Switched on Pop - This Generation's Caroline Polachek

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

From the first seconds of her latest album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, Caroline Polachek asserts that she is truly a once-in-a-generation artist. From her work in the indie band Chairlift to years of behind-the-scenes songwriting, she has worked hard over years to build a stellar music career – culminating in the pop opus Desire, already one of the best rated albums of 2023. On this episode of Switched on Pop, we look at Polachek’s career thus far, and talk to her about the intricacies of her latest. Songs Discussed Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want To Turn Into You Caroline Polachek - So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings Chairlift - Bruises Ramona Lisa - Dominic Beyoncé - No Angel Danny L Harle, Caroline Polachek - Ashes of Love Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek - Tears CEP - Lilian’s Pavilion Caroline Polachek - Pretty in Possible Suzanne Vega - Tom’s Diner DNA remix Caroline Polachek - Welcome to my Island Caroline Polachek - Bunny Is A Rider Caroline Polachek - Smoke Caroline Polachek - Crude Drawing of An Angel Caroline Polachek - Butterfly Net Caroline Polachek - Sunset  Caroline Polachek - Fly To You Caroline Polachek - Hopedrunk Ever Asking Caroline Polachek - Billions Caroline Polachek - Blood And Butter Caroline Polachek - Butterfly Net Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched-on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. One of the things about living in Los Angeles for a long time is that you eventually get jaded on celebrity sightings. It just kind of happens on the day-to-day. Sure.

It's very rare that I get totally starstruck. Uh-huh. But... But then there was the time that you and I were hanging out at our favorite cafe. And do you remember who walked by? Yeah, I do. I know exactly you're talking about. We've seen quite a few celebs there, but I could never forget seeing this tall, elfin, majestic figure floating down the sidewalk in a diaphanous white gown and a woven headpiece. And I grabbed your arm and I was like,

Charlie, that's Carolyn Bollecheck. And that remains the apex of all our celebrity sightings, I think. Absolutely. She is an artist that captivates me. And it's not because of celebrity. I find Caroline Polichick fascinating because she's a once-in-a-generation songwriter, producer, artist, who isn't just a flash in a pan who has arrived suddenly, but rather represents the artist who works hard over years, decades to build a music career. She really finally arrived as a full-blown pop star in her mid-30s. and her music is great, but it has no ends in its depths. You can listen over and over again. She has an album out called Desire I Want to Turn Into You.

It's currently the highest rated new release LP on Metacritic, which is like the roll-up of all of the review sites. I think Caroline's an artist where it makes sense to review some of her work up until this point because it reveals a staggering amount of growth. Great. So where does it all start for Caroline? It didn't start at that cafe in Silver Lake. It goes back to the mid-2000s. She had a Brooklyn-based indie band called Chairlift

with Aaron Fenning and Patrick Wimberley. They had a breakout song in 2008 when Apple picked up for an iPod a device that no longer exists. RIP Nano. Yeah. Apple used their song bruises in an ad, and it brought them mass awareness. I tried to do hands dance for you. I'd try to do heads dance for you. I love that, Charlie. It just like screams Brooklyn post-collegiate musical experimentation. It's got those kind of tinny sense and drums.

But then there's Caroline's ethereal, gorgeous voice. Like that is really what makes this song work, I think. It is the most Brooklyn sound, a sound that was very very. very popular at the time and got Cherileft assigned to Columbia Records. All in all, they put out three albums together. But Caroline Polichek is not just the lead singer of this group. She's also doing things on the side. She co-writes a song for Beyonce called No Angel off of Beyonce's 2013 self-titled album. And she flexes her skills as not just a songwriter and a singer, but also as a producer, by building out a whole solo project under my favorite musical pseudonym ever, Ramona Lisa. in her 2014 project Arcadia, where she records an album almost entirely on a laptop,

including her vocals. She just like sang it into her MacBook. Lofi. Once again, I find Polichek's vocals so striking. And here it's the way she kind of like weaves in between vowels and elongates them in these surprising ways. It's like, you hear her voice and you're like, that's something I haven't quite heard before. Some people even go online and accuse her of using too much auto tune. but she's even gone on the record to show that, no, it's not autotune. Haters will say it's auto tune.

