The third album in four years from song interpreter extraordinaire Madeleine Peyroux, Bare Bones is both an extension of the currents of 2004’s Careless Love and 2006’s Half the Perfect World and a bold step into previously unexplored psychological terrain. Produced, like its two predecessors, by Larry Klein, this fluid and enthralling new work, is Peyroux’s most personal yet, hardly surprising considering she had a hand in writing each of the 11 songs, marking the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
“This really is a new experience for me—it’s almost as if I got to make my first record again,” she says. “Larry really was the first person who ever said to me, ‘Let’s write every song on the record—you should do this.’ I’d co-written with Larry a couple of times in the past, but this was a big leap for me as a writer, and also a deep exploration as a co-writer,” Peyroux continues, “not only in the experience of writing but also the message I wanted to portray. Like the end of any event—being up all night, or when the rain stops and the sun comes out, it’s a transitional moment of getting past some kind of struggle.”
Each of these 11 songs is like a gem, revealing its myriad facets one by one as it turns in the mind of the listener. ‘Instead,’ co-written with her friend Julian Coryell, begins the album on a marvelously life-affirming note: “Instead of feelin’ bad, be glad you’ve got somewhere to go,” she purrs in her stunningly evocative alto, “Instead of feelin’ sad, be happy you’re not all alone / Instead of feelin’ low, get high on everything that you love / Instead of wastin’ time, feel good ‘bout what you’re dreamin’ of.”
Peyroux sees the act of lightening up as part of a psychological continuum that began with the experience of loss and the resulting tangle of grief. “There’s reference to loss in several of the songs, if not all of them,” she points out, punctuating her point with a quick laugh, perhaps realizing how much more of herself she’s revealing now than ever before.
“In a lot of ways, this record is my attempt at expressing a philosophy of life,” she elaborates. “That’s why I decided to call it Bare Bones—because most of these songs are a way of excavating the essence of what I think matters, so in that sense it’s very personal, but the question of looking at things and saying, ‘This isn’t important after all,’ is part of that process as well. Once you do get to the point where you’ve discovered that there are some things that are not just important but vitally important, that’s a positive discovery—a beautiful, pot-of-gold revelation.”
Peyroux got the song title as well as the overarching theme of the album from When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Difficult Times, a book by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, which a friend had suggested she read. “Can’t we just return to the bare bones?,” Chodron writes in one key passage. “Can’t we just come back? That’s the beginning of the beginning. Bare bones, good old self. Bare bones, good old bloody finger. Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time—that is the basic message.”
When asked to describe the sound of Bare Bones, Peyroux pauses to consider the question for several moments. “The lyrics and the sounds are both honest, so that they match each other. We’re really exploring the calm, relaxed attitude, because we tend to fall into a rhythmic pocket that is not exploited much in popular music. Everybody’s ahead of the beat, on top of the beat or trying to get to the next beat; everything is short and very repetitive; we’re just way slower than all that.”
While the writing of the album took the better part of years, the initial recording was completed in less than a week, the result of the closeness of Peyroux and the players—Dean Parks on a variety of stringed instruments, Larry Goldings on organ, Jim Beard on piano, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, Carla Kilstead on violin and Klein on bass. They nailed the title track in one take, “Homeless Happiness” in two, and no song took more than four or five. The studio band played live off the floor, surrounding Peyroux, who sang and played acoustic guitar to enhance the vibe; she later recorded her final vocals and guitar parts to the completed tracks.
Peyroux likens the process of writing and recording these songs to “opening a shade onto sunlight in the morning—it just feels good. I’m really happy that I got to write, and sometimes I’m extraordinarily surprised because I like what we ended up with. I’m really excited, because it feels like a new segment, and it’s great work. I’ve been surrounded by beautiful sounds, really honest musicians, really honest playing. It sounds like music to me.”
