Madeleine Peyroux

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0:48where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. Every great music conversation goes beyond the surface. The influence that shaped an artist's sound. The moment that changed their creative direction. The story behind the story that fans never hear. Claude helps you discover those deeper connections. Upload interviews, liner notes, or music journalism, and Claude reveals patterns across an artist's entire journey, showing how influences become innovations. Whether you're a music journalist, passionate fan, or someone who loves understanding creative processes, Claude matches your curiosity about what really drives great artists.

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2:11Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. Madeline Peru is a jazz-inspired singer-songwriter who got her start singing in street bands in Paris as a teenager. In 1996, Atlantic Records released Madeline's debut album where she covered tunes from the 30s and 40s by artists like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. And then later, she recorded songs by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. This year, Madeline Peru released Let's Walk, her first album of all original songs, co-written with her longtime touring guitar player, John Harrington. On today's episode, Madeline and John play through some songs for the new album, and Bruce Hedlund talks with them about their mutual creative process.

2:56Madeline also remembers her early days busking with a bohemian expat named Dan William Fitzgerald, who became her musical mentor. And she explains how Dr. Cornel West became her guiding light during a recent bout of personal despair. This is Broken Record. Line of notes for the digital age. I'm Justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Hedlum's conversation with Madeline Peru and John Harrington. You've got this new album, Let's Walk, which is very exciting. It's been, what, six, seven years, I think? Yeah. Since your last album. Now, your last album, at the time you said, the question sort of driving that album was, where do you stand?

3:40What was the question going into this album? What was animating you going into the studio this time? These songs are essential to my experience in the middle of COVID, facing issues, realities, or feeling the need to be able to really get personal. And, you know, I've always tried to say, and I thought I sounded flippant in the past when I said, everything is a little bit political. And some people would say, no, not everything. We need to be able to get away from it. And I'm like, yeah, of course we do. You know, I was not ever civically engaged in my life to a degree. So I suppose I was telling myself that the act of playing live music, the act of sharing space, sharing vibrations in music is, at least when I was a street musician, it felt political in a way.

4:48But this time in 2020 that I spent a lot of time forced to be alone with myself. And I would have gone mad if it hadn't been for John Harrington responding to my email saying, okay, that's an interesting idea. How about this? And we started collaborating. I think it was 2020 or maybe 2021 when we first started. Could be 21 on the train. Throwing things back and forth. How did you know each other before then? Well, we've been playing music together. I pay him to hang out with me. I've been working for Maddie for at least 15 years. We think maybe more like 17 years off. Okay, well, that's what I thought.

5:30I was a little surprised when you said... Just in her band on the road. When I reached. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. So the relationship was a little different then is what you were... Well, this is new for us, yeah. Yes. To be songwriters, especially writing all 10 tunes on the record, that was new for me with Maddie. Yeah, no, I thought you'd been around for a while. I think it was new for Maddie, too. She's had some records where there have been other authors, but never like an exclusive writing pair for all of the tunes, I don't think. That's true. Absolutely. And your producer, when he heard the song, said no covers.

6:03Yes, he did. We had a lunch, one meeting with Elliot Shiner, and the three of us sat there, And I had put together a list that I thought, this will make sense, and we can revamp some older stuff, and then we'll get this record done sooner. And Elliot, he said, you know, I like the songs that you two wrote together, and so just do that. Only songs by you. Yeah, he said, no covers, and none of those other songs, just the ones that you wrote with John. And if there aren't enough, write some more. Is that right? Yeah, that's what he said. I looked at John and I just went, what the? What are we going to do?

6:45How are we going to do that? Well, you've been writing for a long time, but you kind of made your bones as an interpreter of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, one of my favorites, Joe Henry. So what was it like to say, okay, I'm ripping off that Band-Aid. There's no. I mean, I was excited to try it. But I remember thinking, oh, God, you know, what have we gotten ourselves into? Yeah, it felt daunting and overwhelming, I think, at first. Looking back at it now, I mean, it was a brilliant idea, I think. It made this record what it is. And I think the record coheres. In spite of the sort of range of, you know, sort of heavy to light, you know, sort of content, you know, and different moods, it somehow coheres.

7:34which I was concerned about but glad to find that it does. I don't think it coheres in the traditional way at all. I don't think it's a really weird record. I remember when we were recording it, sitting in the booth going, what are we doing? This stuff is crazy. But it is. It just wanted it to let it be. I feel for me, these songs just came to us in varying degrees. We worked at chiseling away at them. But it's all a gift. And the real mandate for me was to make sure that it's something that I really care about. Even the Mosquito song was something I really care about. I was going to say that there are ways that it coheres for me.