Gotta love that voice. It's stunning. And it really does capture attention. She starts making music with the collective of people around the PC music label. They're that crew that originated in London of people making hyperpop. And she makes a song with Danny El Harle, a member of that crew. They make a song in 2016 called Ashes of Love. She follows it up with a collaboration on Charlie XX's mixtape Pop 2, one of my favorite mixtapes.

Here's the song, Tears. It feels like now she's really straddling the line of like experimental, avant-garde music and just like straight up catchy pop. This is somewhere right on that line. Yeah, and it is definitely not that Brooklyn indie sound anymore. In fact, the band Cherliff that she's a part of, they break up around this time at 2017, and she decides to go out on her own. She's just going to be Caroline Polichick.

The first thing that we get under kind of her name, under her initials, CEP, is an album called Drawing the Target Around the Arrow. It comes out in 2017, and it's a great example of totally disregarding pop. It leads very heavily into the otherworldly, the strange. This is an album made up of entirely sine waves, the purest sound that you can make. This is giving me celestial vibes. It is definitely leaning into the world of the ambient and art music. I think this, including her connection with the PC music,

helps establish her as one of these budding artists in the world of pop music. But that really cements itself in her first proper debut album, PANG. Now I feel like we've pushed the needle a little bit further into the pop world, but there's still like all these weird experimental touches, including the completely psychedelic lyrics themselves. I mean, this is a joy to listen to. a joy to listen to. This is what I love about her, is she straddles these worlds of pop and avant-garde,

and puts her in company with other artists like Bjork or Grace Jones, Yoko Ono, Solange, and Erica Baidu. People have made a lot of comparisons to Kate Bush, to which Caroline Polichick has said, while I realize it's a huge compliment, I'm endlessly fucking annoyed by being told I'm this generation's Kate Bush. She is our generation's Kate Bush. She is an active artist who's topping the charts and is irreplaceable. I, meanwhile, am this generation's Caroline Polich.

Well said. Also, not a good comparison, honestly. They're doing such different things. That says more about our need to be like, oh, there's two women who might sound vaguely similar. Let's say they're the same. I like to think of them potentially being in the same world as being totally idiosyncratic, absolutely themselves, and making music that is pushing boundaries. And this is really the moment in her career where everyone else starts to note it. Off of the album Pange, she's got a song called So Hot, You're Hurting My Feelings. It becomes a viral TikTok hit with a talking heads-like dance. And it's a smash. Yeah, if she's the Carolyn Polichick of our generation, that is the bop of our generation. Oh, I love it. It's really wonderful.

It really helps make her a star. And she basically becomes a pop star during the pandemic. And in this time, she works on her latest album. that's recently been released, Desire I Want to Turn Into You, and leans into the sort of Dadaist approach to songwriting, where she rejects songform, she rejects simple narratives and uses unlikely assemblages of musical references. She really leans into intuition for meaning making. Just like the Dadaist movement emerged out of the destruction of World War II, this album, this album emerges out of the pandemic in a really dark period.

For me, it is a musical salve, which is upbeat. It is deep, but in ways that are not always totally obvious. I think a prime example is the song Pretty Impossible, Track 2 off the album. Okay, first of all, she's singing Dada, so I have to point that out. But I think she's also leading into a really fun. and much-referenced piece of musical material. Tom's Diner by Susan Vega. It even has some of the same vibe of the DNA remix of Susan Vega's track.

Back to the Polichick. I would not have made that Tom's Diner connection, but I'm pretty persuaded. Yeah, the Dada Us might have rejected prior art. She's definitely leaning into some of it. She does so, though, and builds a new world. We get very imagistic lyrics. Time is running out in it. Pity the mayflies in the swimming pool at dawn.

It's like these mayflies are about to come out of the pool. Their life is going to be so short. It's a wistful and strange way to open a song that then takes us in a million different directions. This song rejects your typical verse, chorus form. And instead it's just kind of this vibe that keeps on bending and curving and changing. She introduces a new hook. And then we get the glorious display of Caroline's high register.

