On stage American singer Madeleine Peyroux seems so shy, nervous and awkward that it almost hurts to watch her. "I didn't go to concerts for years," she told the audience at the Basement in Sydney in 2005. "That's why I'm not very good at this."
Despite her obvious fear of the limelight, the girl with the folksy Billie Holiday voice is enjoying great success on both sides of the Atlantic. Peyroux, 32, has just released her third album, Half the Perfect World, and is about to return to Sydney as one of the hot tickets of the 2007 Sydney Festival.
Half the Perfect World has followed her best-selling 2004 album, Careless Love, with almost unseemly haste. After all, there was an eight-year gap between Careless Love and her debut album, Dreamland. Was it that same blend of self-doubt and self-preservation that makes some artists wary of early commercial success? "Wow!" she says, over the telephone from New York. "I think you hit the nail on the head. I had many doubts about it [performing music] being an appropriate job for me. As a career it's quite a different thing than just to say that I love to play music."
Born in Athens, Georgia, but raised in Southern California and Paris, Peyroux's voice still betrays a trace of the South. After her parents' divorce in the late 1980s, she moved to Paris with her mother before being sent to an English boarding school. At 15, she ran away, back to Paris, where she joined a group of street musicians.
Initially, she just passed the hat around for the buskers. Then she began to sing, joined another troupe and lived hand-to-mouth without a home as a busker for three years. It is a period that she recalls with great fondness.
"I have to be very careful not to look back and romanticise it too much," she says. "But I must say that I learned to find the muses at that point in my life. You can be touched very deeply when you're on the street. The exchange is so intimate - you really feel that you've changed someone's day - and it's completely serendipitous."
By her own admission, Peyroux struggled with the fame that followed her debut album, which was described by Time magazine as "the most exciting, involving, vocal performance by a new singer this year". Her response was to disappear from the music scene for a while. "I stepped back and took a breather."
This tendency to go AWOL has not changed much since her school days. While on tour in Europe last year, Peyroux failed to turn up for a television interview and her record company had to hire a private detective to track her down. She had skipped town for New York.
But Peyroux promises she will arrive in Sydney, armed with an eclectic mix of jazz standards, songs by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits, plus a smattering of original compositions.
"Frankly it's a very dramatic show; a show that has a theatrical aspect to it," she says. "The show has been growing over the past six months in a way that suits the music better."
Not that this most tentative, awkward and beguiling of artists is in danger of finding a comfortable, mid-career groove. "I actually think of myself as still being at the very beginning stages of what I do."
This High Definition Broadcast from Australia was taken right after her concert last January of 2007. It lasted for almost an hour of pure Madeleine -Folksy-jazzy type of music.
No comments:
Post a Comment