For her mucky, bold, feminine new album, the singer gets primal.
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Caroline Polachekwasnt out to scandalize the zoo.
A lot of the motifs Im playing with on this record are about using elemental, primal textures.
The elemental vitality that springs up again.
I mean, literally, yes.
Its video begins, she explains, with me having an orgasm on a cracked terracotta floor.
Its deliberately exaggerated, cheeky even, telegraphing a kind of irreverence for which Polachek rarely gets credit.
(For the record, she is five-foot-six.)
When I list these descriptors aloud, she raises her eyebrows.
Pedro captures the contradictions that can exist within women in a very human way, she says.
Its the attitude of a mess rather than the actuality of it.
She wanted the album to sound that way too mucky, bold, feminine, contradictory.
Ive been thinking about how to do my own version of that.
He needs to learn how to be a wild horse, explains one affable staffer.
He doesnt need to know how to be a persons horse.
(Ass cleavage is in for 2023, she jokes.)
Oh, youre really changing!
remarks one of the staff members, visibly alarmed.
Polachek directs and manages like this all day.
You have excellent taste, says the photographer, and Polachek replies, Thanks, queen.
WithDesire,she wanted to unclench that steering wheel a little.
She found the cathartic tone that ties the album together after the 2020 death of her father from COVID-19.
It gave me a spiritual road map to finishing the album.
I appreciate the artisticness, but its not the image we usually portray.
Im not sure if theres something we can do to make it look more … normal?
She gazes at Kurt from the side of the truck, and he pees suddenly, forcefully.
The staff member clears her throat.
Is there any shot it’s possible for you to get with her more clothed or with a jacket?
I look at Kurt, himself nude, quietly wandering the grass with no concept of human shame.
Polachek and the photographer apologize, but the other staffer is not appeased.
I think were done, he says.
No one wants a scandal, she tells me moments later in the bathroom.
I ask where they went.
The Florida Keys, says Polachek, grinning.
Shes diaristic if nothing else.
When Dido FaceTimed her a few days later, I screamed and screen-grabbed it, says Polachek, laughing.
Full disclosure: Im taking my European tour at a loss, she says.
But its worth it for me.
Ive always leaned to the slightly riskier side of reinvestment back into the project than maybe would be wise.
But its because I believe in it.
At the park, a group of elderly hikers ask us if we are doing a school project.
At one point, she swings the carrot cartoonishly and he stops her: Youre doing too much.
As ever, she says.
Polachek displays a casual savviness with social media.
Like any avant-garde artist, she sometimes misses her audience in translation.
I, meanwhile, am this generations Caroline Polachek.
The dunking and memeing began immediately.
I ask if its frustrating to be seen as so self-serious, even humorless.
But maybe people want a more sincere version of me because its easier to process.
Desire, I Want to Turn Into Youis out February 14.
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