With New Album Pang, Caroline Polachek Is Finally Free

Caroline Polachek has spent a lot of time limiting herself. To be fair, the fruits of these limitations have been wildly successful: She popped into the zeitgeist in 2005 as a member of key darlings Chairlift, the option indie-pop project that built a cult following for more than a decade before Polachek and bandmate Patrick Wimberly called it quits in 2016. On the side, she filtered her solo work by way of the lens of monikers Ramona Lisa and CEP, all of the while co-writing and producing with heavy hitters like Beyoncé, Travis Scott, and Charli XCX. All possibilities to stretch her creative wings — although habitually in the rules.


And as she explains it, these conceptual boxes she's willingly placed herself in — Brooklyn-flavored indie pop princess, experimental synth queen — allowed her to hone her own creative strengths. "I think in the past, those limitations have been especially useful for me to remember what I'm doing why as well as how to do it best," she tells MTV News.


But right now? Permit Caroline Polachek to reintroduce herself. "I think I finally felt willing to take off all of these limitations and just mention what I have to mention she reveals. Pang, her long-awaited album and the initial under her own name, is obtainable today (October 17). It features one of the year's best pop songs in "So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings," an ironically quirky declaration of being painfully, hopelessly in lust with a flame just out of reach. The feeling it owns is so deeply relatable, however oddly specific, it's easy to believe that this is Polachek at her most trustworthy. "I knew I wanted this music to be more upfront than anything I'd ever done before," she explains, "and forcing myself to finally use my own name felt like a way of stating that very clearly."


MTV News: I have to talk about "So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings," as I just think the world of it. Tell me everything about how it came together.


Caroline Polachek: So, "You're so hot, it's hurting my feelings" is something I'd actually told someone a week prior, and the phrase just kept playing on my mind. I had a session set up towards the very end of writing this record with a couple companions of mine, and the initial melody that came was the melody that's right now the starting of the song. There's something sort of classical about it, yet it also reminded me of "Video Killed the Radio Star"-era '80s pop. Just something about the excellent class of the jumpiness of it. And then I thought, wait a minute, this is sort of the ideal vessel for that lyric. So [I] just began writing around that idea.


MTV News: Just that line itself, it has these ideas of lust, desire, pain, jealousy. This person, who was so hot it hurt your feelings... Which emotional directions did that come from?


Polachek: Well, any time someone's hot, and is just not actually attainable... We sort of have this idea that maybe in the event you hold them or get some sort of promises from them or have sex with them, there's some sort of satisfaction that can be attained. Yet, the fact is there isn't. Once you're that attracted to someone, there really is this sort of thing about them that you could never truly have or possess, and it's that sort of aggravation of wanting it and never being able to have it. It's also, more typically, a song about long-distance attraction. I don't know if it just needs to be a relationship; I think in 2019, so several folks are experiencing relationships through their phones, even if they're not living that far away from each other.


MTV News: I've also been listening to "Door," and there's a really lovely line in the song towards the beginning: "10 laps around the planet to prove what I wasn't."


Polachek: Yes, exactly. For me, that lyric was very specifically about my twenties. I think, and I feel this is pretty common, that a lot of my twenties [there] was this sort of aspire to prove both what you are and what you're not, and sort of entering into another later chapter in my life right now, that sort of need disappeared. You get more confident. You know yourself more.


MTV News: once you hear "So Hot" and "Door," and also songs like "Ocean of Tears," these songs on Pang aren't songs of total bliss, nor do they feel like songs of complete misery. They dive into these moments of murkier emotional tension, whether it's with a lover or within yourself.


Polachek: Yeah, that's a good piece of what Pang means to me, both as a sensation and because the title of the album. Panging is the sort of sharp pain you feel indoors once you're reminded some sort of unattended need or something that you've neglected. Whether it's nostalgia or hunger or envy or regret, all those ideas come from addressing a lack that's been did not think about. Plus a pang is ultimately private. It's not a thing that gets broadcast to the world; it's a sort of internal alarm that sounds any time something has to change plus it has to change fast.


MTV News: This being your first album with your name on it, is there anything you feel like you're saying right now that you could might not have been able to mention before?


Polachek: It's all just more unfiltered right now. I'm certainly getting into characteristic with my personalized life that I probably wouldn't have dared to get into before, although I think that's just coming from sort of a new desire for things to feel very clear.


