Madeleine Peyroux

Madeleine Peyroux

MADELEINE PEYROUX: BACK WHERE SHE BELONGS
It’s been a long, near-decade wait for fans wowed by Madeleine Peyroux’s debut album, Dreamland. With Careless Love this acclaimed vocal interpreter returns, bearing good news: The wait was worth it. Bringing new light to classics associated with a diverse range of artists, from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to Hank Williams and Josephine Baker, Peyroux affirms her stature as one of the most accomplished and eclectic vocal artists of our time. Ted Panken spoke with the Georgia-born singer about the long-awaited project.

Barnes & Noble.com: All your publicity mentions that you’ve been off the scene for a while.But from the sound of things, it doesn’t seem that you’ve been neglecting your music at all, because it’s a very mature album. What have you been doing since that Lilith tour with Sarah McLachlan in 1999? What’s your life been like?

Madeleine Peyroux: The thing is, I’ve been going in a few different directions. Of course, I’ve been playing music, and I did spend some time without being able to work as much as I normally would have when I had the full support of a label. So it had changed a lot. Ironically, I was going through a lot of stuff with the record companies at the time. I sort of was signed the entire time, and I changed hands at one point; I left Atlantic for Sony. [Peryroux now records for Rounder Records.]

B&N.com: Let’s talk about having put the record together and conceptualized it. Does the material more or less reflect your performance persona and the things you’ve been singing in recent years?

MP: I’d say yes and no. In a sense, from being out of the public eye, so to speak, in eight years there’s a lot of material I’ve experimented with that didn’t make it on to the record. If it’s really in my heart, it never leaves. So I’m hoping that this is going to be the beginning of an ongoing process for me, to keep working on really finding the heart of the music I’m trying to make. It’s a pretty tall order for me to even try to put that kind of thing in words. But I definitely feel strongly that the songs on this record are all really well crafted and that, in a sense, it really represents a lot of respect for the American pop song.

B&N.com: Reading your bio, you went on the road with a French blues-and-roots type of group when you were 15. Was that when you first knew about this music, or did you know about it before?

MP: When I first went on the road, I was learning to play this music, and that was a different kind of experience. So I was really immersed in Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. It was a great learning experience, because I was really working as a musician for the first time, and I was surrounded by people who were studying music. So even though I was on the street, it was a pretty diverse environment, and that’s what allowed me to keep on learning. I heard this music first, though, when I was growing up. My father is from New Orleans and I did have a lot of music around, and I did know some of these songs, and I think that’s what gave me the chance to do what I did when I was 15. So I guess it’s a testimony to how important our home lives are, because there was just enough of a spark in my first days to set me off on a positive path, and then after that, nobody really ever got in my way, thank the lucky stars.

B&N.com: I’d say you had fairly enlightened parents, if they let you do that when you were 15.

MP: They were extremely enlightened, to the point of being radical -- so that some other things in my life were not necessarily as charming. But if you’re given maybe one joyful experience with no strings attached, I think it’s probably the most precious thing, because it keeps on giving.

B&N.com: Everybody who writes about you talks about certain stylistic affinities to Billie Holiday’s sound, which no one else was doing when you came out with Dreamland. Could you talk about what it was about her voice and tonal personality and Bessie Smith’s voice and tonal personality that grabbed you as a teenage girl in 1990.

MP: These women spoke to me from a social perspective. They were capable of telling the truth! That’s what I liked.

B&N.com: Let’s return to the record. Who did the arrangements? How did the process go?

MP: I can tell you honestly about that. It’s true I can’t tell you honestly about the truth or my life, but I can tell you honestly about the record. [laughs] The arrangements on the record, as understated as they are, just spring from the basic skeletal ideas of my producer, Larry Klein. They were really very loose, so I would have to say that the musicians took part in that as well. They filled in the spaces, and we got into the studio. But the basic arrangement idea is based on putting these four people in a room and giving them a very simple understanding of the music. I think we knew what we were looking for. I think Larry Klein had a very clear idea of the sound that he was looking for, and that was long before I did, I must admit.

B&N.com: First, do you see yourself as a jazz singer, as a blues singer, or maybe as someone who can channel those qualities within a broader concept of music?

MP: I do. I do think that it’s important to see jazz as an open-ended proposition. Because the proposition that it is, I think by nature, is that it’s meant to inspire the rebirth of pop culture every time. So without trying to define it myself, I’d like to be able to think that that’s my medium. I like to think of it as jazz and blues. It has been pop. It was pop many times over, and in some ways it’s gone out of the popular eye. But I think because it’s such an all-encompassing music, it’s better for the culture. It fits its purpose even more, because the definition just is that -- that it has to do with rejuvenating the ideas. As far as whether or not I am creating a new way of doing things myself right now, that remains to be seen. laughs]

B&N.com: You seem to have a very fine technique. Are you a self-taught singer? Or were you ever trained formally? Was it all homegrown?

MP: It’s been a homegrown experience for me up until the time a few years ago when I was finally given some. It was as if I needed it more than ever. I was struggling to work as a singer again, and I really wanted those lessons. I found out that one of the reasons why I got hoarse was because of some very simple things that I needed to learn. But I did get some funding from the record company, and I was able to take lessons for half a year just a couple of years ago. And it’s been an amazing help, and it’s actually really central now to my vocal regimen, being able to know that much more about the voice every time that you work on it. So it’s become more and more of a discipline over the years. It’s become more of a necessity, I’d say, for it to be a discipline. But singing is taught, and singing is taught in so many ways. You can learn to sing by watching someone and you can learn to sing by listening to someone -- and of course, by doing it. But for the most part, vocalists are capable of the highest emotional power. I might not be able to get everybody to agree, but I think most people would agree that the voice has the most variations in it than any other musical instrument, that you can the most infinite number of sounds and changes and sort of depth of combination of qualities, with tone and timbre. Any natural voice, because it’s built for just that purpose.

September 2004