Finished Business: An Exit Interview with Chairlift

As the New York City duo play their final shows, they talk about what’s changed, what’s next, and what it was like being at the forefront of pop getting hip to indie.
Image may contain Patrick Wimberly Human Person Face Caroline Polachek Art Drawing Photo Portrait and Photography

Interview: Finished Business: An Exit Interview with Chairlift

Photo by: Photo by Tim Barber

When Chairlift announced their breakup late last year, it came as something of a surprise. Why a group that’s shapeshifted and grown with each of its three albums would call it quits when there seems to be no acrimony among its members remains a bit puzzling. Plus, the Brooklyn music scene that incubated Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly over the last decade seems more primed than ever to understand their post-genre mix of pop, experimental, electronic, R&B, and rock.

But right before I leave Polachek’s homey, top-floor walk-up in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood earlier this week, it clicks. “There’s an indie ghetto,” she laments. Though the band has been signed to major label Columbia since 2009, she means that no matter how many certified bangers they write, Chairlift, as an idea, will always be perceived as being a product of peak indie rock. And Polachek and Wimberly don’t have small-time aspirations.

“Up until this point, it’s made sense to combine what we do into one thing,” Polachek tells me, more diplomatically, over coffee, ginger snaps, and cat cuddles around her kitchen table. But with Wimberly’s production work for artists including Solange and Kelsey Lu, along with Polachek’s flourishing songwriting skills—she co-wrote and co-produced Beyoncé’s “No Angel”—the singer says, “Having a single-collaborator format doesn’t make sense for either of us right now.”

The duo’s short goodbye tour culminates with their biggest show to date in Brooklyn on April 22. Wimberly and Polachek still plan to call each other up when they get stuck on their own projects, but Polachek admits there’s a rattly, metallic, “quintessentially Chairlift” synth sound she’s going to need to retire at this point. Short of that, though, don’t expect these two to slow down anytime soon.


Check out a batch of candid Chairlift photos from across the last eight years, courtesy of the band:

Pitchfork: How do you think technology has changed the music world across the past decade of Chairlift’s existence?

Caroline Polachek: More than anything, I think social media had the biggest impact. When we first started, Myspace was peaking, but it still didn’t feel like it was at the center of the way people consumed music. In those early social media days, at least in the underground pop scene that was happening in Brooklyn, there was still this idea of total humility that was left over from experimental and indie rock—it was extremely uncool to brag about yourself, or to be confident. Some of the bands that you saw blowing up at that time, like MGMT and Grizzly Bear, were confident, but it was part of the concept to be self-effacing.

I’ve been unpacking that [idea] recently, because the opposite is the case now. The people who are 17 years old and present themselves as gods of the world right out of the gate have this huge advantage and aren’t looked down on. That would not have flown at all in the world that we came up in. There was something ingrained in that entire scene that was generational. Sometimes I look at it as kind of a disadvantage because I have to remind myself: How much of that are you still carrying around?

Between your first and second albums, Does You Inspire You and Something, founding Chairlift member Aaron Pfenning left the band. What changed when you went from a trio to just the two of you?

Patrick Wimberly: We set out on a clear path and got rid of an obstacle.

CP: Burn. [both laugh]

PW: Love him to death, but it wasn’t working.

CP: The communication lines were not open. But also, everything changed in our lives around that time. Patrick and I both entered into serious relationships with people that completely changed who we were. It felt like we were both becoming New Yorkers for the first time after spending a pretty grueling year and a half on the road. And it felt really good to put down some roots and to see ourselves as music professionals, because the whole first album was a whirlwind. I was in college when we were making it—I mean, I was in the computer lab at NYU checking my email between finals when I got a text that “Bruises” was in an iPod commercial.

We were also dealing with legal shit for a year and a half with Aaron leaving. So there was this undertone of passive aggressiveness that went into that second album. I was digging really heavily into obscure ’80s music then and part of what I love about that stuff is the mixing of the super sweet with the really aggressive. We felt very caught in the middle, too. We’re a major label band, but we like so much weird stuff.

In those early Columbia days, was there ever a sense that they wanted you to be more of a commercial pop act?

CP: There definitely was a tug of war at first. They wanted an album full of “Bruises,” and we wanted to become a new band.

PW: But once we turned in Something, nobody fought us. They went with it.

CP: That was our first time working with the amazing Maureen Kenny, who signed us to Columbia. She had a much more pragmatic outlook than we did. As we were still in the writing phase, she was very matter-of-fact about saying, “Keep writing.” We wrote about 40 songs for that record, and at one point she gave me a Bruce Springsteen documentary about how he wrote 300 songs for Darkness at the Edge of Town and that he would play them until he figured out which ones were the best. At the time, coming from music just being a hobby, being told to keep writing was a brutal thing. It’s funny because now that seems not only par for the course, but I think we should have written more. Both of us have a new appreciation for the process of writing—it’s actually my favorite part of the whole album life cycle now.

What’s something you wish you’d known when Chairlift started?

