The near-unquantifiable Canadian provocateur has been ‘moving forward’ and ‘pushing boundaries’ ever since her second release back in 2000, when Merril Nisker ditched the avant-garde folk-rock and became the Peaches we all know and love.
This is all well and good, but usually it’s the kind of empty platitude heaped on every performer when they release something new. But of all the performers who actually live up to the romanticism of the artist standing at the edge singing into the void, Peaches has a real claim to shaking things up.
“I definitely work very organically,” she says. “Just to give a little history, I never thought I’d be a professional – not that I like to use that word – but a career musician, or whatever it is that I am. It’s all organically happened, which is the same with anything I’ve done. It’s evolved, the same with writing the music and how I got into it to begin.
“In that way I’m not very calculated in general, and so a lot of times when I write these albums, I don’t even know what it will be called. It’s funny, because it always presents itself, it makes a statement when I put the name on at the end, and I go, ‘Oh, It’s all come together now.’ The retrospective part comes after all the work is done, so I work externally, and then it becomes an internal critique afterwards.”
As retrospection goes, Peaches has found a unique way of looking back to her most recent record, 2015’s Rub. Over a year old, the dust of its release has now settled, and like any artist such distance grants a perspective impossible to fathom in the depths of the studio, or in the dervish of tours. But in June of this year, Rub Remixed appeared; the entire thing re-imagined through the eyes of others, which sounds both exciting and nerve-wracking. Not that Peaches herself suffered any trepidations.
“I trusted those people, and I was curious. I had enough distance, enough confidence, to know that the original songs were fine and held up, that I still liked them and was ready for them to have a new life on their own. You have to let them go.”
Unsurprisingly, this evolution seems entirely fitting with the nature of Peaches’ music. Shock, amaze, outrage, inspire – whatever the response – the idea is transformation. Watch the extremely NSFW video for Rub’s eponymous track, and it’s impossible not to walk away without having an opinion. She’s like a musical John Waters, an influence Peaches has cited in the past. You can see the cult director’s shadow not only in Peaches lyrics and tone, but in the striking visual style she’s been developing, particularly since 2009’s I Feel Cream.
“In the end, the songs [are] all very connected, and I revel in that. My last album, I made a video for every song, and for this I really wanted to make every song interconnect. It could almost be seen, loosely, as an abstract movie. I still have one more video to make, and there are connections. There are reoccurring characters, things like that.
“I think I didn’t have enough money or time to plan it from the beginning, because I work so spontaneously. I can’t say these videos were completely spontaneous, particularly with the song Rub. There were two months of me and two friends working out what to do, what can go wrong. But I feel there’s definitely, always a connection with me.”
We have been given precious little time for this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it chat hardly enough time to get a true sense of the person and the art. The best you can hope for is a sense what might be coming next.
“Collaborations with Feist, well, she was the only one on my first album, because I didn’t know how to overdub vocals so I asked her to sing,” Peaches says. “That song, Diddle my Skittle, she was there in the background. And she’s on Impeach my Bush, and this one. We’ve done a lot together, and hopefully we’ll do a lot more.”
By Adam Norris
