that were handmade, or analog. We were both really into nostalgia. We were both into charm – things like that. We were both into soft voices and, you know, intimate music. So that's kind of how the project started. I feel like even as big and loud as our shit gets, which isn't that loud in the grand scheme of things, that same kind of sleepiness always persisted.
You talk about metal all the time, and I just wonder if you ever want to bring any of that into what you're doing with Chairlift.
I'm not into the fast or aggressive aspects of metal. I'm interested in the more mysterious aspects of it. Like, the side that verges almost on spiritual, whether it's with the primal beats or the gothic aesthetic or the romance that's around it. Even the kind of attitude it has in relation to other genres of music – like, it just doesn't care. I've always been into that.
There's no other genre that has drumming as precise and intricate as metal. I mean, maybe jazz. But there's so much intensity in metal drumming, which I've always been really into. I guess that's it – like, the kind of mysterious droning.
Also the mathy aspects of metal is really cool. I was really into “mushroom prog” for a while when I was in Belgium, and I went into it knowing exactly how cheesy and bad it was and thinking that was cool. It was like watching a cartoon.
And there's totally that same badness – and I don't mean “bad” as in badass, I mean “bad” as in corny as hell – that runs through, whether it's Black Metal or Nu Metal – all of it. There's the total gimmick of it, which I'm willing to throw out the window immediately, but at the very core it's kind of a hymn, and it's kind of like a war chant, all of which is an ancient thing. So I'm into that.
I know a lot's changed for you and the band over the last year. What's the touring like for you now?
While I was still in school, touring was like this fun thing that we got to brag about. It was like a road-trip, it was a vacation, it was an adventure. And now we have to tour even if we don't want to. We've planned it so far ahead, and we might want to be home working on stuff here, making new material or hanging out with friends, but we have the nonstop touring schedule ahead of us.
One of the things I've heard you say is that when you're away you don't have anything that's secret or private and that you go out of your way to make ridiculous things secret…
I don't know about things that are ridiculous, but I have a tendency to horde like, private tendencies. Like, the time that I get in the bathroom at night – that's pretty sacred, cos it's the only time of day that I get to actually be alone. So I'll let all the guys use the bathroom first and then let them go to bed, and then I have it for like an hour. I can take a bath, or I'll take long showers.
Sometimes I'll bring my journal in there with me. Sometimes I'll have my Ipod in there. Sometimes I'll just camp out on the floor in a towel and just hang out sending text messages or writing down ideas from the day, or like – just grooming. Just kind of getting in touch with yourself at the end of the day – things like that.
That sounds like a good ritual.
Yeah, I mean, it's not one that I can do every day. It usually happens a couple times a week. Sometimes it's embarrassing, if there's a new tour manager that we're with or something and I'm sharing a room with him and I'm like, “I don't want him to see that I'm in the bathroom for an hour!” So that gets kind of funny.
You have to share rooms with dudes a lot?
Every night.
Is that hard to be the only girl?
Yeah, it's a little weird. It's kind of an identity crisis because sometimes I feel like one of the boys and sometimes I don't. And sometimes it's good not to feel like one of the boys, like it has its perks once in a while. I get a little more leverage in decision-making. If I'm like, “No, I do not want to eat at Arby's!” you know, because I'm the only lady in the convoy, they're like, “Alright, out of respect for her….” But if Patrick or Aaron said that, everyone would be like, “Suck it up, dude! Get a burger and deal with it.”
I recently read a book about My Bloody Valentine, about the making of Loveless. It was written by Mike McGonigal, and put out by this publishing company 33 1/3 that just does a book about seminal records – they're short but they have some awesome information in there. Kevin Shields was talking about how he always liked to have two guys and two girls in the band, and having equal balance of masculine and feminine energy, and I was like, “Yeah, I totally agree with that.” And you can hear it on their record too – it kind of sounds otherworldly but in a way that you need both genders to channel and not just one.
