Madeleine Peyroux talks to Marty Duda

MD: What do you do to prepare for a tour?

MP: Well, I’ve kinda got it down to a very simple science. I think it’s always kind of a pleasure a couple of days before going out to just look at everything and say, “Well, these are the things I really need”. I’m going to be rehearsing for a week with a new guitar player I very excited about, so we have that and I’m putting together, I think, a different kind of show with a lot of the new material.

MD: Is the guitar player someone we would have heard of?

MP: Mark Goldenberg. I don’t know if you would have or not. He’s been around for a while. I think he was out with Jackson Browne for a long, long time.

MD: You mentioned that the tour is different from what you’ve been doing in the past, so what kind of different things are you planning?

MP: Well, because of the new record I think we’ve been able to explore a little with forms being much longer than song forms that I had. The earlier and sometimes last about two or three or four minutes and then you get into the folks songs of the sixties where there’s an infinite amount of lyrics and they can run about five or six minutes. But now with this new song form that I experimented on on the last record I think there’s a lot more continuity between songs and a bit of a different arc. So musically, I think we’re trying to create a storyline with all the material that I’ve amasses on my recordings. So I’m excited about that. I think we’re going to be building something we haven’t done before.

MD: Is there more opportunity for improvisation with these new song forms?

MP: Ummm, I would say that the improvisation happens in a different place. I think that it’s exciting because the energy comes to you in a more…it’s more about energy than virtuosic soloing. Everyone sort of builds more dynamically. It’s much more orchestral thinking for the musicians in the band, I would say. But we’re still always sort of feeling each other out, feeling the audience out and I sing differently, everyone plays a little differently every night so I find it more exciting. It’s as though we are following a script, as it were, but the nuances of what we’re talking about can change from night to night. I think it’s really cool.

MD: How important is the audience in all of that? How much of an impact do they have on what you end up doing?

MP: I think it’s an amazing difference from one night to the next. Here in the United States I find that I have more preconceived ideas about what the audience will think or, for example, I’ll find with an English-speaking audience, such as in England or Australia, I’ll mistakenly have these ideas because I think of it as being an English speaking audience but the culture is so deeply important to what it is we all understand. Not everybody speaks the same language. Wherever we go we get a different reaction. In some places I would sing a French song and it would be totally romantic and nobody cares what it’s about and it’s a love song and all you have to do is say the word love in the song and it conjures up imagery that is specific to that culture. And then I go to another country and I remember singing Je Des Amour for an audience that, as I introduced the song, I said, “here’s something that we can all understand”, and for some reason one of the audience members up front felt that that was enough to be political and he said, “Not everybody, not in this country!” It’s always exciting to see that and I think that it does change everything in terms of how the music changes and how we hear it back when I listen to my concerts. So I’m not just dreaming it up. I try to learn from it.

MD: Do you like getting that kind of immediate response from your audience?

MP: I do, I do, it’s a stunning experience. It feels like we really are at home with each other. As I travel I don’t do anything…most of my time is spent in transit…and being on the stage with an audience for however long, whether it’s 75 minutes or 90 minutes or so, that really does define our experience of that place in the world. My geographic understanding of the world is within those few feet up there on the stage and from hearing what the audience has to say. To me that’s where it all boils down into the essence of human relationships and stuff like that. When I’m on the road and sharing these stories and getting different reactions from people and the fact that it doesn’t have a lot to do with really understanding one version or another of a story, that there are some many things that are really common among these cultures in Greece or Russia. I think of Western Europe because it’s a really concentrated cultural melting pot.

MD: So you’ve played a couple of times in New Zealand, once on your own and once with Diana Krall and Melody Gardot. Do you have any memories of any of those instances happening while you were playing here?

MP: Oh yeah! I was actually quite surprised that the New Zealand audience was more rowdy than I thought they’d be. I was more expecting a more British culture for some reason. But no, I think it’s totally different. I find that people are not afraid to say what they think. I don’t remember any specific instances but I know that we celebrated New Zealand wine quite a bit. I know that the shows with Diana were wonderful for me to be able to go out with her it’s a warm environment. We were on the South Island for the first time when I went with Diana. I didn’t see too much of anything that time and I did a very short concert when I was with her so I’m really excited that we’re coming back to New Zealand.

MD: I’d like to talk a little bit about your songwriting. I’m curious as to how you feel the process has evolved. You’ve been doing it for a few years now. Do you feel that it’s changed from when you started writing songs?

