Girl, uninterrupted

I should be writing about Madeleine Peyroux, the singer with the affected Billie Holiday voice and stern, Emily Deschanel-à-la-TV’s-Bones face. But she’s late sending back the answers to the questions I e-mailed her last week, so instead I’m reading about another hard-to-peg vocalist: Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power).

Crazy like a fox: Lots of artists blow off interviews. Not so many of them actually agree to help orchestrate their own elaborate disappearances. And when’s the last time you saw a singer holding a cigarette in her promo shot?

And I can’t help wondering: Is this the era of the semi-psycho female singer? The new Ian Curtis, Jim Morrison or Ryan Adams with finer features, better accessories, but no less swagger? Girl, Interrupted with a recording contract?

Plenty of parallels can be drawn between Peyroux and Marshall: talent, moodiness, a love-hate relationship with fame. I know this because I have time to peruse back articles written by fascinated, if confused, journalists. “For two months I’ve tried to interview [Peyroux],” Mark Swartz wrote in a Perfect Sound article in 2003. “She even agreed to meet me once, but then she stood me up. A few days later she left a voicemail asking me to be patient. ‘The more you wait,’ she teased, ‘the more story you’ll have.’”

The sweet-and-lowdown showdown

Peyroux’s reputation has long been set. Reported under “Image” on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the vocalist: “Peyroux eschews publicity and keeps a low profile. She has dropped ‘out of sight’ for extended periods of time.”

With her third CD—last year’s Half the Perfect World (Rounder)—in an 11-year career, Peyroux proved she wasn’t the one-trick pony critics early on expected. There was an eight-year hiatus between the much-hyped debut and the critically acclaimed second effort.

It was producer Yves Beauvais who signed Peyroux to Atlantic, co-producing her first album, Dreamland, released in ‘96. Time called Peyroux’s album “the most exciting, involving vocal performance by a new singer this year” (Swartz heard “an incredibly tasteful work by an immature artist”). She was trotted out on tour with an all-star cast of musicians (including Woody Allen’s bassist, Greg Cohen). The singer opened for Sarah McLachlan and played Lilith Fair and then … she vanished.

There were rumors of vocal surgery, of a return to busking in Paris, of drifting haplessly around the U.S. She was even spotted performing at weddings. Nonplussed, Atlantic dropped her, and nearly a decade passed before audiences heard the next shy, sultry, old-scratchy-album sounds from Peyroux.

But the sophomore album, Careless Love, didn’t squeak by without drama. “A record label has hired a private detective to trace jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux, whose album has been steadily climbing the UK charts,” the BBC reported in 2004. Rounder Records said she was “proving impossible to track down.”

According to the BBC, “The company said it had gone ‘to great lengths to protect Madeleine from burn-out through too much promotional work’ … But it would seem that despite these efforts Ms. Peyroux has had enough. She is that rare thing, an artist more interested in her music than in the glitz and glamour of show-business.”

But the singer recently admitted to Scotland’s Daily Record that the disappearance was a publicity stunt. “Quite simply I was doing what I had planned to do, which was to go back to New York for a week. … The record company thought it would be a good thing for me to be missing for four days. They were manipulating the media.”

Daily Record also adds: “She makes no apologies for dodging the chance to talk to journalists and media types and going on walkies just as fame appears imminent.”

However, as with Marshall, Peyroux’s latest album is her most coherent. There remains the vintage-record tremulousness, which teeters between authentic and precious. The Billie Holiday thing can read kitschy, especially when paired with the Emmet Ray-esque strummings and Bellocq-reminiscent photos. But there’s a constancy to the album that renders it real.

Add to that Peyroux’s duet with k.d. lang and covers not just of chestnuts (Johnny Mercer’s “The Summer Wind,” Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile”) but her interpretations of contemporary numbers (Joni Mitchell’s “River,” Tom Waits’ “(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night)”—and the fact that Half the Perfect World borrows its title from the Leonard Cohen-penned song of the same name.

Peyroux’s early life provided the ideal background for her vintage-haunted, atmospheric song repertoire. A childhood in Georgia and Brooklyn, a father from New Orleans, a hippie mother who—when Peyroux was 13—swept her off to Paris, where she dropped out of school at 15 in favor of singing on the streets. See the arty video for “Don’t Wait Too Long,” in which a stylishly ragamuffin Peyroux strums her guitar in fingerless gloves on a street corner, and then asks the old question: Does art follow life, or vice versa?

This may well be the era of the crazy female singer. The guys have had plenty of opportunities to steal that limelight—why not give the girls a chance? But, unpredictable as she may be, Peyroux’s music tells a different story. Half—released a mere two years after Careless—proves this singer isn’t permanently trashing fame for fingerless gloves. At least not yet.

Late-breaking e-mail Interview