Interview: Chairlift

In clipped tones that betray just an inkling of fear, Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek says: “I walk into a wooden room. In the room there’s a small swimming pool, and the floor is mahogany. I’m wearing a white night gown. At the end of the pool are 11 girls standing in the same gowns as me, and I take my place next to them. A lady blows a whistle and we all jump into the water, and swim as fast as we can to the other side. As we get out of the pool, the girl who finished last starts screaming, and the whistle lady takes her by the arm and leads her out the door.”

Polachek has had many such nightmares. She calls them “hive dreams”, and they all revolve around scenarios at a boarding school with unspoken regulations, reflecting the Chairlift frontwoman’s fear of the peer group, and the restrictions on the individual that inevitably follow.

That may sound suspiciously close to the plot of Kazuo Ishiguro’s sinister boarding school novel, Never Let Me Go, but Polachek only mentions it by way of explanation of her band’s second album, Something, due in January. Above all, says Polachek, the successor to 2009’s patchy synth-pop debut Does You Inspire You is about the loss of control, and mistrust of our increasingly mediated lives.

But there’s another subplot to all of this that’s been bubbling away for a while now: midway through touring the last record, Polachek and boyfriend bandmate Aaron Pfenning decided to split up, but not without seeing live commitments through first. Then, on returning home from tour in January 2010, Pfenning quit the band altogether.

Rather than sit at home moping about it, Polachek busied herself writing for the next album with third full-time bandmate and drummer Patrick Wimberly, in a rented room behind a Brooklyn antique store. Sessions were going well, but Pfenning’s departure — he co-founded the group with Polachek in 2005 and co-wrote Does You… — put the pair in a pickle. Did they continue recording as Chairlift, or not?

‘Amanaemonesia’

“We thought about changing the name for a second,” says Polachek. “But in the end we wanted to keep it, because there were a lot of ideas that weren’t very well developed on the first record that came together on this one. I’d like, after a couple more albums, to show a trajectory between them. And if you keep changing the name it makes it harder for people to pick up on that.”

Was Aaron cool with your decision?

“No, he definitely wasn’t okay with that. There were legal proceedings in order for us to keep the band name, but luckily we all came to an agreement and went our separate ways.”

With Polachek and Wimberly now at the controls, Chairlift MKII could begin to flower in earnest. Recorded with Hot Chip producer Dan Carey in London, Something transfers its predecessor’s potentially unit-shifting knack for melody into a more substantial — though still primarily eighties-influenced — framework. The space-age kitsch survives intact, certainly, but it feels fresh and vital on tracks like ‘Amanaemonesia’ and ‘Wrong Opinion’.

“We knew we wanted to write songs that had more life,” says Wimberly. “Having been on tour for so long with the first record, we started changing the arrangements of some songs to give more energy to the live audience. And we tried to bring some of that to the new album.”

“We were goofing off on the first record,” says Polachek, “imitating genres and trying to make a playlist album, whereas this time it’s less about any about that — all the songs feel like they’re made by the same character. And I guess the connection between the sadder parts of the record and the more manic, vivid parts are more tied together on this one; they’re fused.”

For all that, Something isn’t a break-up record, although its stated themes could certainly be read that way. The first track, ‘Sidewalk Safari’, even dreams about mowing down an enemy in an act of premeditated road rage.

“It’s about feelings of frustration,” says Caroline of the track. “When me and Patrick got back off tour there was a lot of aggression. I also got hit by a car in New York — only lightly, but I started having this thing where I’d get these gross X-ray visions of a car going right through my legs whenever I crossed the street.

“It was happening more and more, which was kind of alarming. So one day I walked into the studio and said, ‘Patrick, I want to write a song about running someone over in a car!’”

Clearly, Polachek is back in the driver’s seat.

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