Foto-© Phoebe Fox

Vor zwei Jahren sprachen wir erstmals mit Paris Paloma anlässlich ihres Albums Cacophony. Damals diente ihr Songwriting vor allem dazu, das Chaos im eigenen Kopf zu sortieren. Mit ihrem zweiten Album The Fatal Flaw richtet sie den Blick nach außen: im Zentrum stehen Liebe, Verbundenheit und die Spuren, die das Patriarchat im Leben von Frauen hinterlässt. Wir haben mit ihr über den gewaltigen Erfolg von Labour gesprochen, über die Trauer hinter der Wut, ihre visuellen Konzepte, und den feinfühligen Rückzugsort ihrer Fanbase.

Thanks for taking the time to speak again. It’s been about two years since you last joined us for an interview when Cacophony was released. I’m honestly in awe of your skills, artistry, and bravery. I feel that last time I didn’t dare to ‘go there’ with my questions, so I hope we can dive deep this time around.
It’s really good to chat again. And I hope so – I love questions.

Wonderful! The Fatal Flaw, your new album, is yet again so special. I’ve just discussed Pre-Raphaelite with my partner, who has a painting background, and we got the sense that you wrote about someone you’re in awe of. You compare that person with a painting or with a myth; ‘putting them on a pedestal’, you’re singing. What drew you to write about admiration that way?
The song is like a patchwork of every girl or woman that I’ve ever looked at and felt like I was looking at a muse in a painting. I called it Pre-Raphaelite because when you think about that movement, you think about Jane Morris. You think about her face, the muse who defined that movement because she was painted so much by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I was thinking about how, since a lot of what I write about comes from my teens, women are so heavily looked at that you start doing it to other women yourself. You end up thinking these other girls have a magical, unattainable quality intrinsic to them that I felt I had to try hard to emulate, but I didn’t have it naturally.
But then, of course, I think everyone feels that way looking at everyone else. Do you know what I mean? No one feels that way about themselves. It’s a song that really speaks not of the jealousy and competition aspects of looking at other women, but really about the envy, about the quality that they have and also wanting that. And then the ways that make you remake yourself in their image. I think it’s quite an amusing thing, which is why I wanted the song to feel so light, you know? I joke a lot with my female friends about girls I’ve just been obsessed with in the past, like at school or uni. It’ll always be peers, it won’t be people who are years ahead of me. Sometimes there’ll just be girls or women in your life that to you are like celebrities. It was that feeling of the Pre-Raphaelite It-girl who’s in all the paintings. That’s what I wanted it to feel.

When we last spoke about Cacophony, you explained how you wanted to articulate, to tidy up and to understand the chaos that was in your own head. How would you describe The Fatal Flaw?
If Cacophony was very much like the inside of my head, The Fatal Flaw is like arms reaching out from me to other people. It’s kind of an anthology of relationships. Some of them are romantic, some of them platonic, some of them are like different kinds of love. Dysfunctional love, romantic love and love that spans back to my childhood. In that way, it feels expansive and it’s going outside of my body whilst also being so rooted in my heart and why I love the way that I do. Kind of like dissecting those massive emotions. It feels really expansive both narratively and sonically because I’ve just made songs that sound so different to things that I’ve ever made before and gone really differently instrumentally. But it’s also a very visual album. It’s so inspired by painting and by nature and, you know, by romantic poems and that idea of vast, swelling landscapes that fill you. That feel like they’re a metaphor for the human condition.