MTV News: I have to ask about "No Angel," the Beyoncé song you co-wrote and produced. To me, it's another song that's not bliss, although not misery. It's this in-between of two people wrestling with the reality of who the other is.


Polachek: Yeah, exactly. The song is sort of about reconciling in a salty way with your partners and professions and asking for compromise along with asking that your own imperfections be taken as well. That song was written about each year and also 1/2 before Beyoncé even reached out. It was a song I wrote right at the very starting of experimenting by myself as a producer for Ramona Lisa. That song is about sort of the end of a bickering match with someone you're in love with, and no one walks away a winner, yet ideally both walk away still in love.


MTV News: Back then, as a songwriter, was there a way that you determined what songs were for you and what songs were for other people? And has that changed right now in any way?


Polachek: "No Angel" was certainly written for me, yet the thing is, I generally write my best as soon as I'm writing for myself, [and] anything's up for grabs. I sort of think that's the ideal way to operate; even as soon as I'm in sessions writing with other artists, I'm routinely pulling from the sort of emotions that are the most raw in my own life and distributing them up in the studio. I'm not that precious with music If I write it.


MTV News: I think about Julia Michaels, a phenomenal singer-songwriter, who has spoken about her first single "Issues" and feeling like it was the initial song too personalized to her to give to someone else. And that song wound up being a Grammy nominee for Song of the Year.


Polachek: Oh, Julia Michaels is such a legend... OK, if we're being straightforward, there really are a lot of songs on Pang I would absolutely not let go, no matter who wanted them.


MTV News: Which ones would you mention those are?


Polachek: "Parachute," for one, I would never give that song away. It's so close to my heart. I would like seeing anyone else sing "Caroline Shut Up." That could be interesting. I would give that one away, actually, which is funny, although it's very personalized. "Door," I would never give away. This one called "Hey Big Eyes," that is correct at the best of the b-side of the album, that one's also just so especially personalized to me, I might never let it go.


MTV News: So what can we expect from Pang?


Polachek: Well, Pang has a narrative thread that sort of runs loosely through it. The opening side of the album is sort of a unraveling, narratively. It's a sort of descent into self-questioning, doubt, structures falling apart, fear, confusion. Then the second half of the album is sort of making sense of it and rediscovering humor and rediscovering trust sort of in my own life.


MTV News: Was that narrative thread something that you set out to do initially, or was it the way the music came together?


Polachek: It wasn't the sort that they were necessarily written in, although they're all sort of taking place at different parts of the same thought process. So structuring the record was very, very easy in terms of the internal logic of it. Although it did happen afterwards as a second process.


MTV News: Was there a point, or a song in particular that you finished where soon after it was done you felt like, "Oh, I have an album here."


Polachek: Oh, that's such a wonderful question. Yes. Actually, that song was "The Gate." "The Gate" ironically opens the album, and the opening track that was written for the album closes it, which is "Parachute." However "The Gate" was written at 4 a.M. In my apartment and recorded in that moment as well. That's the take. It just felt like a finished thing any time that song got added, and I knew immediately it was going to be the intro to the album. That song sort of serves in a lot of ways like the sort of overture or the forward in the book, sort of, in case you will.


MTV News: Got you.


Polachek: And the song ends with this line, "I come here day-to-day just to hear you mention, finally there's a way to be both free and safe." And, I think the entire album proceeds from then on, this impossible mixture of freedom and safety, attempting to find it in my own way.


MTV News: Which one do you know you're leaning more towards right now, as a person?


Polachek: Well, I'm habitually out of balance. I think now, a segment of my conception of safety is taking care of the things I've made, although I'm probably leaning a little more towards safety this week, because I haven't really been taking good care of myself this week. I have been working so much on getting this record ready, although I think that's fine. These are the sacrifices we make for things that we love and keeping them safe, right?


MTV News: you can mention that any time whenever you were an artist under another name, you gave yourself parameters with which to feel safe, plus it feels like coming out on your own name and your own terms, there's a freedom to it.


Polachek: Yeah, exactly. I hadn't thought about that, nevertheless it's true.


MTV News: So which do you know you'll feel as soon as this comes out?


Polachek: Well, there's a freedom in being understood, isn't there? So think I plan to feel more free. Hopefully. Let's find out.