8:21And that's the one I think that's the most critical. That these are the most personal collection of songs, I think, that you've ever put on a single record together. And that's a big part of it. But I think sonically, thanks to Elliot, it coheres. And thanks to the musicians being all basically the same team, guys who've been on the road with you and everybody who was in the studio together. That's true. A background vocal section that was the same on the four or five songs that have backgrounds. Yeah, I don't know. And so sonically, I think it holds up that way too. And I think mostly because you weren't going to put a lyric on, a word on this record that you hadn't vetted very thoroughly.

9:00and that didn't ring true to you personally. And that coheres to me in spite of the range of styles, which I understand feels pretty radical sometimes. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. But there are other ways to look at it. I don't think that a lot of producers would have let us get away with doing it like that. I think Elliot might be one of the few people that's truly still very adventurous in his spirit. He's wide open, yeah. That's a beautiful thing, yeah. I love that about him. Do you think another producer might have said, okay, but let's put on a Leonard Cohen, or Downtown Train, let's put on something?

9:36No, I think that they would have wanted to rearrange the songs to be more tame in their stylistic breadth. And say, well, let's try to rein this into sort of a little bit dumbed down in a way. Or maybe the songs musically are more similar than they are far ranging. But the other thing is another producer, if he were functioning as a real producer and wanting the clout and the control, we should remind ourselves that you and I and Elliot were all sharing the producer role. And for that reason, I think Elliot was hanging back a little more than a sort of producer producer who was the only producer on the record would do.

10:24And so it was a collaborative effort that way as well. And I think he liked that and wanted it that way. And he's a kind of reticent guy until it's important to speak up, and then he speaks up. I know. And that's how I remembered him. That was kind of one of the only things he said at that lunch was, no covers, like he said. Yeah, no, he's got strength, but he waits a long time. And he only speaks up when he knows it's important. In fact, he's sitting right here, and he hasn't said a word. No, he's not. Well, we're waiting for that. He'll finish the episode. So how did you split up the producing duties?

10:59How did that work? Well, John did most of the work, right? Well, producing is a funny term. I don't know. And there's so much overlap nowadays in the way most people put a record together. There's overlap between the songwriting, the arranging, the producing, the engineering, the recording. So, John, you had made demos. Right. Before we met with Elliot Shiner. And we had made demos, too. And then I had added my vocals to them. But I think you pretty much were the one that made those demos. Yeah, pretty much. You played everything. We recorded anything that I recorded. I came over to your place.

11:39And some we didn't have time to really demo. But we went for it anyway. Yeah. And then there was the one, like the title track, which you made the whole song. Yeah. And made a demo of it. I made a demo of it. hear all these vocal parts, all the harmonies, the type of bass treatment, the type of treatment, and the energy. And some of these songs were, I mean, could have just been scripted. Obviously, we didn't do that to the guys when they got in there. They were pretty well thought out before we got to the studio. That's what I, and that was John. We wanted it to be that way. The title track, a couple tracks have a, they've got like a New Orleans feel to them.

12:17That one certainly does, yeah. Yeah, you've got that kind of New Orleans organ in a couple other songs. Was that deliberate? Did that come from something? I think Let's Walk became sort of the drummer was playing that kind of beat. I don't know if it was an organ thing. I didn't conceive of it that way, really. I think I changed it a little bit. We tried it like that in rehearsal, and we sort of liked that it felt a little more spirited and not so sort of safe. I mean, it's a march. and what is more appropriate to feeling like you're dancing while you're walking, feeling music and walking, that's American.

12:59What's more American than New Orleans marches? It's a natural part of all of these musicians' repertoire in terms of styles because it's music we've all loved so much for so long. And it's at the heart of all American music. Because to me, I have decided that American music is one of the main important things that we have to offer the world. And we don't even know what we have. We don't necessarily recognize it very well. We don't understand stylistically how much crossover there is, how much like how blurry that is. And yet how also steeped really in different like cultures that are identities.

13:54It is at the same time. You don't think people. I'm more country and I'm more bluegrass and I'm more. People still do that, which is so odd because there is no. Those things were never separate. in musically speaking. Well, you know, anytime money gets involved, you know, the categorizations help sell it. So that's why there are genres. Yeah, but I'm trying to step even further back, you know. Now, most people, of course, think you're French. Right. You are American. Right. But you did live in France, and that was your kind of musical education. Do you think you have got that kind of outsider's view of American culture?

