'I'm an outcast'
Madeleine Peyroux could be the new Norah Jones - if she didn't find the idea insulting. She tells Caroline Sullivan about walking out on her record company and arguing with Michael Parkinson
Tuesday August 2, 2005
The Guardian
Madeleine Peyroux
'I believe I was given a special chance because of the psychological freedom I had, singing in the streets ... Madeleine Peyroux
Every pop singer makes a point of announcing that they were the school weirdo, who took up music expressly to "show them". Madeleine Peyroux's claim, though, rings a little truer than most. Meeting the jazz singer now, at 31, it's easy to imagine her as the unblinking, quietly intense misfit at her Brooklyn junior high school. "My parents were both university teachers, so it was a big part of my upbringing to be talking about Socrates and Greek tragedy," she says, almost as soon we've shaken hands. "Then to go to school the next day and try to have a conversation about this stuff ... And I was overweight and wore second-hand clothes, so to say I was a weirdo was an understatement."
Peyroux, you could say, started as she meant to go on. Fifteen years later, she's emerging as the wild card of the jazz-crossover scene led by Norah Jones and Jamie Cullum, neither of whom could conceivably be described (as Peyroux was by a critic) as "likable but exceedingly strange". Stories abound: she left her first major label after one highly acclaimed album because of a dispute over musical direction; she walked out of a recent appearance on Parkinson when asked to change the song she was booked to sing; and while she let one of her tunes be used in a cosmetics advert, she won't allow her current album, Careless Love, to carry a sticker reading "As heard on the Simple ad", thereby costing herself sales. "You can't get her to do anything she doesn't want to do," someone at her record label says, with a kind of despairing pride.
But as Peyroux lights the first cigarette of the day and tests a small smile, she seems cheerful enough. And why not? While former classmates - "Italian and Irish girls who were always prettier and smaller" - are now McJobbing in Brooklyn, she's in the Normandy resort of Deauville, halfway through a European tour that's sowing the seeds of fame.
Her career has moved quickly since Careless Love was released last winter. The Simple ad aside, Peyroux also received a substantial leg-up when Starbucks decided to sell the album - the first time the coffee chain has done so with a relatively unknown artist. The deal suits both Starbucks, which garners cachet for selling a singer who has been compared with a young Billie Holiday, and Peyroux, who has watched sales rise "a lot". True to perverse form, though, she's no Starbucks fan, seeing it as "catering to people who can afford $2 for a cup of coffee and would also buy my record if they saw it". Well, yes, but she's allowing both it and Simple to use her music, isn't she? Her inscrutable response: "I have no aversion to it, but I don't want the association to go beyond this. I want the music to speak for itself."
Careless Love is getting the kind of reaction that makes it all worthwhile: both punters and critics rate it, the former enough to buy 100,000 copies, the latter enough to refrain from mentioning Norah Jones in every review. That says a lot, because her crossover sound is superficially comparable to Jones's zillion-selling wallpapery cocktail-jazz. She's awfully polite about her rival. "I'm not part of that Norah Jones/Jamie Cullum movement. I listen to their artwork and think about the merits they have, and I respect their ability to perform. But all of us are riding on the coattails of legendary singers who went before."
Impressed by Careless Love's dark, smoky heart, British reviewers have cautiously compared her to Billie Holiday, the Guardian describing her as "immaculate ... almost too perfect". Meanwhile, the French, who regard her as a Parisienne because her mother moved the family there when Madeleine was 14, are even more appreciative. Earlier, Peyroux hosted a press conference for French journalists, who asked typically Gallic questions about pain and art. "They're pretty serious here," she says dryly, and she should know - at 15, after brief spells in schools in Paris and West Sussex, she dropped out and began busking on the streets of Paris. She's evasive about details - how does a young girl end up singing on the street in a foreign city? Why was she singing jazz and not chart pop? - but it was a formative period.
"I believe I was given a special chance because of the psychological freedom I had, singing in the street. If I'd stayed in school, I wouldn't have been one of those people who are encouraged to shine. I had all these transitions going on."
Assumptions about her emotional state are fuelled not just by her ineffably careworn vocals, but her choice of cover versions (she rarely writes her own material), such as Hank Williams's Weary Blues and Dylan's You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. Pretty lovelorn stuff, eh? She busies herself lighting another cigarette, then admits: "I'm always lovelorn. I haven't met my, uh, lifetime companion yet."
She seems contemptuous of things that preoccupy most rising singers. Almost a decade ago, her first deal with a major label ended when she couldn't follow up her debut album (1996's Dreamland) to her own satisfaction. Despite a fantastic reception (Time magazine called her "The most exciting ... new artist this year"), she junked studio sessions and returned to busking. It was years before she was willing to try again with another label.
"I was always an outcast, and at the label, after the first record, I still felt like an outcast. I was wondering, from a philosophical standpoint, what everything meant to me. How this career figures. Now I'm a little closer to figuring out how to mould my life rather than allow it to be moulded."
That would account for the curious incident of the Parkinson no-show. She was booked to sing on Parky - the kind of ring-a-ding career-maker that money can't buy - but on the day of the show, her appearance was cancelled. Her PR people say she was unhappy with the show's request that she "jazz up" a slow ballad, and walked out. Peyroux herself tells a different story. "I cancelled two American shows to come to London to do Parkinson. We went to the studio, and when we got there, they said my appearance was cancelled. It was never explained why." Never explained? How odd. "Mm." So you didn't walk out in a huff? "It was never explained," she says levelly, the matter clearly closed.
Later that night, Peyroux plays a show in a fabulously rococo theatre in Deauville's Casino Barrière. It's full of characteristic contrasts: her sequined cocktail dress is offset by clumpy beach sandals; her plaintively assured singing jars with awkward, tangential banter. She makes a strange rising star - but rise she will.
