The music that influences Caroline Polachek
Just over a year ago, Caroline Polachek released the critically acclaimed album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. This cemented her as one of the most refreshing icons in pop music, as she saw every wall that might have been put up in creating a pop album and completely smashed it down. Nothing was imposed in terms of genre, pace or style, and the result was what many people called the best album of 2023.
Recently, to celebrate the anniversary of the successful album, Polachek has released a deluxe version called the Everasking Edition, which features expansions from songs that inspired her and some brand new tracks. It’s interesting to read about some of the music that inspired Polachek, given her album is completely unbending to any kind of specific genre.
One track that was an inspiration was Operating Theatre’s ‘Spring Is Coming With a Strawberry’. To commemorate the track, Polachek included an electric cover of it on the new album. She also did an extended version of Default Genders, ‘Pharmacoma’.
Another one of her major influences was pop icon Enya. She said in an interview that the Irish singer was one of her first influences, as her parents would frequently play her music. “My parents got divorced when I was really young,” she said, “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.”
Interestingly, Polachek also speaks highly of her former band, Chairlift, and her time playing with them also influences what she makes today. Working with her bandmates and playing on the New York scene was a massive part of what would eventually shape her solo career.
She said: “Once arriving in New York, we found ourselves immediately drawn toward the sort of electro-pop underground scene that was developing there, with bands like MGMT, in the wake of bands like TV on the Radio or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but a very distinctly different generation.” A massive turning point in the evolution of that sound was the new access to computer music production, which was “very cheap and easy to use and available at the time.”
Polachek continued: “It was a really interesting moment culturally, where there was this real underground, DIY spirit, but using all the same tools that pop-music producers had access to via cracks and leaks of software that we were accessing on our laptop. So it was this interesting kind of hi-fi, lo-fi blend that was happening in Brooklyn.”
With Desire, I Want to Get Into You, and throughout Polachek’s career as a whole, you can hear in real time the steady disbandment of the genre due to cultural shifts and technological advancements. The result is pure creativity. Caroline is an artist who knows what it means to step outside of confirmative boundaries and, in doing so, has produced some of the most exciting music of late.
