"Crying in Public" by Chairlift

[REUPLOAD] originally posted July 23, 2022

It’s undeniable: this year, Caroline Polachek has been having a Capital-M Moment. A New Yorker profile written by Jia Tolentino, collabs with Flume & Charli, the existence of this tweet:

This is a Holy Trinity of today’s saddest sex/art icons. Being the chosen soundtrack to now-engaged (!) Phoebe Bridgers & Paul Mescal’s first public makeout (Maia, can you fact-check this?) is kind of like winning a Grammy, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, this is all to say Caroline Polachek has crossed over firmly into the mainstream. In the last couple years, she’s been cannily remade as the alt-pop queen of lonely, horny girls, a sultry, witchy creature of the manic-depressive deep. It’s already her third lifetime in music: before she was Caroline Polachek, she was the singing half of the indie electronic duo Chairlift, and before that, she was Ramona Lisa, making downtempo synth-heavy ballads in her bedroom. But through it all, her voice has stayed inimitable: athletic and trilling, haunted and ethereal, warm as a cello and airy as a flute. 

I’ve been fascinated by her evolution from wet elf singing Handel in a lake to psychotic-eyed seductress licking a bolo knife inside a limousine. In the past decade, she’s clearly found her groove, aesthetically and musically. But my favorite song of hers remains “Crying in Public,” which she wrote & sang as part of Chairlift, and which came out on their 2016 album Moth. 

“Crying in Public” is an epic fever dream of a song, sprinkled with synths like the sounds of glass shattering, driven by an undercurrent of layered staccato beats and droning cicadas. As with all her best songs, the lyrics are sharp and unflinching: “I’m sorry for crying in public this way / I’m falling for you / I’m falling for you.” It’s a confession of love so strongly felt it eviscerates its listeners, and Polachek sings it from the potent heat of frustration, lurching through the syllables like it’s an accusation. The rhythm of these simple lines is genius, classical in its construction, dactyl-dactyl-dactyl: “SO-rry for CRY-ing in PUB-lic this WAY.” It digs its claws into me. I can’t stop thinking about it, about the way Polachek sings it. All warm and strung-out wanting, all incandescent need.

The video speaks to how much Polachek has evolved as an artist in the last eight years – it flips back and forth between black-and-white footage of her singing in the studio, chastely dressed in a white button-down and dainty jewelry, and footage of her wandering New York with stick-on gems meant to look like teardrops constellating her eyes and cheeks. It’s sparse and slow and nowhere near as weird as the video for “Bunny is a Rider,” which features a wild-eyed Polachek dance-walking through Richard Serra-esque walls of rusted sheet metal. During the scenes where Polachek sings to herself on the subway, I found myself wanting her to throw herself against the windows and doors, beg for mercy, fly around the poles and crumple to the floor, but instead her face stays motionless as she sings, to no one in particular, “I’m sorry for causing a scene on the train.”

Still, the song speaks to me more than any of her more recent work. I fell in love with it the spring of my freshman year, which I spent largely in the oil painting studio. That winter I’d been a wreck, pure maudlin excess spurting all over the place, and in the spring, I set out to learn how to be alone. All fall, and most of the winter, I’d been incapable of sitting by myself for more than twenty minutes – I needed to feel like I was going somewhere, making friends, collecting adventures. Instead I ended up getting too drunk too often and crying on somebody’s couch. One particularly embarrassing night, about a week after I “ended” “things” with an emotionally distant drug dealer I’d been kissing, I gave up on my rainy walk to the Row, swerved back home, and spent three hours waiting for said drug dealer to arrive so I could yell at him for not having feelings for me. Tough!

Then, spring: the washed, pale light of March and the promise to do better, the glass walls of McMurtry’s studios and the wide-open sigh of its plant-lined sandstone roof. I took a perverse pleasure in being on the opposite side of campus from everything and everyone else, the exact inverse of my previous fear of being alone. I went to the painting studio when I knew people were dartying, or late at night when I otherwise would have been hunting somebody’s attention. I stood alone in a corner and painted dragonfruits and fallen palm fronds, wood chairs from Lagunita casting pink shadows in the sun. I listened to “Night 52” by Christine and the Queens and “Bad Girls” by Tennis and “How Did I Get Through the Day” by Har Mar Superstar and especially “Crying in Public,” I had a whole playlist of these anthems of choking on my feelings.

This spring, I went back to Stanford twice, and I spent a lot of time wandering around campus wanting to cry or actually crying. It was lovely to be anonymous, to be puffy-eyed in silence among the strangers and not care. I cried because I still craved the home that I’d outgrown, but under the surface of recognition, there was a kinship missing. Because the place was different and so was I, because it was like an old world resurrected, sturdy and warm and a little unreal, a world I thought I’d been ready to leave behind until I was back in it. In short: I cried because there was nothing else to do but cry, which I think is how you know that a place has become a home, the bearer of all the feelings you can’t help but feel, spilling out and over you wherever you are, embedding themselves in your surroundings.

Stanford became a home to me that freshman spring, in the studio where I first learned to be alone, where I retreated from my public tears and learned to take them all in stride. I had no idea at the time. I didn’t think I’d still be yearning for the fitful peace I found that spring. But I feel that way about all of college: I didn’t know the people I met there would make me until they had, until all the memories worth tracing, ecstatic and embarrassing, painful and idyll, were with them. The parts I savored and the parts I wasted, the choices I overthought or made at random — I don’t know when it all cemented into my history of being. It just did.

On the way back from campus to LA, sitting at my gate at San Jose, I listened to “the best songs for crying and healing,” a playlist I made in 2020, and of course I looped this song at least eight times. This song is the heart of how I came to believe in my own endless catharsis, the necessity of it to grow.

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P.S. For some reason, Spotify keeps trying to get me to listen to Squirrel Flower’s egregious cover of Caroline Polachek’s near-perfect “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” I literally muted the song because it was in my Discover Weekly at least once a month, but my Spotify algorithm has not gotten the hint, and it continues to be the #1 song in my disco any given week. Any tech support in this realm would be deeply appreciated. Well-wishes, thoughts, prayers, etc. also acceptable. <3