Foto-© Jennifer McCord
Kürzlich absolvierte Paris Paloma eine ausverkaufte Headline-Tour durch die USA, gab ihr Debüt beim Glastonbury Festival, teilte sich die Bühne mit der legendären Stevie Nicks im Londoner BST Hyde Park und lieferte bei BBC’s Later…with Jools Holland eine beeindruckende Performance ihrer Durchbruchssingle labour ab. Jetzt geht es ans Eingemacht, denn diese Woche erscheint das mit Spannung erwartete Debütalbum Cacophony! Ihr ätherischer Sound und ihre feurigen Texte rufen bei den Fans starke emotionale Reaktionen hervor, wie ihre bereits veröffentlichten Tracks boys, bugs and men, my mind (now), drywall, as good a reason, yeti und der viralen Billboard-Chart-Single labour, die alles ins Rollen brachte. Die 15 Tracks des Albums reichen von zart und herzzerreißend bis hin zu unterschwellig aggressiv und rachsüchtig. Mit Einflüssen aus Dark Pop, Folk und Indie schafft Paris eine Diskografie, die etwas Ursprüngliches, Kraftvolles und von Natur aus Weibliches hervorruft. Wir trafen die Newcomerin via Zoom zum Interview!
Lovely to meet you virtually, Paris. How are you doing?
I’m good, a little tired, but otherwise, good.
How are you going to spend the next month or so pre release?
I’ve got a couple of festivals still to play this season. A festival in Oslo and I’ll be doing Reading and Leeds. And then I’ll be doing some writing over the next month and getting ready to start promoting the album more now that all the singles are out. And then the tour in Europe in September is a celebration of the album too.
Have you had favorite moments during the entire making of the album?
Every time one of the singles is released has been a really special moment. The Warmth just came out and My Mind Now, came out in January and the other ones in between. The releases feel like an intentional build of the world for people before the album comes out.
That sounds wonderful. Was there anything you found specifically challenging?
We decided to do the album once I’d already written some of the songs. They are all from the last two years, some even a bit older; others feel very recent. I think patience to me, when it comes to the creative aspect of things, I struggle with it. My creative process doesn’t stop, but obviously, things slow down when you’re trying to release music and that’s always a challenge. It also feels challenging to release a body of work into the world that’s so vulnerable – that wouldn’t stop me from doing it though.
It must be quite the time warp, having worked on something vulnerable, that you release to other people at a point where it’s something you might have moved on from.
Yeah, it’s definitely like that. But, you know, it’s still music that I feel very close to and there isn’t any kind of disparity.
When you work on your music, do you plan a long term vision or think about the impact?
I don’t think I do. I mean, prior to Labour it’s not even something I could have conceptualised or predicted a song of mine having that scale of effect. Now it’s something that crosses my mind. But I think it’s not something I plan for, it’s something I plan around. I understand now that my music doesn’t go out into a void, which is kind of what it can feel like when you’re an artist starting out and you don’t have an audience yet. I did that for a while, sort of releasing songs into the ether. Now I know that there’s a really attentive and thoughtful fan base, an audience who listen to my music and that’s who I think of when I release these songs. I want them to feel empowered by it. I want them to feel comforted or whatever it is that I’m trying to say, I want to share in that. I want to have a community in that with them.
Does that help you manage the vulnerability you were speaking about earlier as well?
I think so. I also never really found being vulnerable difficult. For me it feels more like relaxing to be vulnerable and dropping the facade and letting down your armour a little bit, rather than to have walls up – that’s what takes the energy.
A lot of your work is around womanhood and connection. Can you share how you’ve experienced deep human connection?
There’s a few songs on the album that very specifically deal with the aspect of my growth that has come through my external loving relationships with people. A lot of my education on love and knowing what love is has come from my relationships with the women in my life, my friends, my grandma, my mom and my sister. And there’s a song on the album called Knitting Song. And that speaks to the passage of love through generations of womanhood. I think of my best friend Kate when I think about that song and she’s one of the main people in my life. She taught me what love is and what love is and what it is to be loved and to be seen. That is such a treasured and celebrated thing for me in my music, the love I have, whether that’s manifested in being indignant on behalf of someone, being angry with them, or being sad with them. It’s about all the women in my life. Then songs like As Good A Reason and Labor, there are these moments of women coming together and it’s out of love for all and understanding that everyone deserves to be treated well and to feel empowered. The presence of love and the presence of female relationships in my life is something that is closely intersected in my songs.
That’s beautiful. Magic happens when deep waters join forces! You’ve released the video for The Warmth a few days ago. It’s so stunning to look at and to listen to and to feel and see all these things that you just described. What has been the process from the first idea spark of the song to having this beautiful visualisation of it come together?
I’ve wanted to write the song for a while. And I struggle to write happier songs, I think when you’re happy you don’t feel like writing about it. You feel like going out and experiencing it. There were some glimmers of things in my life where I was starting to notice that happiness was returning to me in a way that I’d not felt it so strongly in a long time, through my depression and through my struggle with both anxiety and OCD. It had been a long and exhausting few years and my self-esteem had really, really struggled for it. I started having these moments in my recovery watching my friends on the beach skimming stones and I remember thinking that it felt like the warmth was returning to me. I kind of had this idea for a song in my head for a while and didn’t really do anything with it. When I went to Bergen to a songwriting camp there, I was paired with Mark Heller, who is a wonderful Norwegian pop singer songwriter, and Eirik Heller, an amazing producer from Bergen. I had a couple of lines and we sort of played with it a little bit and I ended up writing this song with Mark and Eirik produced it. I was so influenced as well whilst I was there in Bergen, I fell in love with the town, and I was feeling the happiest I’d been in a long time. So the warmth is one of those songs where you’re writing about it in real time, as you’re realising everything. A lot of the time I will have an idea of something and I’ll be very self-aware of it and I’ll ruminate and then I’ll make a song because I know exactly what I want to say. But The Warmth was something I was writing as I was realising it and it has become what it is now.
