by Aly Eleanor (@purityolympics)
Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack, aka “Juju” and “Jojo,” have a new home. The duo behind Pearl & The Oysters have traveled the world and discovered that it’s not a place or a time — it’s each other. Their new concept record, Planet Pearl, delves into a wistful jazz-pop, yearning bossa nova, and the experience of feeling like an extraterrestrial wherever you go. They synthesize the sounds of the past into something that sounds like a transcendent future. Only such a deep, intrinsic partnership could yield such vibrant music. It’s alienating and catchy, laser-focused and totally out of time. Post-Trash caught up with the pair to talk about college, touring, love, jazz, and more.
photo credit: Ross Harris
Aly Eleanor: How do your formative experiences with music ripple into the present, as listeners, musicians, and people who think deeply about it.
Juliette Davis: My dad was a musician and both my parents loved music so much. Including music in everyday life was part of being a human being, you know? I’ve had a close connection with music all the time, working on instruments, which was my life a little later, but also taking time to listen to full records in the living room and talking about music. I have a prism through life that includes music. It's part of what makes me want to wake up in the morning and what brings me the most fun and happiness.
Joachim Polack: My mom would use music almost like Maggie Simpson’s pacifier. My mom had a Discman and it became mine when I was three or four. I wasn't particularly hyper as a kid, but I was definitely overwhelming around the house sometimes. The thing that runs through my relationship with music now is it being very private. Plugging in the headphones. Listening to that Discman every night in Morocco to fall asleep became a thing for me. Until a few years ago, I still couldn't really fall asleep without music. I still value listening to music in a private way, letting the music form little environments in your head.
AE: Since you’ve both studied music in an academic context, has there been an overlap between that world and the world of writing songs and making pop music? Has there been a divergence in how you approach them?
JP: Everything comes from the intense, scrupulous, analytical part of our relationship with music. I studied musicology longer, but Juliette also studied music for a long time. It all comes from our appreciation of music, even pop music. I don't mean to say that we don't like accessible pop music, because we actually do. We strive to make a kind of pop music that is very accessible and also shows our taste for musical repertoire that isn’t as celebrated or quoted. The music that sits at the edge of these things has interested us the most. It felt natural to try to understand music theory in a deeper way and learn things that typically aren't present in the canon of pop. We learned about classical counterpoint and jazz theory, jazz harmony, improvization, stuff like that.
We were listening to records that were blending these things even when we were younger, like The Zombies and Margo Guryan. We've always been interested in that particular pocket of pop — pop for people who like classical and jazz. It was only a natural thing to do. We studied those repertoires so we could make our own blend later. We've always been music nerds. We went to one of the rare public high schools in Paris that offered a music program. Typically, kids would go to the conservatory since it's not built into the curriculum. We were put on the rails of studying music in a more scholarly way, and it stuck.
JD: We were very driven by curiosity, wanting to learn more and get the tools that would help us write songs in this genre-blending world that interested us. Learning more tools, learning more history. We're extremely lucky to have grown up in a country where education is basically free. I have to mention that because it's not the case everywhere. We're able to hop into musicology after high school.
JP: It didn't feel like a very loaded decision, which would have felt so much different in the U.S. We were lucky that could indulge in studying a hyper-particular soft science. We didn’t feel too guilty because if there's no job, at least we're not in debt.
JD: Most of the time when people go to study musicology, it's like a Ponzi scheme.
JP: I love to say that college is a Ponzi scheme.
JD: We took another path and moved to the U.S. and created a rock band.
JP: We were irresponsible. Sometimes you just have to do it.
AE: You study music because you love it and then turn that into a rock band.
JP: It's good to think about it that way. At least we did something with it.
AE: That’s not a knock against the people that are studying, deep in theory and writing essays. That’s still a very fascinating and central part of it, even for you.
JP: I still enjoy reading musicology on almost a daily basis. I got disillusioned with discipline and the milieu, how academia works and stuff, but I still really love learning and systematically studying music in more ways than just theory and composition, trying to go deeper on the social and cultural phenomena that surround my musical expression. In a circuitous way, it plays into the music that we make. It's music that's informed by the love of music, but also the love of examining music with a microscope.
