BORN
CURIOUS
By Tom Lanham
photos by Nedda Asfari
T
he relationship between art and its
attendant inspiration has been ana-
lyzed countless times over the years.
The French painter Henri Matisse, for
instance, said that the main impetus for
creativity was simply courage, while
author Jack London believed that you had
to hunt it down with a club. Renowned act-
ing coach Stella Adler posited that “Life
beats you down and crushes the soul, and
art reminds you that you have one.” A
great point. But leave it to the late advertis-
ing executive, Leo Burnett — creator of
such memorable campaign icons as the
Marlboro Man, the Maytag Repairman,
and Tony the Tiger — to summarize it best
with, “Curiosity about life in all of its
aspects, I think, is still the secret of great
creative people.”
And ex-Chairlift singer Caroline
Polachek (who just played a sold-out show
at Lincoln Hall in Chicago) could not agree
more. Otherwise, she never could have
made Pang, her first official solo album,
whose generous 14 songs fly in the face of
chart-safe convention and run an eclectic
gamut that’s daring, demanding, and ulti-
mately downright dazzling. It’s instinctu-
ally experimental music that she is driven
— or creatively compelled — to make.
The disc opens with “The Gate,” with
textures reminiscent of Enya, whose Celtic
catalog Polachek’s parents regularly pla-
cated her with as a rambunctious child.
Next comes the title track, an Atari-pinging
thumper, which segues into a jittery pedal-
steel augmented “New Normal,” an
acoustic jangler called “Look at Me Now”
that Celine Dion would be proud of, the
conversely sleepy syllables of “Insomnia,”
the Far East filigrees of “Go as a Dream,”
and a playful, finger-popping self-admoni-
tion dubbed “Caroline Shut Up.” Before it
closes on the plush keyboard etudes
“Door” and “Parachute,” the set dips into
the bouncy, wah-ooh-peppered current
single, “So Hot You’re Hurting My
Feelings,” whose video features some truly
idiosyncratic choreography of the cowboy-
booted star — part line dance, part
Bangles/“Walk Like an Egyptian.” It
might not make sense initially, but it’s how
the 34-year old physically interprets her
own music.
If you study this New York-born artist’s
career, she’s been pursuing the Muse down
every last rabbit hole since childhood,
when she grew up in Japan and became
intrigued by that country’s more compli-
cated musical scales. She took up the syn-
thesizer and flexed her voice in various
choirs, and formed Chairlift (originally a
trio, later pared down to just her and
multi-instrumentalist Patrick Wimberly)
while attending the University of Colorado
before moving back to New York. Before
its breakup in 2017, she would release two
separate albums, Arcadia as Ramona Lisa,
and Drawing the Target Around the Arrow, as
simply CEP. Along the way she dove into
other interests: she did an artistic residen-
cy at the Villa Medici in Rome; penned
runway music for several fashion design-
ers; scored dance music that eventually
accompanied a piece by the Dutch
National Ballet, and became so enraptured
by opera, she recently began attending
serious classes with a vocal coach. She also
added her lissome voice to cuts by
SBTRKT, Blood Orange, and Charli XCX,
and even got her song “Take Off” into the
animated feature Duck Duck Goose. By
Pang, working with PC Music mainstay
Danny L. Harle, she was ready to cut loose
and bravely forge new sonic frontiers. And
— as she explains below — a lot of heart,
22 illinoisentertainer.com february 2020
soul, intellect, and good artistic taste went
into it. No Jack London clubs required.
ILLINOIS ENTERTAINER: Aesthetically
speaking, when did you first notice as a
kid that you saw and heard things differ-
ently?
CAROLINE POLACHEK: I think I started
realizing that there were things that I saw
or heard — actually, mostly visual things
— that I wasn’t able to express to people. I
started realizing that at a very young age,
like eight. And, I saw links to those kinds
of feelings in films, and in art, and books,
and these relationships between them and
things that I had experienced in real life
that were kind of on the edge of dreams.
And the way that they could be accessed
reminded me of things that I’d seen in
films and art and stuff like that. And that
was the beginning of me realizing that
there was something very special about
what art was able to do.
IE: How did it assimilate within you and
then come back out in your own art?
CP: You know, there was never a moment
growing up in which I realized that I was
capable of doing that for people. I think it
took me a really long time, like into my
mid-twenties, when I realized that I was
capable of doing that myself. Until that
point, there was an array of images and
experiences — a lot of which were aesthet-
ic experiences — that became very pre-
cious to me and something that I held onto
internally, but not something that I was
able to give to other people because it
seemed too... well, out of reach.
IE: You seem to oversee every aspect of
your work, even down to the Pang cover
photo, where you’re climbing a rope lad-
der. You could be an aerialist on the way
to work, or someone being rescued by
helicopter. You’ve mastered the art of
expressing yourself through all these dif-
ferent mediums.
CP: Ha! I haven’t heard the helicopter one
yet — that’s great. But thank you. I feel like
I haven’t mastered it yet, but I’m getting
closer every year.
IE: When most people watch Lars Von
Trier’s Antichrist film, they’ll probably
never view a millstone the same way
again. But you saw it and picked up on
the operatic score.
CP: Yep. That opening sequence? The
music was so amazing that I just had to go
and find it.
IE: And then you took it to the next level
— you studied opera.
CP: Well, it was actually pretty simple. I’d
always been repelled by opera — so much
about it really turns me off. I think the
more bombastic, floral quality that a lot of
it has, I just find to be over the top. But
there was just something about that piece
that made me think, “Wow — this is what
I’ve always been looking for, and I’ve final-
ly found it. Who wrote this piece, and
where’s the rest of this good shit? And how
do I find the good shit just by Googling
these couple of words that I found?” And
to be honest, I found very few pieces that
put me in that particular state of that
recording. But it made me actually go and
study opera because I thought, “Well,
maybe I can do the thing that I like about
this.”
IE: And how does one go about this?
CP: For me, it was very easy, and I was
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