CP: I’ve got two things, and they’re sort of opposites of each other. One is to not be precious about your music within your own world. Try everything you want to try; just because it exists doesn’t mean it’s done. But also: Don’t say yes to everything. Learn how to say no, because people respect a no. We were surrounded by people who were telling us, “This is how it works—you just say yes to things and you do the things.” I look back on the first album cycle and I’m proud of the music we made but, man, there was a whole trail of garbage generated by promo stuff we did that I would never do now. There’s a garbage machine out there, and you can say no to it, and it will be OK. Because that’s not what’s going to make your career—your music and your good ideas are what make your career.

PW: And you have to trust yourself when the answer is no. Because there’s often somebody very close to you telling you the opposite.

CP: Yeah, you have to remember that you are the artist, and the people around you are not the artist. I’ll keep expecting managers or labels to be like, “OK, I’ve got this good idea about how to frame who you are,” but no one is going to do that for you. It’s intense and scary, but that’s the real shit right there—when you realize that the good ideas are going to come from you. No one else is in your dream world.

Was there ever anything you said no to that you regret now?

CP: No.

PW: No.

What’s something you said yes to that you wish you hadn’t?

CP: All sorts of things, but they’re all on the same level of inconsequential small shit. It’s just the ground hum of it. Video interviews. Branded stuff. Over-playing to the point that we were exhausted and couldn’t do a good show. Wearing stupid clothes for stupid magazines.

Hopefully I can be someone’s big sister and be like, “You don’t have to do that.” I wish I’d had a mentor. Especially for women in the music industry, there’s a lack of mentorship.

In the time since you started Chairlift, do you think the sense of community among women musicians has grown?

CP: Well, we’ve always been really lucky that we had a close community, but it keeps shifting for many reasons. People drop in and out of music, in and out of New York City. It’s just natural. In a lot of ways, I credit Chairlift’s success—if you could call it that—to the community we’ve been part of. That’s been a really important thing for us too—giving artists that we believe in a hand up, collaborating and sharing shows, swapping demos. That’s why we came to this city. Patrick’s even more that way than I am—he’s extremely loyal to his crew.

PW: I stayed very close to the MGMT guys ever since we shared a rehearsal space with them in 2008. They were the first ones to have us open for them, and now I’m working with them on their fourth record.

Besides community, how do you think being in New York changed the band?

PW: That first year that I was in the band [in 2007], we were such hustlers. Once we decided to take the band seriously, all three of us were working so hard and booking our own tours. There was a certain grind that I don’t know would have happened anywhere else.

CP: It affected us more in terms of motivation than musically, but it definitely fed the sense of mania in the music, too. When Aaron and I were living in Colorado, I was part of a small DIY noise scene there—we were in a place that was so calm and wholesome, you would really seek out violence in the music. I remember going to shows with the hopes that there would be something really physical about it—even just moshing—because in a place so spread out, that’s what you look for in a scene. But then in New York I was so physically overwhelmed by the crowds in the subways and just how much it takes out of you that I started listening to new age music and really soft pop. You would have thought moving to a city like this would make you make harsher music, but actually it did the opposite.

At the same time, New York is a place where you can have so many identities. You know how some trees have those ear mushrooms that just grow off, and you could live on one of those mushrooms and not realize that there was stacks and stacks of others? That’s how I describe music scenes in New York. That’s one of the trippiest things about living here—just how many parallel universes there are that you can be completely unaware of. That definitely fanned the flames of our collage-y tendencies. I think if we lived in a place like Paris or London or Berlin, we’d feel more like we needed to define ourselves with a monolithic sound.

Can you think of a New York moment that changed the music Chairlift was making?

PW: I went to see Das Racist for the first time, at Galapagos [in Brooklyn], and heard them play that song “Combination Pizza Hut Taco Bell,” and I was like, “You guys gotta come over to my studio this weekend and record it.” I had never worked with rappers before, so I went and bought an MPC and spent the next day learning how to make beats. And that became a huge part of my production—just from that one show.

Can we talk about highs and lows, in terms of personal memories?

CP: We were reminiscing a couple of days ago about maybe the worst 24 hours Chairlift had, back in 2012. We almost missed a flight from Singapore to Stockholm. We were all sick. They lost my synthesizer, and we had to play a show without my synth, on Valentine’s Day. It was just one of those points when we were just dragging ourselves along the floor from place to place, completely jet-lagged. But the next day in Copenhagen, when my synth arrived, we were all just so irrationally happy. I look back a lot on those moments of surprise—when things are out of your control but working out the way they should.

PW: That show in Copenhagen was one of our fondest moments, ever. It was a great audience. There are certain audiences that I can remember very vividly.

Do you remember their faces?

PW: No.

CP: I can.

PW: It’s a feeling for me, like you’ve actually made a connection.

Do you remember a crowd that was the exact opposite of that feeling?

PW and CP: Liverpool.

PW: It was our first tour in the UK [in late 2008]. We were about to get signed [to Columbia] so we were in between record labels and really tired and sick and broke.