JD: We're also always going to shows and enjoying live music, not thinking about analysis.
JP: It's a default thing that's wired in my brain. I can go to a show and turn it on and off. But whatever I do, I listen with a very analytical ear. It's part of our everyday life to engage with music in the way everybody does, which is going to shows and listening to records and stuff.
AE: Planet Pearl is about being stranded on Earth and the loneliness that comes with it. You both traveled across the ocean to live here and have been around the world touring. How does a sense of place inform the music that you make? Your previous records feel rooted in that, while the new one turns that in on itself in an interesting way.
JD: When you anchor your life to a new place, the environment that you have around you is different. There's something that switches in your mind and you need to make it your own. You need to make it your home. Going from Paris to Florida was a gigantic change and very inspiring to us. It made us change as human beings, learning and growing so much. Consciously or unconsciously, we fed off those discoveries, inspirations, and sounds. We realized that our relationship to Earth and the ecosystem was the main thing that attached us to each new place. Every time we moved influenced our music in a different way. But it's also exhausting morally. We're so lucky to be able to travel, but it's also very easy to be nostalgic about — what have we left behind, what's been scary, what's been lonely?
JP: [Planet Pearl] is the first album we've made after being on the road a lot. We toured regionally for the first couple albums. When Coast 2 Coast came out, it was the first time we had a bigger record deal with Stones Throw, so it was time to tour for real, you know? We did two full U.S. tours last year. We went to Europe, we went to Asia. All of a sudden, we were feeling like aliens by constantly traveling. As a touring musician, you're constantly the outsider. You're like a traveling circus. This experience gave us a new perspective. That's what gave us the idea that the band really is just Juliette and I, whatever we do is the band. We had finally gone past telling our story in that way. The metaphor of aliens stuck on a new planet was already a thing with the first record. We just find it more on this one because it felt more appropriate to where we were at in our lives and as a band. This was the first time that we were uprooted constantly. It takes a toll mentally to be far even from a place that isn't really our home yet. The album is a reflection of that new situation.
JD: We met when we were 14 or 15 years old and now we're way older. We grew up together and living this very uprooted life makes us closer. If anything, it's like we are each other's sense of home at any given time. We talk about that a bit in the album.
JP: It’s our “love” album.
AE: The sense of feeling like a perpetual outsider is very present, beyond the joyousness of pop music. What made it the “love” album?
JD: Since we've been together, we’ve had a “no love song” rule.
JP: We felt the music was twee enough that we can't add another layer of things that people will find too saccharine.
JD: We write songs together, we grew up together. It's a lot to write songs about each other on top of that.
JP: It took a long time to get to a point where it was okay to write intimate lyrics and have more openness. At first, the project was sort of a goofy cartoon thing and it took a few albums for us to get out of a mindset of world-building constantly. There are ways of telling stories and still letting people know about what's going on in your head.
JD: Maybe there's one real love song [on the album], at least two dispersed. There's one sentence here or there and if you add them together through through the whole album, you'll get a lot of hints.
JP: There's a song that you wrote when I was touring with other projects and I was suddenly out for long periods of time.
JD: That's one part of “I Fell Into a Piano,” a song I wrote when I was in deep distress. It was a way to feel Jojo closer to me. That was a therapeutic way of expression. “Together, Alone” is another love song.
JP: It's a love song about being on the road together.
AE: “Together, Alone” is a perfect descriptor for being on the road. You're together, but you also have space in the middle where you feel alone and need to have solitude, because it’s so hard to come by.
JP: You can't catch a break from the collective sense of being confined in a really small space for hours of the day. It's super alienating and isolating in a weird way. We deal with it in different ways, and we realize it at different stages of the tour sometimes. You’re in your head a lot more. You’re forced into socializing constantly, with strangers usually. People at the merch table telling us that we we mean something in their lives is the ultimate validation. It's sort of why I do it. But at the same time, they're very ephemeral encounters. It's five minutes out of my day, and the rest of the time we're on, well, cruise control. You turn off all other brain functions other than your reflex for driving. It's a strange occupation, to say the least.