That sounds super special. A tangible outcome of yourself coming to yourself in a way..? I loved, how in your PR text, you explain that rather than trying to create an album, and rather than conceptualising it too much, you let the songs inform each other.
The album is called Cacophony in reference to the Greek creation myths that say that the earth and the sky and everything just sprang out of chaos instead of the big bang that’s described by science. In the Greek myths, there was chaos at the beginning of all things. Stephen Fry writes about it beautifully, in his book Mythos, as this great yawning chasm of noise and darkness and this resonated with what the inside of my head felt like. It felt like chaos and this noise and this electrical storm of emotions and pain and trauma. And the songs on the album were all written out of a necessity to articulate, to tidy up and to understand the chaos that was in my head. The album kind of draws the songs together…, creation as an act of healing or as an act of taming the chaos.
You’re letting them become what they need to be rather than planning the script too much?
Something really beautiful happens when you have an emotional outlet that you can rely on all the time and writing has always been that for me. Writing and my artwork.
Where do you envision people listening to the album for the very first time?
I would never say sort of like one place because different places mean different things to different people. I’d want them to listen to it somewhere where they feel really completely present, whether that’s in the safety of their home or out in nature. Those are kind of two of my favorite places to listen to music, just going for a walk and finding a green space with trees or a river and listening to it there.
What sort of place do you tend to be in when you write music?
I have ideas come to me all the time. I collect them like ingredients and at home is where I do the big mixing pot of songs and put all the actual work in.
You’ve written songs since you were a teenager and then I understand you studied fine art, right? Who are you in both of these worlds?
I think the same person. I think having a multifaceted creative life is so enriching to me. And I wish that I had even more forms of art that I could do. I did ballet for a very long time and I wish that I could do it now. I’d love to get to a point in my life where I’m doing even more art. But yeah, I studied as a visual artist and to me, it felt very similar to what I do now with songwriting. My visual artwork comes into what I do now in terms of all my cover art and all the artwork that I make to help myself enrich the music that I’m making. It feels like being understood. What I fear most is being misunderstood… pursuing a career as a creative, whether as a fine artist or as a music artist, are both antidotes to being misunderstood.
You’ve collaborated with Jennifer McCord on beautiful photos. How involved were you in the creation of them?
I love doing those photo shoots, they’re so much fun. I work closely with my stylist, Leith Clark, who pulls all the amazing clothes that I get to borrow and wear and I get to be part of the personas and the visuals of this world that’s become my world. Jennifer is so wonderful. I didn’t know what the shoot was going to look like beforehand, but I trusted Jennifer implicitly and we had such wonderful talks before. It was such a fun day and it got so cold. It was mostly women that day and all of us who were there were all just these wonderful creatives. And I guess when you establish that sort of trust and, like you say, understanding for other people, then, this goes back to the other thing we said, you don’t have to know what it’s planned to look like but you can just let it flow.
How do you stay sane when a song like Labour becomes so massively successful?
I think through dissociation, initially. Then there are many different things. One of them is just noticing and trying to conceptualise the amount of good that it’s done for people. I get so many emotional messages from women, mothers and young girls about the effect the song had on their lives and a lot of messages about it empowering them to leave abusive or exploitative relationships. That’s so moving and I honestly feel like I can’t possibly take an ounce of credit for the song. It’s just something like a lighthouse to hold onto when it seems really overwhelming. I’m so grateful, it feels like I’ve found a community in a lot of my listeners and audience, which really helps when things feel overwhelming.
What has been a particularly memorable performance for you to date?
I played at BST and supported Stevie Nicks four weeks ago just over a week ago. That was amazing and one of the best days of my life. I was petrified to do it beforehand, it was an inconceivable number of people for me to play in front of. The capacity is 65,000, I don’t how many ended up being there at the time that I was playing, but it was incredible. It was such a beautiful stage, the great oak stage with this big tree coming out of it. It was moving just to kind of be stood there and feel how far I’d come. I played a show last year on tour where there was no one there. It’s beyond stupid to, like, someone let me in. Imposter syndrome is so, so real! My manager said to me that it’s both reassuring and kind of sad, but imposter syndrome doesn’t go away because it’s with you at every stage in your career. I mean, hopefully, at some point that means it becomes something that you don’t pay heed to, it just comes with any level you are at.
I guess every level that gets added on it, whichever form, it’s just the new thing that you can then question and think, oh gosh, why am I here? What am I doing? Who are all these people? And it sounds just as humbling to play in a venue where no one shows up as it does opening for Stevie Nicks in bloody Hyde Park next to a big oak tree.
It’s amazing, it’s still humbling because when you’re the first person on a stage that big, most people don’t know who you are. And that makes it really fun because it’s such an opportunity to gain audiences and there’s lots of people discovering your music there and that’s so fun. But yeah, you’re so right, both experiences are humbling and confidence building.
Paris Paloma Tour:
11.09.24 Köln, Die Kantine
12.09.24 Hamburg, Mojo Club
14.09.24 Berlin, Heimathafen Neukölln