CP: It was a packed show but people only knew “Bruises” and they were talking loudly and not paying attention at all. We stopped playing in the middle of a song, and I threw my wine glass into the crowd and walked off stage. And the sound guy, who only had about half his teeth and reeked of alcohol, referred to me only as “baby” during soundcheck. He touched my butt during soundcheck, too. So I was an angry woman. When show was done, the promoter came out and said they weren’t paying us—and that we should pay them.

PW: It was one of those things where our manager was like, “You guys gotta pack up real fast and get the fuck out of here.”

CP: And then in the middle of packing, Aaron said something to the effect of, “If we don’t get paid, it’s going to be your fault.” I took his beer and poured it over his head. It was really all about the beverages that night.

You were part of the convergence of the underground and the mainstream when you worked on Beyoncé’s 2014 self-titled album, and now you see other people from your world, like Rostam and Father John Misty writing for big pop stars, too. How did that Beyoncé collaboration come about?

PW: We met Solange in 2009 when she came to one of our SXSW shows and introduced herself.

CP: She not only introduced herself—she asked if she could get on stage and dance to “Planet Health” because she had choreography all worked out for it!

PW: We ended up hanging out with her all weekend and became best friends. Later on, after she had finished [2012’s] True, she asked me if I would play drums for her live and help her with her show. She was using our rehearsal space for a hot second.

CP: She was rehearsing there one day, years before the actual Beyoncé track happened, and she texted me saying, “I think you should write for my sister.” I texted her back like, “Uh, anytime. You’ve got my phone number.” And that was it. It was like she’d had a brain fart.

PW: I had worked with Solange for a month or two but had to stop because we were starting to write Moth. She was playing a gig at MoMA, and they called me up to help with something. I was watching at the side of the stage with her sister and her brother-in-law [Jay Z], and afterwards all three of us were talking when Beyoncé was like, “You guys should totally come to the studio.” We were like, “Great, when?” We went the next Monday.

CP: They gave us our own studio there, in this compound at Jungle City [in Manhattan]. It was like a hive of people—you could hear different songs coming out of different studios. It was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that or had any sense of how much music gets generated for an album like that. It was intimidating but also exciting because it made me want to write fast. So Patrick and I made five songs in about two weeks, with lyrics, that we gave them. Patrick had two instrumentals he threw into the folder, and I had a song from a year prior that I had done for [solo project] Ramona Lisa, but I changed the lyrics to make them more Beyoncé.

We didn’t hear anything back for like six months, and then I get call from the engineer at three o’clock in the morning, coming back from an Ariel Pink show, being like, “I need [song] stems right now.” I ran home and sent them, but didn’t hear anything back for another four months. Then I got a call from her A&R asking if I could come in to approve her vocal on “No Angel.”

Part of the structure of that song was that it’s supposed to build dynamically: enter really high vocally, octave wise, then drop down for chorus one, stay down really sultry for verse two, then shoot up for chorus two. But she had done the whole thing high. I turned to her A&R and was like, “I’m sure Beyoncé doesn’t take notes, but I’m going to say this anyway, just in case: The song is meant to surprise you at every turn, start high, drop low, stay low, jump up high.” And she’s like, “Beyoncé doesn’t take notes. This is the take.” I said, “OK, it sounds incredible, you have approval.”

A month and a half later, I get a congrats text from a friend. I was so confused. He sends me a screencap of iTunes, and “No Angel” was track five. I went over to his place, and we watched the video, and I couldn’t believe it—she had changed the fucking vocal to be the way that it was on the demo, with the octave jumps.

And I think we can finally confess this now: “Ch-Ching” was one of the songs we wrote for Beyoncé. Which is funny because it feels very full circle for us: That song just got an Apple Watch ad last week.

What if “Ch-Ching” blows up huge now—are you going to pull an LCD Soundsystem and come back in a few years?

PW: I don’t think so. As soon as we announced the breakup and the farewell tour, everybody that we’re close with was like, “Oh, you’re doing that LCD thing.” Whatever. That’s not the idea at all.

CP: We had considered going on a hiatus for a while, but it really didn’t make sense to have a project that we’ve put this much work and love into become just become a part-time thing.

What’s next for each of you?

PW: Our last show is on Saturday, on Tuesday I go into sessions with Soko for three weeks, and one more week with MGMT, then I go out to L.A. for some writing and mixing. That’s only the next two months. It doesn’t look like I’m gonna be working any less than I have for the last 10 years.

CP: I’m making a point not to talk about what’s next, but I will say it’s exciting to be fully in control and to have a full tool kit—I feel like everything up until now has been a form of training.

Training for what, exactly? Do you want to be a pop star?

CP: If you mean pop star in the sense of playing ball with radio formats, no. But if you mean it in the sense of building a compelling world that I’m at the center of, that a lot of people are tuned into, then yes. Radio is so cutthroat, but I do feel like the music industry is structured so differently than it used to be. I’m amazed and in awe of artists who can build a parallel universe that’s so big and clearly defined that the mainstream finally has to pay attention. Lana Del Rey is a perfect example.

Success will come. Or it won’t. But I think you can only make a go at it in a big way by fully being yourself and taking risks. People can feel risks.