AE: It's like longing for something and feeling its absence, but still embracing whatever's in front of you and trying to make sense of both of those things simultaneously. It feels weird, but it can also be super validating.
JP: Our first home, Paris, has changed so much since we left. We’ve alluded to feeling like strangers in our hometown on previous songs. It's very strange to go back and be like, “Oh, this isn’t how it used to be and it cannot ever be that again.” Coming to terms with that is also a huge part of the album’s sentiment. It's definitely what the last song [“Mid City”] is about. You're not just homesick for a place, you're homesick for a time. The innocence of childhood and how easy it was. When people get in their 30s, they're in bands and traveling a lot, and their life becomes more complicated and more rootless. There’s a geographical loss of a space to call home. Maybe home wasn't a place. Maybe a home was a sense of comfort that you got from the people in your life. All of a sudden, things go sideways, people grow older and go their separate ways. That's something that’s difficult to lose.
JD: With our world right now, it’s all about archives. There's alienation about building your life, moving forward, and always having an eye on the past. You can see the specifics of what's going on in your little life while the whole world's connected all the time. We talk about this a little bit in our songs, too.
AE: There is a very modern alienation in addition to a four-dimensional longing, an absence where it's not just a physical place. I think it’s fascinating when artists explore that kind of thing through the idiom of different kinds of pop. How did the record’s sound develop? With a fifth versus a first or second record, you can go deeper into something instead of feeling a pressure for musical upheaval.
JP: It feels like a continuation of the last record. With each one, we try to take a picture of where we're at with music at that moment. There are different streams of influences, but to tell a long story short, this is the jazz album. Well, not jazz. I don't think we can call it jazz. It’s the album where we let ourselves be as jazz as we wanted. We always wanted to, but never had the confidence to make a record that is so imbued with that part of our musical upbringing. Juliette is a jazz singer, I studied jazz piano. It's something that's always been a part of our lives. It no longer felt possible to present ourselves as a “rock band.” It’s funny because when we started the band in the 2000s, it felt like a difficult thing to reconcile, rock or pop and jazz. It's interesting to think of the history of the band as a progressive affirmation — we don't need to sugarcoat it. This album is the combination of us coming to terms with this very big part of who we are and putting it forward in the sound.
JD: We had a big Blossom Dearie phase, the post-1973 Daffodil [Records] years, where she created her own label and made exactly the music she wanted. She's a jazz musician but her songs are super pop.
JP: Margo Guryan is also a perfect case study of the intermingling of pop and anything that isn't. Those were huge cornerstones in terms of influences.
JD: Because this was our second record with Stones Throw, we had the means to record in their studio. That helped a lot with getting a full band together and putting them on tape for the first time. Songs like “Cruise Control” were all recorded on tape and and I think it played a huge role in the sound quality of the album and the chemistry of everyone playing together in the studio.
JP: It’s people in a room. I think there's more of that than there's ever been.
JD: We also indulge in all of our favorite synth noises and fun glitter.
JP: It's still playful. We can't shed that.
JD: It’s the music we deeply want to make. We've been so fascinated with early electronic music experiments in England, then later on with Stereolab and Broadcast. We're trying to combine all those musical worlds that speak to us.
JP: It has to be playful, because that's the band's idiom at this point. It's impossible for us to make a record that would have the same themes as Planet Pearl in a very serious way. We don't know how to make a super heavy record. We can do it by making everything around what we’re saying super lush and beautiful and wide-eyed. It's the in-between that is interesting to us.
JD: The Portuguese call it saudade, meaning the tension between light melodies and lyrics that are more intimate and can be really sad. We love to play with that.
JP: It's about longing, I guess. Longing or nostalgia or loss, even when it's presented in this beautiful way. We always want to uplift and not wallow. There’s a multi-dimensional aspect to letting lyrics be heavy and having the music say something different. Aesthetically, it’s a more fruitful approach.
