American-born Parisian Madeleine Peyroux has the perfect blend of influences for her languorous music, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.
Maadeleine Peyroux. She may have once described her parents as hippies, but Peyroux seems to be as straight and organised as they come. Talking to her as she travels by car through the Florida town of Fort Lauderdale, on her way from one gig to another, Peyroux exhibits most of the signs of the artfully controlled person. She gives the impression that she knows what the next town is going to be, the next gig, the next album.
It's also interesting to note that she has a mind to revise her recorded output. Her third official release, 2003's Got You on My Mind, was a seven-song EP recorded with multi-instrumentalist and then boyfriend William Galison. In 2004, as she enjoyed million-selling success with Careless Love, Galison expanded the EP by adding four of his own songs and re-released it. Cue bad blood and the airbrushing out of the record from Peyroux's discography. Such things may be more indicative of the ways of human nature and the manner in which ambition is gazumped by whatever it is that curdles relationships, but it shows that Peyroux is not to be messed with.
Her career is littered with similar exercises in mind control. Athens, Georgia-born and New York-bred (her academic parents moved to Brooklyn when she was six in order for her father to pursue a career in acting), Peyroux and her mother moved to Paris following her parents' divorce. At the age of 15, Peyroux joined a group of street musicians in the Latin Quarter, passed around the hat, and was bitten by the free-spirit bug. The next few years were spent touring around Europe in a blues/jazz band performing songs made far better known by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Fats Waller. Peyroux's debut album, 1996's Dreamland, set her on the course of initially moderate and then widespread commercial success.
"The music, quite simply, has its own energy, its own life," she says. "So that's definitely a driving force. I think it always was because I didn't necessarily know I was going to do this. It was just my good fortune. It's also the fact that there's hope in the type of music I do. Somehow, for whatever reasons, music has hope in it, and that's another thing that makes me keep doing it. If it didn't have hope, then the rest of it probably wouldn't be worth the trouble."
On the face of it, Peyroux's music is a svelte mixture of the tried and tested. If Dreamland featured her languorous versions of musical modes that were at their height in the 1940s, subsequent records have mixed the old with the newish and some tentatively composed originals. It's the blend, however, that sets her apart from, say, the emollient and often soporific sounds of Eva Cassidy. That, and Peyroux's intimate, unforced voice, in which one can easily lose oneself for minutes at a time. Presumably she chooses her material extremely carefully?
"The more I do this, the more I get a chance to work and choose songs, the more it becomes a philosophical choice," she says. "I think that my most recent record, Half the Perfect World [ 2006] is that kind of thing."
On that record, Peyroux mixed several co-written songs with originals by Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg, Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell - songs that she says have a perspective on life. "Actually, perhaps they have an even grander perspective on life with the problems and issues in the songs. It's not just that it's beautiful music, but it's also that the lyrics carry a certain attitude and a philosophy. That's the reason why I sing the songs I sing. I suppose it's always been a way to communicate with people you normally wouldn't get through to, the necessity to say things you normally couldn't say and to complain about things you normally wouldn't have a right to complain about."
It's a long way from the boulevards of Paris where, as a busker, Peyroux learned a degree of her craft. She recalls those years as being crucial to her development. "The streets were relatively safe, and so as musicians we were quite free to do what we wanted," she says. "Do I yearn for those times? I just try to find it again in different areas; it's not always the same or exact type of freedom, however. In a way I think it fits me, but I'm lucky. I'm having a great time right now, and I'm going to continue that as much as I can."
THE PLAN AS it stands is to keep on doing what she does. However, should plans not work out, Peyroux says that if she can't tour, or if she doesn't have the opportunity to tour then she'll just do something else. "I'll be recording - or not. There are so many things to explore, and right now there's a lot of exploring . . . I enjoy that because I'm still developing.
"I've certainly discovered that there's a real goal for me, and part of my work as a performing artist is to get to a place where I've actually achieved painting the big picture, telling the whole story - and not just my story. I share that experience when I'm on stage, with the audience, and I want that experience to be a complete one. That takes a while, trying to decide what's important in a performance. Sometimes it's not being in key, or not having a great arrangement. I can feel the dead air in the theatre when that happens. What's important? It's having a great dialogue with people."
Considering the size of the venues she now performs in, is it not a problem to engage in a dialogue with the audience? Can she still see them and sing to them, eye to eye? And when does stagecraft become merely an act, a professional sleight of hand executed to create an illusion of intimacy?
Peyroux ponders such trade secrets. "I think I do, I really think I do," she says. And then she ponders again and says, perhaps more realistically: "I don't know whether what you're talking about would be possible if I played larger spaces, but theatres are built for that and, from a dramatic perspective, I think it's a very exciting kind of show. Playing in these beautiful theatres is in many ways the apex of the type of work I do. Once you get into the pop world, or the big arenas, or something that's bigger than a regular-size theatre, it's always a different monster. That's got to be a big transition, as is the transition from a jazz club to a bigger venue.
"I was more aware of the problems involved with that because I was aware of theatre and drama. When I look at a rock concert, or a very large concert, I often don't understand what's going on. It's a different beast, more like a carnival, and not about something that's important. That said, the good ones can be about something very personal, but it doesn't have the same kind of interaction that a show like mine can have."
Madeleine Peyroux plays Dublin's Olympia Theatre on Apr 13. Her latest album, Half the Perfect World, is on Rounder/Universal