MP: I do. Think that I have really been holding tight to the idea that I could sort of follow through with what I wanted to do as a and get to a point where I’d say what I wanted to say and see if then I would have accomplished or achieved the kind of reaction that I would have in me. But I felt that there’s no way to know until you try. I think that it takes years to be able to articulate certain things. The bottom line is, writing for me is a very long process that demands not just editing and reviewing but really the time that it takes to think and conjure up different ways of looking at a problem or a sentence or a history in time. I’m always inspired by picking out a particular angle on something that might not necessarily grandiose, but peculiar in a very small and insignificant way. So that hasn’t changed. I think that it has just been the technique of getting to the bottom of it that disturbs me and continues to plague me. I don’t know that there’s any judgment once I’ve gotten to what I wanted to say…and I think on this last record there are a couple of songs that that definitely touching on what I wanted to say. way one of them.

MD: You’ve had some collaborators along the way and one of the more interesting ones is , the former . I’m curious as to how that collaboration happened.

MP: Well, he was extremely generous and he is also extremely meticulous and hard working and was very interested in the lyrics in anything we did together which surprised me a little bit. I expected there to be more of a musical slant but apparently he’s really into poetry. We worked on several songs together. We spent a week together.

MD: How did you initially hook up with him?

MP: Bill Wyman was visiting the Nice Jazz Festival in the south of France. He was going to see B.B. King. They have several stages and I had just finished my concert and I was backstage. I think I might have been doing an interview and this gentleman came up to me and said something about something related to a bass player for . I didn’t understand what he had said and it was all kind of going by quite quickly and I said, ‘Oh, don’t let me interrupt your interview’. And he was very nice. He had his wife and children with him and I wasn’t really sure what he had told me but I had a feeling I needed to check it out. So I invited him to come and meet the band and the guitar player said, ‘I know who you are, man!’ So it was Bill Wyman. So Bill and I then talked later and he apparently had sent me a song, or was about to send me a song that he’d written to see if I would work on that. So I was really excited that he decided to come back and say hello to us. I then got the song. When I got home off tour there was a song in the mail for me and it sounded a lot like the kind of song I’d want to do but also the kind of song I’d want to write. That’s when I contacted him to see when he was available to get together to write songs. That was really my passion, I think, at that point. Getting off the road I just wanted to write.

He put a week aside in winter of last year and I went to London and visited with him every afternoon and stayed for dinner with the children and sat around talking about whatever it was, whether it was the football game that day or European history or something. I really enjoyed that week in a very relaxed way but also the work beforehand, like I said, was very poetic. That’s exactly where my heart lies. That’s my starting point when I write a song…as a singer and as a songwriter. So I learned a lot about what a song is from him. He’s very generous, very kind.

MD: Were you a Stones fan?

MP: I was a Stones fans but, I have to say, I don’t know a lot of the records, the original records. I had heard the songs in various other formats, but I wasn’t from the generation that had the original experience.

MD: Since you’re writing your own material now, I wonder if that affects the cover versions that you choose. Do you try to make them fit in with what you’re writing? You have several covers on the new , a Dylan song, a and a Beatles.

MP: You mean in a live performance?

MD: No, I was thinking more in terms of putting a record together. MP: Well I’m stuck with the dilemma that it’s really being able to perform that dictates the repertoire, not what I would deem to be a good list of songs necessarily. I think the reality is I love to do these songs no matter doing them live or recording. I am each time reminded of how great these are because of what it’s like to embody them and perform them. When it comes to my own songwriting I’m determined to put it out there and try and make it work as much as I possibly can. This particular record, I think, tried to embrace some standards that I was willing to try my hand at and might also fit into the general idea of what I was trying to do on my own songwriting. It’s an attempt to mix up my songs with those songs as far as what we are talking about and how we approach them musically…having a more orchestral attitude toward the arrangements.

MD: I really enjoyed your version of and it’s a song that tons of people have done in the past, including The Rolling Stones. So how did you approach a song that has been recorded so often?

MP: I would say that that song in particular is something that gets…it represents the standard in 12- bar blues form. People hear that and they think, ‘well I’ve heard that before. That sounds like a blues to me because I know what blues is and I know what that sounds like’. But to me, unfortunately, that has become like a numbing effect and I wanted to get away from the lack of experience that one can have through the storytelling of a blues form. So I didn’t want there to be a lot of attention to the blues chord changes and the solo riffs that we end up hearing a lot. I wanted it to go back to the story that the person was talking about in the song because I fundamentally believe that we have lost attention for that aspect of the blues which is what made it such a grand medium. It’s a catchy format that allows you to tell something in a poetic way. I really wanted to explore that. I think that because wanted to be dramatic about it that there’s a lot of sparseness that gives you room to just build intensity. I said at some point, ‘we that’s perfect, it’s practically operatic what he did”. But I thought that’s the only way to make this statement because of the culture that we live in now where you have to be aware that people are numb. I thought it’s OK to be a tad bit melodramatic because it deserves that, you know. A friend of mine called me and said, ‘I saw that you’re doing Love In Vain. You have to take that seriously, man.’ Don’t mess with that song! Because people hear a song like that and a whole life of philosophies can be invested in it. And I agree, I totally respect that. So I wanted to give it as much justice as I could. Of course that’s my reading.