I’d love to follow up on so much here. Let’s start with love. You’ve mentioned bell hooks as someone who holds both deep love and sharp critique – especially in how she speaks about loving men and patriarchy and the manosphere at the same time. How has that balance influenced the way you think about love, anger and reconciliation in your own writing?
Well, I found it so important to root this second album in love. Obviously in my discography, a song like Labour happening was amazing. But what happens when a song gets that big is that often the meaning… it doesn’t become diluted, but it sort of becomes smaller to lots of people, rather than very big and nuanced to one person. So I was thinking about the fact that now that I have this audience, I talk so much about patriarchy, about feminism, about misogyny, but love is so intrinsically a part of that conversation. And that’s why I love bell hooks so much. At this point in my life, in my mid-20s, love has really been a mountainous trajectory over the last few years. It was something I was writing about very naturally. I’m totally fascinated and I think we all should be. Being a woman and loving whilst extricating yourself as much as you can from patriarchy. Not allowing love in the romantic sense to define you, but also knowing that you deserve to be loved in a way that is outside of patriarchy as much as possible.
The Fatal Flaw as a title was chosen for many reasons, because it could mean so many things. One of the meanings is that I often describe patriarchy as a crack running through a life, which is similar to how Donna Tartt describes the fatal flaw in one of her books. So the fatal flaw could be lovelessness and patriarchy running through a woman’s life, where you’re having to mend it, fix it, and grow around it all the time. Ah, it all just felt like an enormously important topic to me.

Enormously important and enormously emotion-fuelling. It would be so easy too, to just feel furious… Labour did spread its wings so far. When you mentioned ‘diluted’ there, how did you mean that?
I didn’t mean diluted in that sense. More that it becomes less nuanced when there’s so many people engaging with it. It becomes synonymous with this immensely powerful movement, and that’s exactly what I want for it. I love that and I’m so grateful for it. But Labour was written at a time when I didn’t have the captive audience that I do now. So my point was that with a captive audience, I wanted to write about the work that goes beyond that. We’re furious and we’re addressing that, but we’re also healing ourselves in that way.
But then it’s a paradox, isn’t it? The crime of patriarchy is something that elicits such rage and anger, but then the healing all has to be loving work. It’s like this wheel constantly turning of feeling our anger, catharting, and permitting ourselves to just be absolutely furious at everything we’ve been through. But then being these fountains of love so that we can actually move beyond the anger again.

And I guess it’s giving it all a voice as well, because all these themes and emotions can feel so hard to grasp and to articulate in words. You’ve found ways to allow a lot of people ways to express this anger, even if they haven’t written the songs themselves. And..perhaps also inviting men in too?
It means a lot to have male allies be a part of this world as well, because at no point do I want my music to only be listened to by girls and women. Obviously, I know that’s immediately who it speaks to the most, because I’m talking about my experience as a woman. But there are songs on the new album that are very pointedly addressing men and masculinity. The tragedy that is toxic masculinity is a theme that runs throughout the album tightly. A song like Beautiful Birds is about being in love, and it talks about the men in my life that I love, whilst addressing members of the manosphere and men in the male loneliness epidemic and imploring them to have a happier relationship with women and therefore a fuller life. Those things are totally connected.

What was it like to witness Labour create such a deep resonance across the globe and across ages and cultures?
It’s honestly totally unprecedented. Nothing really could have prepared me for what happened with Labour but there’s a lot of imposter syndrome that comes with it. When I was a teenager, there were events in my life where I encountered gendered violence, and that massively impacted my mental health, my self-esteem and my ability to have a voice. So I was desperate, so desperate, to have a voice on those topics, doing all I could to learn about feminism and becoming this rage-y baby feminist who was overwhelmed by the massive, scattered problem. I know Labour is a drop in the ocean of solidarity happening around the world, but it means so much that it’s been a bit of a lightning rod and built a community where there might not have been otherwise. I feel very much like a participant in that, as opposed to the leader of a movement, because all I was doing, like all the women who listen to my music, was trying to find a voice and validate it.

You’re writing about quite rage-fuelling themes with such confidence and grace and also joy sometimes. Is giving all these women a voice, what also helped you gain what, from a listener’s perspective, feels like quite the clarity and authority in your expression? Are there shouty, screamy recordings or versions of the songs somewhere in your recording backlog?
I feel like there’s so much anger in my music because I write about things that elicit a lot of anger. About so much injustice, because that’s how I process these things. But I think the tragedy of it is that I wasn’t built to be an angry person, and so many girls who are furious don’t actually enjoy being angry. We’re just relieved that we can be angry and find each other and have that solidarity in our rage. But we have such an enormous capacity for joy and peace, and ultimately, I think that’s desperately what we want. That’s what this album speaks to. It’s like, yes, I’m so angry, but I deserve to love and be loved and for that to exist outside of patriarchy.
What does that look like if I’m choosing the love I feel like I deserve, if I’m finding what I want my life to look like outside of the dysfunctional love that patriarchy enforces?