From there, the song just keeps expanding and growing and changing. It doesn't have a proper chorus. It goes into a spoken word section. It introduces new, very compelling melodies. Every melody is standalone and interesting in and of itself. It takes on new lyrical frameworks, and it just kind of coasts along on this endless vibe. I hear all that, Charlie, but this is still right on that line of what we would call pop. I mean, this is really accessible and fun to listen to at the end of the day.

Listening to this album of surreal sounds and heartbreaking lyrics, it makes me want to know what it's like to create music that is so multifaceted that exists on this border between pop and fine art. So when we come back, we're going to chat with Caroline Pollich. Spotify, has got a new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera,

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unnotic irresistible. Discover it on today. Hey, I'm Caroline Polichek. I want to

start by asking you about what is the sonic world that you wanted to inhabit on this

album? I got glimses of of this sort of sonic world of this album about a month before the pandemic hit, sketching out a song that became Bunny as a writer. Bunny is a writer, Saddle I can't find her.

Bunny as a writer I made with Danielle Harrell, my co-producer, co-writer across this album, in a studio in L.A. right before I was about to leave on tour, and we were just sneaking in a couple days of writing. and we made this thing that was just really percussive and really dry. You know, barely any reverbs on my voice. Or my voice was sort of leading the polyrhythm.

And the lyrics were completely stream of consciousness. Just sonic, yummy, absurd, sexy, completely resisting narrative. And that song ended up becoming the one I looked back on. You know, of course, I went on tour, pandemic hit, I got COVID, the world shut down. That song sort of stuck in my mind as well. That at least set a sort of tab on where I was going to go next. And I also wrote a song that week that became Smoke, which is these clattering breakbeats almost as of happening from a warehouse next door. Completely opposite sonic picture, really dirty, full of,

reverb, very dense, maximalist, huge vocals. And these two songs sort of sat in this sort of bizarre conversation with each other, because one was bone dry, one was like cavernous concrete reverbs. And yet they both have this kind of manic quality to them. And so from there, the record became like, okay, how do I build a bridge between these two kind of zones? I knew the break beats were going to be in the palette. I knew that the kind of absurd, semi-spoken vocals were going to be in the palette, that the kind of itchy bass, the kind of physicality of this of Bunny as a Rider was going to be there. So that was really the assignment was kind of building a bridge between those two songs.

Can you describe what that bridge sounds like? I get really inspired by the idea of connecting two dots because it provides you with a set of limitations, working with a infinite plugins and infinite music reference points as we now have being on streaming and online, I find limitations like really, really comforting and useful. So it became a game of seeing if I could let that kind of itchy, absurd quality of songs like Bunny find their way into a kind of more dreamy space, you know, maybe a more kind of floaty space. I think songs like fly to you or, let's see, pretty impossible kind of. created a bridge maybe between those two songs.

But I also have a tendency to stray very far from an assignment. And all these really kind of creepy, mournful ballads snuck onto the album. And, yeah, and sometimes you just got to go with the flow. And you've made an album specifically about desire. Why desire? Well, this album is like decidedly not a concept album. I got almost all the way through making it before I chose the title, which is of course course one of track one.

And I chose that title for it because of all the inbuilt paradoxes. Desire I want to turn into you. I want to turn into the subject of my desire. That's fucking psychotic. Like being so in love with someone that you want to become them, that's terrifying if someone actually tells you that.

You run. But at the same time, you flip it, desire, I want to turn into you on, turn into desire itself, almost like this urge to like dissolve, to become non-physical and just become pure velocity, pure momentum, pure force, pure, I don't know, electricity. And then, of course, desire, I want to turn into you. I want to be held. I want to turn into you, which is so sweet and tender and basic.

And I just, I loved it. I think every song on the album sat somewhere nicely within those triangles of meaning. And so it was a good house for the album, that phrase. But the more I started thinking about the word desire, and especially as it like pertains to the idea of will or like free will, desire started becoming for me like physics, like the force that pulls us through the world. It desire is what makes us do anything. Is it fate? Is it free will?