AE: This record is a culmination of a lot of these themes, like nostalgia for a place that doesn't exist anymore, while also dealing in jazz, classic pop, Brazilian music — all these sounds that have been around for so long and synthesizing them into nostalgic yet present and playful music. How did your relationship with nostalgia develop throughout making this record? How does it continue to inform your art?
JD: I've always been a very nostalgic person. I think we feel more comfortable sharing those emotions with our audience, with the Oyster Nation [laughs]. It's more about opening up feelings that were always there.
JP: We couldn't have made this album even a year prior. We're hyper-nostalgic. I love music that is nostalgic, too. It's almost like a caricature of the feeling is something that we wield into becoming art. It's very natural for us to traffic in nostalgia. It's so deeply ingrained in our experiences.
JD: I feel a deep sense of dread, as most of us do. It's really hard to project into the future. Maybe it's a feeling we have explored before.
JP: Nostalgia is like taking refuge in a weird way. We want to look the future in the eyes.
You're taking refuge and also using it to reflect the future in the present, in on itself, instead of hiding from the world, because it is so bleak and terrifying most of the time.
JP: “Cruise Control” is about love and desensitization. We tried writing a song about this really heavy thing and turned it into a sort of Steely Dan snarky shuffle. There's power in talking about heavy stuff in a way that is unexpected.
JD: There’s power to celebrating what is beautiful in this world. Most of our records celebrate this beauty. It was really strong when we discovered Florida, which has the most gorgeous landscapes but is also threatened from every corner. All this beauty could disappear or die. We need to find a way to proactively act on those feelings. Right now, the way we deal with them is writing songs about it and anticipating the worst while witnessing the beauty that's still there. It's processing for us, in creative expression.
JP: There is an immediate response. It leaves its own imprint on reality, because that's what art is, I guess.
JD: It can bring people together.
JP: There needs to be political action, that's for sure.
AE: It isn't the only action, but it is part of it, hopefully.
JP: I hate self-aggrandizing gestures from art. It's like feeling that what you're going to say or put out into the world is going to change things. But in a way, it is! If it reaches even one person and makes them think about something that previously wasn't in their purview. It's a powerful tool to raise awareness about all kinds of things. I don't think we see that as part of what we do or our mission. But we try with what we're able to do, with our tools, to make uplifting art. The point is catchy melodies that make people feel better. Ultimately, it's very simple. We navigate within a very simple understanding of pop, where it makes us feel pure, unbridled joy. We try to do that for others.
AE: Through the process of making Planet Pearl, what is something that you each learned as artists, as creatives, as people?
JD: We learned that it was really nice to have label backing, in a very material way [laughs].
JP: Money helps you make the music you want to make. Although, I will say, you make do with what you have, keeping a mentality of DIY, like we did in the beginning. But it is nice, after a while, to have the means of your ambition, the possibility to put five people in a room and know that they're going to get paid. It's the first time that we made a record this way.
JD: Having a team backing us, after doing it DIY for so many years, is so useful. It's a lot about moral support, even while there is power in DIY.
AE: I always like wrapping up interviews by asking: what's something that you each love about your artistic approach and your creativity?
JD: I'm very grateful for my intuition.
JP: Okay, Rick Rubin over here [laughs]. I'm grateful for my ability to get stuff done, in my practice as a musician. I get in a slow mode when it's finishing time. I think that comes from the academic in me, dealing with due dates. It was drilled into my brain and now I can actually exploit or enjoy it in my artistic pursuits. I will spend hours and hours making sure something is good.
JD: He’s the reason we have anything like finished. He's very tenacious.
JP: We're both perfectionists, there's no question. But we know when to call it. That's a great quality, when you can discern, “Okay, this is good enough. I can share this with others.” I don't know if it's an inherent quality or if it's something learned. I would encourage everybody to try to work on that.
AE: It's okay to finish things.
JP: When your friends tell you it's done, it's probably done.