Chairlift Talk New Album Moth, “Ch-Ching”, Working With Beyoncé

Photo by Tim Barber

Chairlift recently returned with “Ch-Ching”, their first single in three years. It appears on the duo’s upcoming, self-produced album Moth, which is due out in January. This week, Pitchfork sat down with Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly to chat about their sources of inspiration for the new LP, “Ch-Ching” (and its dance-heavy video), and what it was like to work with Beyoncé, among other topics.

Pitchfork: You guys played a version of “Ch-Ching” at Pitchfork Festival 2013, but many of the lyrics and parts have switched around since then. How did the final version come about?

Caroline Polachek: We’ve been working on that song probably longer than any other song on the record. The original was about a minute longer, and we really wanted to cut it down, but you know how it is, when you like every part, it’s difficult. So a lot of that cutting down actually happened during a trip to L.A. when we visited Robin Hannibal [Rhye, Quadron] and got some co-production on the beats for that. He made some really good suggestions for what we could take out. And I think that’s the kind of thing that sometimes you need someone else to come in – not necessarily to add, but just to say “You don’t need this. You don’t need this.” The soul of the song is still there, if you go back to the original and listen to it, but it’s just tighter now.

Pitchfork: Where did the Moth concept for the album come from?

CP: Well, moths aren’t something you really see in New York City. You don’t see them very often, at least, but we liked the idea of the moth as a metaphor for vulnerability, for something that’s fragile but relentless at the same time. It goes towards the light; it beats its wings until it dies. There are risks everywhere, but it doesn’t question them. So for us, that was sort of the attitude for the music: something really beautiful, vulnerable, honest.

Pitchfork: This feels like a very New York record, but you also have global touches on tracks like “Ottawa to Osaka”. Is there any geographical feel to it?

CP: We do think of it as a New York record. We’re sort of realizing how crazy and special [New York] really is for so many reasons. It’s this mix of futuristic, and sometimes horrible, new architecture on top of crumbling, sometimes almost Third World-looking buildings. The diversity of the people, even the wealth gap. Everything about it is so — there’s so much contrast. And kind of learning how to be a person in the middle of all that, and especially how to have fun in all that was — we didn’t really talk about it, but I think we were both interested in that the whole time we were making this record.

Pitchfork: How did you link up with Beyoncé [on "No Angel" from Beyoncé], and did you learn from working with her?

Patrick Wimberly: We started working with her after she asked us to. And it was coincidentally right at the time when we were about to start writing our record. It’s not like we went in there and it overly changed us, but it was just nice to be asked by somebody like her to come and work on her record. And it wasn’t like, “Come write songs with me.” It was more like, “We love what you do, we just want you to come do your thing.”

Pitchfork: The dancing in the music video for “Ch-Ching” had a bit of a Beyoncé feel to it. How did that video come to be? Did you come up with the choreography?

CP: No. This was the first time we ever worked with a choreographer, which was so fun and it makes me want to do it more. For this video, I really wanted it to be less about the lyrics and more about the energy and getting the energy of the song. So I did a lot of poking around online looking at different styles of dance. At first I was thinking actually about traditional Chinese dance, because I love the cleverness of the hand movements, and the liquid quality of the way they move.

And then somehow I stumbled upon videos by a dancehall choreographer called Korie Genius, and I noticed the way he moved and his choreography was really similar not just to Chinese dance, but also to Bollywood style dancing, which I love. But he was choreographing dancehall, which originated in Jamaica – so I thought it was interesting that this kind of emotion is sort of a universal thread that goes through so many different styles. And I was like “You know what? Let’s give this a try.” He heard the track, and he was like, “Let’s do this.” So he choreographed it. He had the whole thing choreographed immediately when he showed up for the first rehearsal. And we rehearsed for about ten days and then shot.

Pitchfork: If you had to describe Moth in three words, what would they be?

CP: Joyful, gooey, and personal.

Watch an episode of Pitchfork.tv’s “+1″ featuring Chairlift:

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