Watching the news, witnessing stories like Gisèle Pelicot’s case, sharing experiences privately with other women navigating this world. It can feel relentless! How do you keep going? Where do you find your stamina?
I’m haunted by the question of what womanhood would look like without patriarchy, you know? The phrase ‚feminine rage‘ is thrown around a lot, and I understand and don’t begrudge anyone using it. But I don’t identify with it that much. I feel like it suggests that to be a woman is to be angry, which ignores the fact that it’s a tragic and grave injustice that we have to be so angry. To be a woman should be to be free and happy and liberated and peaceful and safe. I do not feel that rage is intrinsic to my identity.
With Gisèle’s case, that’s a moment of just absolute chilling. I feel like we’ve strayed so far from what life should have been and I’m very haunted by thinking of what life could be without patriarchy and what it could have been. I think we all feel that collective grief and that’s a tone that I think comes through in my songwriting a lot because it just haunts my narrative.

I like how you name grief here. Acknowledging the landscape beneath the anger.
How do you reconcile with something that you know in your heart you should have, and there is no infrastructure anywhere to build it? But I’m very grateful to have pockets of women’s solidarity and community. I see it in glimmers at my shows and I see it in women’s spaces online and in the world. It’s happening everywhere, you know, it’s just a long fight.

What is something that gives you hope?
Any space where women are together and especially at shows women singing together. I try so hard for my shows not to feel like you’re all individuals coming to listen on your own. I want it to feel like a communal space and a community that people feel safe in, that people can come to shows on their own and know that they will be held in that space and everyone is appreciative of everyone else. Because that’s what I would’ve really wanted when I first started going to concerts. To find a space like that.

It’s very moving to hear you speak about the fairy dances your fans have created post-show in The Space Between Claps. With this being album number two, how do you feel this sense of community and the connection you have with your fans has influenced your new work?
It’s really, really deepened. I think knowing now that there’s an audience there enables me to write in a more nuanced way without fear of being misunderstood. And it’s also allowed me to be more vulnerable. A song like Stem the Flow, which just came out… I don’t think I would’ve written as vulnerable a song as that two years ago. But knowing that I have such a respectful and sensitive fanbase, you’re then looking at soft ground for you to fall onto. So you feel like you can write something without it being used or taken, or people trying to mine your life for trivia. I really feel like I can make very vulnerable art knowing what community I have who are receiving it.

I’m genuinely so pleased to hear that. As your fan base grows and you’re also finding yourself on stages with bigger audiences, festivals too that aren’t your own concerts. It must be quite vulnerable to physically put yourself there and perform these songs. How do you keep a sense of safety there?
It’s hard, it’s tricky. I was really lucky because I just opened for Florence + The Machine for like five weeks and I was very, very lucky that there’s such an overlap in our fans. Obviously Florence is enormous, but most of my fans are also Florence + The Machine fans. So because of that kind of Venn diagram, it felt like such a warm audience, more so maybe than other opener tours where there isn’t that much of an overlap. And that was so brilliant. But I think when I step out onto stages at festivals, bigger shows, or opener shows and people are new to it, I just hope it’s a lovely introduction. I’m still me, and when I’m playing shows, I don’t alter anything to cater to different audiences. I just bring the world to that stage, to that moment. I love performing, and I find it so fun no matter who I’m on stage in front of. Some shows are tougher than others and some crowds are tougher than others if they don’t know who you are. But it’s always worth it, because you leave and someone has fallen in love with the world that you’re in love with as well, you know?