Yeah, I think a lot of people also think of that as a record people have sex to, so that makes that really interesting – the pairings or whatever.
Totally! It's a very sexual record. Yeah – I totally wish there was another girl in the band, but as far as staying in rooms, it gets a little weird. Sometimes I feel like when it comes to packing, like if there were other girls in the band I'd feel okay about packing more or bringing more clothes along.
Because you don't want to be the diva…
Exactly. I want to pack just as lightly as they do and be just as mobile, and just as tough – and, you know, not fussy.
Have you had fun partying in the towns you've been to?
Yeah, I'm really picky about what nights I'll allow myself to go all out on. If you want to, it's always there, but a lot of nights it'll end up being like, looking for the party all night or waiting for the right people to show up. You end up sick and tired the next morning, and you have to sing and your voice isn't all there. I like to wait for the night that feel really electric and kind of explosive and exciting and just wait to go out on those nights.
Where has that happened?
We had a really fun night out in London, like a week ago. It was fashion week and our publicist invited us out to this Henry Holland party. It was thrown in this really big, kind of meatpacking-district-style club. The whole thing was chandeliers and purple lighting and like, big marble dance floor. It was so over the top and everyone was dressed very predictably fashiony, you know, very London – like very dark – and we had just played a show, and I was wearing this really big baggy tee shirt and soccer shorts and I put stilettos on with it.
I'm sure you looked amazing.
I got a kick out of it. Columbia had given us a bunch of champagne, so we took the champagne with us to the party in my bag and popped it in the middle of it. We ended up running into some friends, so we were rolling with a small crew. Kanye West was there – and this is the funny part, because we had just released our “Evident Utensil” video, which was supposed to be like the first Datamosh video ever –
Datamosh?
It's a kind of key-frame based editing that scrambles the information in a really organic way, so it looks like the frames are morphing into each other – like your screen is getting crunched. And it's not like normal pixilation, cos it's movement-based, so it imitates the way the people on the screen are moving. So it's really psychedelic.
The same guy that worked on the MGMT videos did the video for us, so since Ray didn't get to use the technique with MGMT, he was like, “Alright, let's do a Chairlift video with this technique, we'll put the flag on the moon to be the first Datamosh video.” But Ray had also been working with Kanye West, so Kanye's team learned this technique. And then Kanye's team was using the technique to do the Kanye video, so it became a race.
In the end Ray won, and our video came out like four days before Kanye's did. But this whole heated blog-battle started, like, “Which video uses it better?” And it was on the front of Spin.com for a week, it was like a vote, like Chairlift vs. Kanye, which video is the better Datamosh.
What did people vote on?
I don't know. When I was there, we were winning, but to me the whole thing is hilarious, because those two videos should not be up for competition in any sense. But Kanye wrote about it on his blog. He was like, “We had to rush the production of this, cos we heard there was another video out.” And fucking, why did you even bother because you didn't win? You should have just kept it under wraps and finished it and done a really good job.
What does it feel like to feel like Kanye West is competing with you?
Well, I was psyched to shake his hand and laugh about it with him, so I went up to him, and he gave me the, “Hi, fan! Nice to meet you, I know you love me,” smile. And I was like, “Hey, I'm Caroline from Chairlift! We did the other Datamosh video.”
And he takes off the sunglasses and steps back and slowly looks me up and down and nods in recognition as he remembers - like, “Oh, this is the girl from the video.”
And he was like, “Oh. OH YEAH…” and just bolts. No explanation or anything. I was kind of making the face like, “Isn't it crazy we're both here?!” And he just splits. You'd think that he'd have a sense of humor about it. But at the same time, of course he hates us. Of course he must be like, “God, stupid hipster motherfuckers from Brooklyn.” I thought it was really hilarious that ANY of that happened.
Are there places where you really love the youth culture particularly?