I'm not sure. But I love this link between just the kind of idea of sort of pure flow with this music, the velocity of it, the momentum of it, the even the headlessness of a lot of the lyrics, as just being dedicated to that feeling of desire. and even getting lost in whether or not we have any choice around it. There is actually a theme on the album of feeling, overcoming disillusioned with the idea that I can cheat forgetfulness. Songs like crude drawing of an angel.

Or butterfly net. Being about this me trying to keep things, to keep feelings, to keep memories. and even sunset to a certain degree and then realizing the futility of it that nothing can be kept. And then kind of pushing that idea even one step further on a song like Hope drunk ever asking

where even our experiences aren't communicable to future generations at all talking about death essentially with lyric like they'll find our bones and yet they won't. Even the versions of ourselves that we document will not be understood in the future. So the idea of legacy, of preservation, being an impossibility. And then of course that being side by side with songs like I Believe, which is really about immortality. I'm grappling with a lot of ideas that don't align with each other on this album. Yeah, and I hear it as well in the closing and just evoking the idea of building.

billions can at times feel completely overwhelming. I hear that song as really truly singing to the world. It forces me to think about concepts that are far larger than I can handle. I mean, Billions is sort of the be here now answer to all of the other kind of questions and worries and lamentations on the album. It's sort of just like, well, we're part of the symphony, part of the multitudes, and that's that. Just get on with it and enjoy it.

you made an album of pure sign waves to get outside the world of genre. You have a real command of genre. And on Desire, I want to turn into you. There are a lot of references to 90s, dance, and pop music. And I was wondering how using musical references helps you communicate specific feelings or ideas on this album. I think a lot about archetypes, even more than I think about genre. mostly because I'm not really a completest, and I feel like I've never fully done my homework

in terms of historical reference or like having quote-un-coked in somewhere at the moment. You know, I think like I tend to sort of have a very personal and bizarre experience of these different genres and cultural moments. So I was thinking a lot about actually like very womanly archetypes in music and different versions of diva archetypes that I grew up with in the late 90s, early 2000s as a kid,

and like the deep stamp that artists like Celine Dion and Whitney Houston, Tony Braxton, Jewel, these kinds of artists held in culture at the time, which is, you know, they're very comforting, but extremely powerful. There was a kind of rawness there. And also this, like, hold that that kind of music had on the mainstream that I think doesn't really exist as Elaine anymore. And I was just thinking about playing with that kind of diva archetype in my own way. Can you tell me about how you feel embodying those archetypes in a inspirations help inform the vocal performance on this album. It actually was like so, so not only crucial to the vocal performance, but actually very crucial to the writing and like the sense of what the whole project was trying to do. I think because I came up in the Brooklyn indie scene and like specifically with like the stamp that what I was doing was like outsider or alternative. I tried to do hands dance for you. I always felt that my what I was trying to do was like react to the status quo

or kind of create new paths outside it. And what I realized is that I felt that there was this thing missing from the dead center of mainstream pop, which was this kind of, I can only really describe it by the word heart. There was a kind of like heart that that kind of music I was speaking about earlier kind of really embodied in this way that felt like it was just dead center, really, really grounded, very kind of. of open and pure somehow. And I kind of just felt like, all right, this is my seventh album. I can play

with vocal flexing and I can play with new sounds, but ultimately it has to have that anchor, it has to have that heart, and it has to kind of fill that void for me personally, that so many of these kinds of women artists filled for me growing up. You mentioned some very powerful divas. People, when you hear their songs, they're undeniably connected to that vocalist. Like, nobody else can really do those songs. And one of the things I hear on this album are songs that are uniquely your own, where your vocal styling is idiosyncratic, and the way that you use your extremely well-trained voice doesn't sort of conform to a lot of trends in contemporary pop songwriting.

