Caroline Polachek on desire, going viral online and starting a solo career in her 30s
The singer-songwriter joins Q’s Tom Power to talk about her compelling creative process
Caroline Polachek has been called one of this generation's most experimental pop artists. Her latest album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is her second record as a solo artist, but her seventh overall.
In an interview on Q with Tom Power, which has been edited for length and clarity, Polachek spoke about her new album, writing one of her songs while taking acid and listening to Céline Dion, and her big hit So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings, which went viral on TikTok.
Here are some highlights from their conversation.
I can't believe I'm starting the interview like this, because I almost never do. But can I talk about your album title? Desire, I Want to Turn Into You — it's very compelling. Talk to me a little bit about the title and where it came from.
I mean, the title is tonal. It's a ridiculous phrase, isn't it? "Desire, I want to turn into you." Like, who is the you? Is the you desire? Do you want to turn into desire itself? That's a bit of a paradox, right? Desire is like electricity. It's like the physical force that moves us through the world, it's the force of our will.
But then, maybe the you is the subject of your desire. Desire, I want to turn into you. Like this person that you desire you want to become, which is extremely kind of creepy and manic, but also kind of real, right? Like when you're falling in love with someone, there's just no limit to how close you want to be to them, like how many of their memories you want to download, you know?
And then there's a very sweet kind of third meaning to it: I want to be held. So I like to think that all the songs on the album sort of sit right somewhere in that Bermuda Triangle of those three interpretations.
I heard [your song I Believe] was, in some ways, inspired by being on acid and listening to Céline Dion. Can you tell me that story?
I was on a road trip with some friends in Italy and heard this Céline Dion song — a very early deep cut. It was En amour.
The chord changes in that song are amazing. But hearing that song, I just kind of visualized her voice as this sort of white sailboat that was chopping through the ocean so purely and so victoriously. And I was moved to tears by hearing it.
When I returned to the studio afterwards, I kind of wanted to try my hand at that quite open-hearted, you know, throwing everything to the wind diva vocal style. And I Believe definitely came out of that train of thought.
WATCH | Caroline Polachek's interview with Tom Power:
You had this song called So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings, which blew up on TikTok. It was sort of a sleeper song and then it went viral. So what is that like to see from the artist's perspective?
It's so wild because, you know, I had heard that TikTok was — I wasn't even really on it at the time — I'd heard that TikTok was kind of a lottery: that certain songs would just blow up years after the fact.
At the time, Dreams by Fleetwood Mac was having a moment, and it was just so wild to see it happen so organically. And, again, I didn't really have any presence on TikTok. I didn't really understand how to use the app. And then suddenly, a lot of friends start texting me these videos of people doing the dance from the music video, which I'd choreographed. But that's what happened, is people just learned the music video dance and started doing it.
It was so amazing to see all these people's bedrooms, all these different people's outfits, their friends, the different spins they put on things. There's one movement that's actually quite a balancing act, because you have to sort of fold up and balance on one leg. And that's kind of, in a way, the joke of the video, it's like, can you land it? Are you going to wobble and fall over? So anyway, it's just so characterful to see people's different, I don't know, I found it very humanizing and very beautiful. And I just felt very lucky and also very passive to it. Like it kind of happened to me.
Talk to me about getting Dido on the record. I loved having Dido on the record. I should say, Dido is on the song Fly to You with Grimes.
I still can't believe that happened. I still can't believe my record has Dido on it. Dido, Grimes and I do a trio ballad and it's like a rave breakbeat ballad.
When Grimes and I made it, both of us got kind of high on the fact of us having done something together and were so excited about, "People are not going to see this coming! It's going to be so much fun." And then I was like, "Wait a minute, what if we added one more voice to it?" And we started thinking about people and Dido was such a long shot. She's so private and so mysterious. And, again, I knew it was a long shot, but I wrote her a letter and took a picture of it and sent it to her. Then, a couple days later, was on FaceTime with her and she was so sweet, so funny. She loved the song.
She was in L.A., I was in L.A., and two days later I was at her house recording her on my home setup. I just brought all my gear from home and set it up on her lawn. She wanted to work outside — I've never done that before in my life, so we set up outside with my monitors and everything and sat there, just singing out into the open air, writing her part together. And then when it was written, we trailed the cable into her living room — because she has a cat flap in her door for the cat to come in and out — so we trailed the cable through the cat flap and sang from her living room where I recorded outside in the sunlight. And it was just so, so special.
The full interview with Caroline Polachek is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Caroline Polachek produced by Kaitlyn Swan.
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