I wish we had more time to get involved with the youth culture. I love Paris. We had a really great time in Paris. We DJed with Women, and Crystal Antlers, who were all there. So it was funny, connecting with these two bands, one from Vancouver and one from San Francisco. It was a really small club, kind of like the equivalent of Union Pool, like that kind of hipster crowd. And we just DJed til really late, playing the funniest R&B, like Bone Thugs N Harmony and Mariah Carey, and everyone was getting down to it.
What's your favorite music to play when you DJ?
I really like 80s music. Or R&B. That's pretty much it. I love playing my friends' shit when I DJ, too. Like whether or not people know it, I just like to see how they react.
What's it like to be in a place as exciting as Paris or London and have people know your singles and you're more famous than you are at home?
It's awesome. I've never had anything short of an amazing time in Paris. I wish we could stay there longer and enjoy it but we're always in a rush. Our first time playing Paris, we played this place called the Showcase, which is this big venue underneath the Champs Elysee right on the water. It's done completely Rococo – every little detail about it is like a fucking curled swirl of ornamental metal, and painted white. Like, chandeliers – it's super beautiful.
The particular night we played was being thrown by Nokia, which made it really weird because they hired these interior designers that came and put in all these big, super-slick, kind of “sushi lounge” pink lights and amorphic couches and it was SO cheesy. So the combination of the Nokia interior design with the underground French stonewalls and iron trellises and shit made for a really weird vibe.
And then everyone was over-perfumed and over-made up and wearing clothes that were slightly too tight, with heels that were slightly too high for my New York taste. It was really decadent and really fun. And I remember we got shitfaced and I found myself barefoot in thirty-degree weather with a bottle of champagne and this white, glittery beaded dress, running around by the water being like, “WE'RE ON TOUR, MOTHERFUCKERS!!!” It was a really fun moment.
That's awesome.
It was intense. Berlin was really fun. This guy Ari took us around to a bunch of squat parties when we were there, cos Berlin has like a vestigial anarchist kind of squat party scene. And I think the way real estate works there a lot of places are being run in a really anarchist way – like illegal bars, illegal venues. But it's totally accepted and not policed. So we kind of went from warehouse to squat, from warehouse to squat.
All they listen to there is electronic music – like, trancy, electronic dance music. And the kids there know their shit. I don't know any of the quote-unquote “songs” they play, but they insert a new like, zipping synth sound into it and people would go nuts. They'd be like, “I love that song!!!” And I'd be like, “Oh, shit, okay, you mean that two-second sample that just got inserted into the rotation? Sure.”
But it was really fun. Kids dance SO hard and for so long there, so we bounced around from one party to another to another, getting wasted. And the last stop of the night, I ended up splitting off with some friends who are all kind of like cool American kids who have relocated to Berlin, and they invited me to this abandoned mansion party.
We walked up to this little shack with a gate in front of it, and there was a candle in the shack, and this guy appears, and he was like, “Hi, are you on the list?” And they were like, “We are but she's not.” And he GRILLED me – you know, he didn't want to let me in. And I notice on the shack there's a fucking MGMT sticker – like a picture of Andrew and Ben. And I laughed so hard – I was like, “Whether or not you let me in this is hilarious that I ended up here.”
But he finally let us in, and he let us through the little gate, and it was an abandoned mansion that had been taken over as a venue. The walls were crumbling, they had set up a bar, and the whole house was just like, decrepitude. All the walls were peeling, it stank, and there was just this throbbing electronic music coming from the top floor.
We walked up, and it was just beautiful. The kids had filled it with lilies, and candles in the chandeliers. And everyone was dancing, and having the most amazing time. It just smelled like fragrant sweat of beautiful young people. Everyone was dancing. I ended up staying there and dancing until the sun came up. It was me and a crowd of like, ten techno-head Berliners dancing until the sun came up, and then we just left. And I walked back to the hotel, trying to figure out where I was going without GPS, and then had breakfast and left.