I think about how vibrato is, like, not very popular in contemporary songwriting. And you use all kinds of wild flips of jumping between different voices in a way that was much more prominent in that era. It seems that you really took a lot of inspiration in terms of the freedom in which you could approach your vocals. I guess I feel pretty lucky in that I didn't even have to think about it that much in terms of what I'm doing being different. As anyone who kind of hangs out around me regularly knows, I hum all the time without realizing I'm doing it. even mid-conversation, not even a way where I think I realize I'm doing it, it can even come off as rude. It's just this, I guess the way I describe it is like, it's almost like if a guitarist had a guitar surgically attached their body,

how could you not be fiddling with it all the time? And I am fiddling with it all the time without realizing it. And I guess coming up with shapes that feel pleasurable and fun. And I guess I think of it a lot like skiing or windsurfing or something, that I can just sort of ricochet and bounce off of chords and not only chords that I'm singing over, but even just kind of reacting to the way my voice feels that day. I guess at this point, the way I sing is kind of going deeper and deeper down my own relationship with singing

and less and less to do with what anyone else is doing. I wonder how much you, when you make a song, how much attention you're paying to the way that the human ear listens to and processes words. I'm thinking of the way and fly to you, the title sounds like, I flatter you. Yeah. There's just countless examples of these like

these words that collide with each other and feel the sound have multiple meanings. Honestly, it's something that I really wish I could get better at is diction because I get so hooked on the way certain vowels and consonant sound and the kind of brightness that certain vowels carry as opposed to others. Like, you know, even in the studio, I'd flagged the concern that fly to you sounded like flatter you. But when I tried singing it fly, fly to like bring that British like, it just sounded so wrong. So I was like, you know, it's the title of the song. People can read. They'll figure out what it is.

So there are these compromises that I'm making. And I, you know, I wish I had that skill of having it be out the gate. I mean, I was listening to the new Lana record and I was like, God damn. She has such natural sense of diction. Like, you don't miss a single word that comes out of her mouth. Yeah, it's something I'd like to get better at, but I'm kind of a sonic animal for me. It's the sonics first. There are a lot of references that I hear. They come for me and some might be intentional and others might be just things that I'm putting together, whether it's sort of flourishes of Enya's digital synthesizers, obviously the Suzanne Vega reference, which I think, you know, sounds like a much more intentional nod. Obviously, you're working with Dido, you know, a real

hero of 90s sort of chill-out music. Fly to You sounds like a song that could be played at Cafe Del Mar. And a lot of the music really made me think about the era of the chill-out room in the 90s that was made where the DJing setup was it could just go in any direction. And you would hear a combination of drum and bass. You would hear New Age bells. You would hear ambient Brian Eno sort of sounds. And all of these things would mix together across BPMs. They were sort of the open format. I was wondering if that history and that if you were intentionally drawing from sort of that open format of dance music that existed from that time or if it's maybe a little bit more in the subconscious. Well, I guess I was a child when all that stuff was actually happening, but we can't

help but absorb things sort of transdermally through like, you know, vague impressions from MTV and hearing things out at cafes or cool shops or whatever and just getting these like, you know, impressions of what this parallel kind of culture world is. But ultimately, I think that kind of chill out genre and kind of template that you're describing went the same way as a lot of ambient music. I'm a deep fan of I listen to mostly ambient music. That culture, truly it got completely consumed by, or not consumed, subsumed by really kind of sinister commercial uses. When you hear that chill out stuff now, it just sounds like you're in the Virgin Airport lounge. Like it became the sound of people selling you things. So I think there's, I personally

can't even shake the sort of deep, but I think of that moment as a genre, I have a, I still have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to like, oh, this is, this became a commercial language. And maybe time is the only thing that can kind of let that, you know, time and then irony and then post-irony is the thing that can kind of let it shed that skin. But even ambient music, you know, like, just new versions of commercial use and commercial rebranding will never stop. So I think it's really about cherry picking, finding the couple things that speak to you and just sort of letting them bloom into their own micro genre in your head and kind of ignoring the macro. Yeah, we're the same age, and I have distinct memories of growing up. and watching MTV or whatever, just basic cable, and there would be television advertisements for ambient music. I think one reviewer talked about your album was like being like Pure Moods,

which was a big... Don't make me get out my Pure Moods T-shirt, because I have one. No way. This music became very commercial. If you wanted to hear digital synthesizers, dulcimer, and bagpipe, the place that you were going to do it was going to a big box store and there would be these ambient collections of vague mood music. Yeah. In some ways, they were the precursor to, I think, the sort of functional-based listening that streaming has really brought much more to the forefront and really changed the way.

