Madeleine Peyroux belongs to the special kinds, she does not follow any trend or style, she stays away from publicity, she does not want to be famous, her songs are almost never played on the radio, she waited 8 years before releasing her second album, she has dropped “out of sight” for extended periods of time, she even went busking in the streets of Paris after the release of her first album, and she is interested in covering old songs mostly from the first half of the 20th century.
I read she is opinionated as she left her first label after one highly recognized album because of a dispute over musical direction; she also walked out of a TV appearance in London because she did not want to follow the show’s request, although the story behind this is not clear. But all this is part of her appeal.
Her somewhat troubled past (a lawsuit with a former boyfriend who may have abused her and who claims $1 million because he ‘discovered’ her) her vanishing in the middle of an album promotion (her record label even launched an international search and hired a private detective to find her) have added to her mystic.
If she carefully selects the material she wants to play, she writes songs as well. In this internet age, where everything goes so fast, she takes her time to choose the songs she wants to cover, she takes her time for about everything. But Madeleine does not belong to these times, or to any other time as a matter of fact. Nevertheless, her free spirit did not prevent her success since her 2004 album ‘Careless love’ has sold over a million copies worldwide.
This album took her out of anonymity and her covers of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’, Elliott Smith’s ‘Between The Bars’, Hank Williams’ ‘Weary Blues’, as well as ‘J’ai deux amours’, a French song which was sung by Josephine Baker (with whom she shares some time spent in Paris), are transformed but magically keep a complete authenticity. She certainly owns them with a rare connection with the lyrics.
She sings the Leonard Cohen song totally differently from the original version, with a jazzier upbeat sound and a smooth and warm voice. We are not aware anymore of the Jewish suffering the song refers to, it is something else, may be a search for love. When listening to ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’, it’s even more difficult to imagine that Dylan wrote and sang this song. I have already mentioned the emotion which comes from her performance of ‘Between the bars, and the same could be said about all the songs of this album. She has just an unforced way to slowly and carefully articulate all the words, which warps the songs with grace and beauty.
If the critics have said she was a reincarnation of Billie Holiday, I would rather consider her being a reincarnation of all these songs since she seems to perform them with a total absence of self-awareness.
Remembering her young years in Paris where her mother moved when she was 15 and where she started singing with street musicians in the Latin Quarter, she said in an interview: ‘If I’d stayed in school, I wouldn’t have been one of those people who are encouraged to shine.’ I fell in love with her when I read this.