I went to art school, and I studied drawing and video art, and I've always approached music so visually as a result that I found it really difficult in the past to kind of hand off music to another director, 'cause it just ends up being this kind of mid-zone where it's nobody's vision, really.
Caroline Polachek
But synthesizer music has been accepted as emotional for long enough that it isn't a huge reach, conceptually, to think of a fake voice as 'emotional', especially since there's a human composing it.
My first concert was Third Eye Blind.
So, anyway, I think the format of love songs for me stopped becoming about people and started becoming about life.
I guess I've gotten older and more sentimental, and I've realized that the love song is just the modern equivalent of a devotional.
I kind of think that's the best way to operate; even when I'm in sessions writing with other artists, I'm always pulling from the kind of emotions that are the most raw in my own life and offering them up in the studio.
I remember thinking that writing love songs was stupid and cliche, and that my job was to not write love songs, because there are enough of them.
My parents got divorced when I was really young and I was a very hyperactive kid, so both parents independently would play Enya at the house to calm me down and soothe me as a kid.
Music feels so environmental to me, especially the process of working with synths or mixing. I started thinking about music as a psychological landscape as well. It's a landscape of the mind.
I like listening to ambient music, especially in very scenic places because I think it allows for the most freedom of thought.
But I wanted the karaoke-style lyrics in our music videos for two reasons: first, cause nobody has lyric booklets anymore, and when I was growing up, lyric booklets were like little bibles. I want people to be able to access our lyrics without having to go to some gnarly website with banner ads.
One of the goals we had when making 'Moth' was to have the vocals sound less treated and less processed than we'd ever had before, to just let them be exposed and very audible.
I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.
When I was in middle school, I loved Egyptian mythology.
A lot of the music comes out of that conflict of wanting this other thing and feeling guilty about wanting it, and then it guiding me somewhere despite my kicking and screaming.
I guess this song isn't about anything necessarily sad, but it makes me sad just because it makes me think about how inaccessible the past is, but it's called 'Boy Child' by Scott Walker.
I think as I get older, I'm just going to start making smooth, new age music - no joke.
If you want to know what the DJ is playing, just ask. You don't have the right to stick your head in front of my screen as if you're an expert leaning over the shoulder of the apprentice.
I think women are taught in the music industry that once you're 35, you've expired, and I'm here to prove that factually incorrect.
Young people have realised that an artist is in charge of what they're doing - this crazy cynicism that artists were puppets has disappeared.
I want to keep different options for different futures open all the time.
With each project I'm always pushing for clarity.
When I came up in a band - not just in a band, but a kind of underground DIY community - there was such a clear cut distinction between what pop was and what not pop was in very simplistic terms.
I think there was a real lane built for indie bands during the time when Chairlift came up.
I was actually really stunned that my label suggested 'Door' as the single to lead with, as it's such a long and winding song.
Panging is the kind of sharp pain you feel inside when you're reminded of some kind of unattended need or something that you've neglected.
And a pang is ultimately private. It's not a thing that gets broadcast to the world; it's a kind of internal alarm that sounds when something has to change and it has to change fast.
I would enjoy seeing anyone else sing 'Caroline Shut Up.' That would be interesting. I would give that one away, actually, which is funny, even though it's very personal.
My mom wasn't thrilled about me being in a band, because she very correctly said she couldn't see any sort of stability in it.
I'm a horribly chronic 'get half way through the book and start a new one' person.
If I'm receiving an email from a stranger, I usually like it to be properly thoughtful and explanatory, and not just hitting someone up for a casual favor out of the blue who you've never met before. I really believe in manners.
I actually don't live anywhere. I live on the road.
In New York, if you spend a few hours doing nothing, you feel like the whole world passed you by.
My stepfather is a baron. He has a castle in Belgium that's been in his family for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not fancy; it's really sort of brimstone and dark. It's got a moat and a drawbridge.
I woke up in London one morning in the middle of an adrenaline surge, and I was just lying there - the sun was coming up - trying to think of the best way to describe this feeling, and 'pang' was the only word I could really use to describe it.
Everything I've done that I'm proud of is everything I've been the most hands-on with, so I'm just following that, really.
Well, I'm just a really sentimental person, and I just get leveled by things so easily, like from films, to personal interactions, to memories, to music.
I've probably listened to 'Try Me' by DeJ Loaf 500 times. It's a little slower than your typical strut BPM, but it still works.
If you're walking through the Union Square subway station - New Yorkers know it's obnoxious and crowded, and in the summer it's too hot - there are always amazing musicians playing, and sometimes there are multiple, different musicians set up in there.
You'll see every kind of New Yorker in there. You really feel like you're in the belly of the beast when you're in Union Square.
Arcadia' was started and finished at the Medici villa in Rome.
I really admire people's interactions with technology that aren't tech-centric but use it as a tool.
Many of the elements associated with storybook mythology and gothic aesthetics are actually not expressive.
One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.
Being a musician, there aren't that many ways for me to consciously use a more strategy, math-based part of my brain.
But I studied art in Belgium from the age of 17 to 18, and I learned French when I was there. Very reluctantly so. I didn't do a very good job. For the first six months I was very depressed and couldn't speak to anyone, and then it kinda hits you.
Well working by yourself, especially when no one knows about it, is totally liberating because it's very impulse-driven. You work when you want to work. You work when you can work. No deadlines. No conversation. No compromise. No help.
But I never imagined that I could ever have a career in music. I always thought it was like a mafia, that you had to sell your soul and know the right people and be in the right place.
Low' was probably the album that influenced me more than any other, because of how it combined humor and impressive, glamorous, driving energy with this totally surreal soundscape production.
I have an opera coach who I went to as a teenager, when I was 15 and 16 years old. When I went to college, I forgot about it.