A lot of people listen to listen. Wallpaper. Yeah. And all of those sounds that I just described are also sounds that I hear on your album. It feels as though you're reclaiming them for some reason. Well, I mean, the toolkit's a toolkit, right? Like, we've seen a lot of, like, the sounds that were initially associated with Trap, for example. get extrapolated into these like chill out genres as well.

So no one's safe. So you're playing with a lot of different references. You're playing with your voice. One of the things I notice is that in a lot of songs, you're subverting traditional song formats while sticking to pop instrumentation. I think songs like pretty impossible and billions and things that seemingly don't have choruses

that sort of cycle into constant new hooks. Why try new forms? What do they do for you? And how do they communicate new things for you in the music? In a lot of cases, it comes out of frustration, actually. I had started feeling like specific moments in traditional pop song structures, for example, snapping from chorus one down to a verse two. You know, verse two being important because it's something you've heard.

It's the first time something repeats traditionally in a song, right? That moment started feeling a little suss to me, where I was like, okay, this is the moment we reveal the structure. and I started getting cringed out by moments like a verse two or a chorus three. Like I don't need to hear a third chorus, at least in the traditional way that a chorus operates, the kind of like triumphant, bam kind of moment. It's on. By the time I hear a third one, I'm ready to move to the next track. And that's not, I think, because I'm an ADD listener.

It's because I feel a sense of manipulation of what like a third, at least, anthemic style chorus is trying to do. And I resist, I guess, the feeling of being manipulated a bit. So I started thinking about, what does my ear want to hear? You know, Pretty Impossible is my favorite song on the record precisely because it doesn't have verses or choruses. You just enter it and flow. It was actually really difficult to write lyrics to that song

without any structure to hang on to. Because I wanted the lyrics to also resist narrative as well, to feel like you're daydreaming or like you're distracted. And to be tasty and visual, but without creating the story, And it was so hard. It was so, so hard. But ultimately so rewarding and definitely something I'll go back into again. Yeah, you say, I mean, you like to work within limitations. They provide us not only as listeners, but also as creators with some structure in which to work against. Yeah. So here you have intentionally given yourself a task of, okay, no structure. How do you experience that music differently? It feels more like weather. It feels more like thinking. But of course, I like to think wherever you're adding.

a lot of chaos, you have to balance it with a lot of regularity on the other side. So, for example, there's only two chords in that song. The dynamics, there's almost no big dynamic shifts. You just kind of enter it and you get that beat. So yeah, I think balancing it out like that so that you can get lost in the song without being snapped around too much as essential. I think you're also in good company amongst other people, even within Hot 100 pop that are rejecting the second verse, even the third chorus.

I think a lot of post Malone songs maybe have no second verse. It's just like a whole new structure, new hooks. Oh, 100%. I also can't claim to be alone. And I feel like especially the world of hip hop, I mean, the structures have been completely exploded the last, you know, five, 10 years. So I feel definitely indebted. I mean, also even in a very mainstream radio space, you know, like,

Sicko Mode, for example, one of the craziest structures of the decade. And that song was like a massive, massive hit. I don't know. I think everyone's everyone's little itchy right now. You're always playing at the various boundaries of popular music. Where do you want the frontier of pop music to be going? Oh, I have no

agenda for pop music. It's supposed to be headless. Just let it rip. I love that. The album is the top-rated album on Metacritic for the year. It's a baby year. We're only in March. How does that feel from especially from where you were

a couple years ago writing it to you are today performing it. How does it feel to have those accolades? You know, I heard someone say recently that, and like, this is, I'm not trying to be shady here, but I heard someone say recently that music criticism is not, it's not a review of the album you've just made. It's a review of your career up till that point. And the way people process music has everything to do with the context you've set up for it and what you make it mean. And when I released Hang, I think, you know, I hadn't really set up much context. I was like, the girl from that band. And what's her last name again?

