Top 50 Caroline Polachek Quotes

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.

I’ve definitely been in that situation many times – staying in a relationship longer than I should. I think there’s so much of your identity that comes from a relationship.

‘Ashes Of Love’ has much more hot-blooded vocal than what PC Music is known for, and a much harder production than what I usually do, so I was fully prepared for people to hate it.

Yes, when I come up with ideas on my own, it’s almost always a melody, just as often an instrument or bassline as it is a vocal. But it is a single, linear, monophonic thing. Something you could hum or whistle.

As soon as we wrote the beat for ‘Romeo,’ I knew it was a running song. I was thinking about it in terms of the body. What do you want to do? It’s not a song you want to dance to.

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 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 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.

I think as I get older, I’m just going to start making smooth, new age music – no joke.

I think there was a real lane built for indie bands during the time when Chairlift came up.

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.

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.

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.

The men’s dance style in dancehall is territorial, but it’s also flirtatious and it’s also showing off strength by way of smooth movement that you can only do if you’re really strong. It has so much attitude.

I think that’s a big trope in pop music: the blaze-of-glory breakup. It’s not one that I particularly identify with, but it’s definitely possible.

When I was in middle school, I loved Egyptian mythology.

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 was born in New York, but I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut – that’s where I went to school. I remember begging my way into choir in the 3rd grade, because you’re not supposed to get in until 4th grade.

I was into music from a very early age, and I was also – I don’t really talk about this that much – really into horses. I learned a lot about rhythm and about voice from that.

Driving in Chicago wins over New York; people are so fast. It’s almost like there’s a subliminal street racing culture here. They drive like comic book characters.

I like listening to ambient music, especially in very scenic places because I think it allows for the most freedom of thought.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, anyway, I think the format of love songs for me stopped becoming about people and started becoming about life.

Before I play a show, I put on lavender oil – it’s sort of a ritual.

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.

Growing up, I was so compelled by artists whose looks were inseparable from their music. Bjork was my hero.

My first concert was Third Eye Blind.

Many of the elements associated with storybook mythology and gothic aesthetics are actually not expressive.

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.

In New York, if you spend a few hours doing nothing, you feel like the whole world passed you by.

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 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.

I want to keep different options for different futures open all the time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Being a musician, there aren’t that many ways for me to consciously use a more strategy, math-based part of my brain.

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 would love to live in Japan again, but would need to really commit to learning the language before doing it. Both my parents speak Japanese fluently, so I suppose it would feel like a tradition.

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.

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.