How special is that? How have you experienced men reacting to your songs?
It is quite polarized. When I talk about men and the way they react to songs, the first thing that comes to mind is the way men who I respect and think are amazing react to my songs. And they react in a wonderfully supportive way. I have so many men in my fanbase where it’s not like beginner feminists. I don’t think I’m some great educator. It’s really just men who… it’s no big deal for, they just like women and therefore they like my music as well. Or they don’t and it’s fine, but they don’t have some moral issue with my music, do you know what I mean? But when I get misogynistic hate, and I’ve gotten a lot, and it ebbs and flows; sometimes I’ll have a big tide of it, but it’s not as much as people would think. It’s from such faceless, nameless people who are so deep in the manosphere that I really do pity them. That’s where songs like Good Boy or Beautiful Birds came from, where I feel like that experience is so far from the love I have in my life. I really struggle to put myself in their shoes… I don’t know how it makes you happy to be so vicious to women and to girls, or to take such offense at videos of girls singing Labour‘ They’ll attack my appearance, they’ll attack my audience, but it doesn’t really matter. If it wasn’t so horrible, it would be quite cute, because they’re all just trying to impress each other.
But I don’t see the people behind that, because there isn’t really a humanity behind it. So the true answer is that I think men respond really wonderfully to my songs, because the people that I’ve had real interactions with online, and messages from, are so supportive and it’s really encouraging. I have so many men in my life that I love so much and who are massive supporters. When I wrote Good Boy, I got a load of my male friends who are in bands to just come and do the backing vocals, so their voices are what you hear.

I love that so much.
You know, it’s just not a big deal to just like women and be supportive of women making music about women’s experiences.

When you released Good Boy, and then the video, with Emma Thompson reading Rebecca Shaw’s quote, I think my jaw dropped on the floor and it took a few weeks until it sort of clamped up again, because it was just like, „Blimey, she’s done another masterpiece.“ And then Good Girl as well, obviously. Can you share how you created both of them, or how this genius link came together?
I really wanted Good Boy to feel like a folk tale, almost like a Christmas carol sort of warning story meets Macbeth tales of men being corrupted by this seductive power of patriarchy. And yeah, that was just such a fun day, and Tom was brilliant. Tom was absolutely brilliant, and Harvey as well. The other actors were all absolute sweethearts and they were just cracking me up. It was great to tell that story and to be such a monstrous character in both of those music videos. With Good Girl, I was just like, ‚I just want to be monstrous. I want to be so unsettling and weird.‘ I have this habit of casting actors I love, and then just having to act like a little freak with them. It might well be something I keep up in the future. Then Richard was phenomenal in the Good Girl music video and I just wanted to get across that feeling of, „I don’t care if you think I’m beautiful. I would actually love to be ugly and weird and unsettling to you if you just leave me in peace!”

What is your involvement in transforming the music into visuals?
I’m really involved in all the visuals. It most often comes from my briefs and stuff that I’ve worked on with my amazing team and creative team. Rarely when I’m writing do I have no idea of what visually I’d like. I’ve worked with immensely talented directors like Georgie Cowan-Turner, who did both Good Boy and Good Girl and Katie Ganfeld just did Stem the Flow. It’s wonderful working with such richly visual music video directors like that.

Do you ever see a song before you can hear it fully?
Yes, sometimes when I’m writing, Pre-Raphaelite was like that as well, I was picturing what I wanted it to sound like and it had to be so rich and so ornamented, like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. That’s why the instrumentation then painted those sounds out. We have a harp, we have a harpsichord and we have strings, so it feels baroque, but also romantic and almost medieval with the harpsichord. I very much piece together what I want it to sound like based off of what I see in my mind, because I’m such a visual person.

I’m very aware of the time, so I’ll just ask you one more, but it’s kind of the same question flipped around. You’ve got a background in painting and fine art and dance. How do you feel like these mediums shape how you express in words and in lyrics?
I think they’re all massively intertwined and massively, massively important. They all serve as emotional outlets when it’s their time. So it’s amazing to have them on rotation. Having multiple, which I’m very grateful for, especially with painting and songwriting, means that neither ever fully feels like work. Nothing gets bled dry, because I just feel like I display how I feel about things across multiple different mediums.

However that rotation moves next for you, I’m looking forward to what you’ll be sharing. Thank you so much for your time today, Paris.
Thank you for the questions and for taking the time. Bye-bye!