They had the iPod commercial, right? It was like there wasn't a lot of context set up for what I was doing, and it took me a few years, you know, and not just me, also my fans, to build this kind of zone within culture for it. And I do feel like that is actually what's being reviewed now and not the music. And maybe we'll see this album reviewed when I make the next one. But either way, regardless of how syndical would take that might be, I'm extremely grateful because admittedly,

like when you're making a record, you do realize that part of what you're playing with is the tension you've created before. And I was definitely setting out to break a lot of that tension. Like Pang, my last album was a very pristine, very crystalline, very feminine, very narrative record. And I wanted to kind of bust open a lot of that precision. I wanted the structures, I wanted the attitude, the graphic design to all kind of become really gooey and unpredictable and not make sense and kind of fall apart a bit. And the fact that that gesture seemed to have landed with people was a massive relief for me because I, you know, I realized that the gesture of creating this understandable thing had landed, and I didn't know

if taking it apart would land. And it seemed like people were willing to go with me there. So that was like very emboldening and exciting. Yeah, I hadn't listened to PING in a minute, and I went back and listened this morning. And I was sort of surprised, having spent so much time with your current album, it's just like the clarity of narrative that exists in some songs, whereas here I do feel I'm a bit in more of a dream space. There's not always deliberate meaning that is immediately obvious to a listener. There might be for you, I'm not sure. I wonder why embody that space.

You know, you're talking about bridging different sounds that first inspire the album. What does it do for you to work in a little bit more of an abstract, lyrical place? Well, I guess I'm kind of coming at it from two angles. One is that I really believe in the creative process that happens for the listeners in the listener's mind when you present people with two things that don't match or two things that don't seem to directly have a direct this than this. I think people fill in the gaps and I as a listener fill in the gaps with extremely evocative, extremely personal images, ideas, and connections. And I think you can create these paths through the woods lyrically that people are in a lot of. build in a much more intricate and beautiful way than you could ever build with words.

So I think by setting people up for these kind of abstract journeys, there's a kind of richer and stranger way of operating as a kind of in relationship with the listener and also trusting them and trusting their own internal creativity. But at the same time, I also felt like we're coming out of a moment in culture where there was so much authenticity being jammed down everyone's throats and the conflation with narrative, especially personal narrative and identity being caught up in the idea of authenticity. I think the dream world and the subconscious is the seat of authenticity. And I'd also been kind of getting into, you know, Jungian analysis and thinking a lot about symbols and archetypes, especially, you know, throughout and exiting the pandemic and what catharsis

looks like and what vitality looks like and what the role of the artist is. And it seemed to me obvious that telling my personal story wasn't really an answer to any of that right now. I think in listening to it this morning was maybe my seventh or eighth listened through the album. And in a funny way, the meaning started to make sense. But I knew that the meaning that I was mapping onto was one, was I was sort of drawing the map and that everyone was drawing their own map. Exactly. And that's what I want. That's what I want. People love to chill out. Chilling out is like a basic human need and desire.

But it's not one that I'm trying to interface with at all on this album. I'll say that. I think there's a lot of potency in those tools and room for them to be like, I don't know. Just played with in a kind of spicier way. So there it is. I appreciate you chatting with me. I think you've achieved something really special here and that you've put me to places that are at times completely unknowable and abstract

act and yet highly specific feelings, which not a lot of pop music does. So thank you, Caroline. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Charlie. It's just great and so much fun. I'm such so honored to be on. Thank you. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Art Chong, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr, ad break music by Zach Tenorio of Arc Iris. Our executive producers in the Shot Kerwa, or member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes on switchdonpop.com, where we've also got some fun show merch. We'll be back again next Tuesday with another episode, and until then, thanks for listening.