Interview w/Madeleine Peyroux

[ghost of miles]

Pulled this off the Songbirds list:

That's Why the Lady Sings the Blues

Last year, Madeleine Peyroux went missing just as her glorious voice was

propelling her to stardom. Now she gets to explain -- in song.

by Gaby Wood

London Observer, July 9, 2006

Last summer, as her second album, Careless Love, was about to enter the UK top

10, American jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux performed what appeared to be her

most compelling act yet: she disappeared. One minute, she was impressing critics

at Edinburgh and appearing on Top of the Pops; the next, her record label was

making it known that a private detective had been hired to track her down.

Her vanishing was quickly made to match a longer script. She had disappeared

before, we were reminded, for eight years after her lovely debut, Dreamland, in

1996. Her quixotic career had begun when she was discovered as a busker (she had

been playing in Paris since she dropped out of school at 15). When Dreamland was

released, critics were astonished by her voice's uncanny resemblance to Billie

Holiday's, all the more surprising since Peyroux was only 22. How, people

wondered, could she have arrived at such sweetly aching sounds? She was working

on a second album with Atlantic records, set to be her breakthrough into the

mainstream, when she announced that there was something wrong with her vocal

cords; she abandoned the album in favour of singing in bars across America and

playing for tips.

More recently, she had begged leave from the confines of commerce by abruptly

pulling out of an appearance on Parkinson; by turning her nose up at Starbucks

even as the coffee chain contributed to the one million sales of Careless Love

when it put the album on its counters; and by refusing to allow a sticker

reading "as heard on the Simple ad" to be put on her CD.

Now, however, Peyroux tells me that her so-called disappearance last summer was

"a misnomer". "For me, it wasn't a disappearance at all. I had been in London

the last day of the tour and the UK label dropped me off at the airport to send

me to New York. A couple of days later, I went up to visit my manager, went to

sleep and the next morning, there was an announcement that I was missing."

Which leaves you wondering whether she is trying to cover her ambivalent tracks

or if others are too quick to want to see in hers a life that matches her

envelopingly fragile sound. On her forthcoming album, Half the Perfect World,

she sings, in words she wrote herself: "Sticks and stones may break my bones,

but tears don't leave any scars."

"The way that I talk about good and bad things, pain and happiness and joy, is

through music," she says. "Part of the reason that I do what I do is to be able

to talk about the things we don't normally invite into conversation."

Peyroux has a reputation for being troubled, I suggest; is that something she

would agree with? "Well, I mean troubled can take so many different forms," she

says obliquely. "I don't think the music that I play is any different from the

kind of person that I am."

I am reminded of her producer Larry Klein's comment, when describing the

"poetry" of Peyroux's voice: "Ninety per cent of what she does is implied." It

is said of Peyroux that she could have been Norah Jones before Norah Jones. But

Peyroux, apparently, has more traditional aims: she combines the timbre of

Billie Holiday with the consonants of Anita O'Day and the phrasing of Bessie

Smith. She says she has even tried to copy Louis Armstrong. An appropriation

doesn't have to be literal, she explains: "I think you can hear that Louis

Armstrong always has joy in every note. And I think you can hear a plaintive

quality in Billie Holiday's voice that I've heard in a lot of blues singers; she

made things sound sad in the way that they actually are, rather than adding to

them."

The crossover appeal of Peyroux's musical resurrections (songs made famous by

Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline) always

seems to surprise her. About 10 years ago, she found herself back in the

working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood where she grew up, playing in a little

Italian restaurant. Remembering the outsider she had been as a child, listening

to Fats Waller when everyone else was in thrall to Madonna, she felt like giving

up before the gig began. But her act opened with "The Way You Look Tonight" and

the whole audience sang along. "My jaw dropped. It was really moving." The

outsider had become the leader of the pack.

Peyroux was born to intellectual parents who met in Canada during the Vietnam

War. Her father was an academic who became an actor; her mother was a French

teacher (the surname comes from New Orleans). The family moved all the time --

from Georgia to Hollywood to Brooklyn and eventually to Paris, where 13-year-old

Madeleine went to live with her mother when her parents had split. When she was

asked to pass the hat round for a group of buskers in the Latin Quarter, she

says, "it seemed like a lot of different things came together".

She left school and travelled with them, learning two songs a week, living at

times on their boat, a life that led her to view her own musical ambitions

philosophically. "I had this career as a street musician and I thought, well,

this is never gonna last," she says. "And then I got the offer for a record deal

and made the record and my voice started giving me trouble. I thought, OK, it's

just not meant to be."

When, while making her soon-to-be-abandoned second album with Atlantic, Peyroux

discovered she had a cyst on her vocal cords, she went to a dedicated voice

hospital in Nashville. Doctors suggested surgery, but she found that her voice

had been so damaged by singing on the street she could rescue it by training it

in a certain way.

I ask Peyroux whether, despite the very real cyst, part of the problem was

psychological, whether the fear of losing her voice was what stymied her. She

deflects the question, but eventually she says: "I'm sure that's half of it."

Did she think you had to have Billie Holiday's life in order to match her sound?

She certainly didn't think you could copy a sound without any understanding of

its meaning. "I don't think everybody agrees with me. I think there are a lot of

people who believe you can prescribe how to bring out an emotion, that you can

just write it out, like a doctor's note. But if I sing a song that Billie

Holiday sang, I'm not doing it her way, because I can't take her life experience

and put it into my song.

"I'm attracted to artists because of what they've lived through and what they

understand. Not because I've read about it in a biography, but because when I

hear their music, I can feel what's happening."

[Bright Moments]

thanks for the article!

i dig her!

[RonF]

Ditto. Thanks. Interesting read....I like her too.

[ghost of miles]

I'm just glad that it's (apparently) not going to be another eight-year wait between records. RonF, what did you think of the latest Cassandra Wilson? I confess that I've played it only a couple of times... I appreciate the new style she's trying to forge, but as a listener I don't feel nearly as compelled to return to it as I do her earlier work. It didn't seem to do very well on the JazzWeek charts, esp. in comparison to the most recent Karrin Allyson.

Edited July 13, 2006 by ghost of miles

[RonF]

I'm just glad that it's (apparently) not going to be another eight-year wait between records. RonF, what did you think of the latest Cassandra Wilson? I confess that I've played it only a couple of times... I appreciate the new style she's trying to forge, but as a listener I don't feel nearly as compelled to return to it as I do her earlier work. It didn't seem to do very well on the JazzWeek charts, esp. in comparison to the most recent Karrin Allyson.

That's pretty much my scenario with Cassandra's latest. Maybe a couple of tracks but otherwise it didn't happen for me like earlier records. And I feel the same as you about her different direction. I like the fact that she's always always pushing. Blue Note sent the record to Triple A weeks before they even approached jazz radio. They knew what was going on. I liked the Karrin primarily because of her generous sharing of the lime light with Nancy King, who is a real pro...and of course the Jon Hendricks tracks. I have to admit I liked much of the lyric writing too even though the police got their noses twisted. The addition of Bruce Barth was also a plus. Wondered if you've listened to Roberta Gambarini?

[ghost of miles]

Half the Perfect World, due out Sept. 12. Edited August 10, 2006 by ghost of miles