14:36Does that help? It helps immensely. There's several things about it. There's being American in another country and realizing and listening to people talk about Luther Vendors and, you know, Kool and the Gong. And like, who's Kool and the Gong? And who are the Beatles? What is that? I've never heard of that band before. Oh, the Beatles? Oh, okay. Okay. So just realizing how people talk about America, kids that were my age at the time when I was 12, 13 or older. And then secondly, what happened when I became a teenager is I met American expatriates who I would have never met. That's something that Dan Fitzgerald said.

15:22He was from Kingston, New York, so upstate New York, but he used to hang out in the Bowery, and I used to take the train over to Canal Street over in Broadway. I would have been in New York City at the same time as him, but I was a young, like maybe adolescent or teenage white girl from South Brooklyn, and he would have been a middle-aged black man from Kingston. we would have never spoken to each other, even though we might have had all of these cultural affinities that were hard to find. But because we saw each other in Paris, we became, you know, like family eventually. And, of course, it changed my life to be there because of that.

16:09So it was interesting. It's one thing to try. It's very hard to try to understand another culture. I mean, you know, I lived in France for a long time. my mother has lived there ever since 1987. She's still learning and we're still talking about attitudes and different types of sayings that you might have to describe something. Just today she said there's a French saying. Women talk about French men, they say. They're only interested until they have killed the beast. that's the literal translation of they catch you the woman a woman is the wildness has to be beaten out of you you have to be tamed i think is what it's kind of saying and then they're then then they're interested they'll move on to other things but uh i'll try i'll try that on my wife i don't i don't suggest it is she american she's america i'm not an american she is an American and I don't think I would survive that conversation.

17:13I think there would be some killing, but it wouldn't be her. But we should back up because we haven't talked about Dan. There's a song about him on this record. Can you just back up and explain how you met him in Paris and who he is, who he was? Okay. Daniel William Fitzgerald was born in 1933 in Kingston, New York. Dan went to ministry school. He went to law school. He became disillusioned by both of those things. He joined the army in the 50s, and that's what brought him over to Europe. And then he just started going back and forth and creating his life. And apparently in 1978, he was hanging out with some friends, some American friends.

17:58He had met expatriates in Paris to find each other, right? And he said, I want to go to Jazz Fest this year in New Orleans. And let's start a band in order to go down there. Somehow he knew all these old Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey songs. He knew them by heart. And there's a Ma Rainey song called The Lost and Wandering Blues. And he started a band called The Lost, Wandering, Blues, and Jazz Band. He made a washtub. He turned it into a washtub bass. He painted it. And he started this band. And they went around from that time on. They went to Europe. And if there was an American who was going to wander around Paris and they would bump into him on the street and they'd recognize him and then he'd make friends and we'd stay at somebody's house that night.

18:47We'd go play near a restaurant. The restaurant would come out and say, come inside and have a meal. You can hang out with us. And it was a lifestyle that he created. I come along to Paris about 20 years later, 89, 90. I was about 15. I joined a different street band that was in the same scene. At this point, you played ukulele or guitar, or what did you? I had a guitar, but I couldn't play any of the songs that we were singing. You know, people said, oh, what songs do you want to sing? I said, well, first I was passing the hat for somebody, and then I heard these guys singing, and I said, you know, I could probably do better than them.

19:34So I volunteered myself as a singer, and they were like, oh, she wants to sing a song? Okay, sure, what do you know? And so it was Georgia and Summertime, and that's it. And then I thought, well, I know all these other songs, but I couldn't. Your mother taught you songs? Is that how it's done? Yeah, we used to play ukuleles together, and she sang all the time. She sang every morning. She sang all over the house. And it was really the only time that my father was not being kind of a tyrant was when we would sit down, the two of us, and sing together. He would just stop and be quiet and listen and say, oh, I guess I can't do anything better than that.

20:21But the rest of the time, he was telling us what to do. But he was gone by the time you were in Paris. Is that right? Yeah, we moved to Paris right after they divorced. He moved out. He was living somewhere in the city for the rest of his life, somewhere in New York. Eventually, he moved out to Corona, Queens in the end. Yeah. What made you want to start busking? The first thing that I remember was that I was, because I was in France and I couldn't speak the language and I wanted to make friends, I would wander around the neighborhood with my guitar and just sit around and play while other people were talking to each other, kids.

20:59And one day somebody threw some money in the case. And I remember going, wait, what just happened here? So that was the revelation for me. It was like, oh, wait, you think I could actually make money doing this? This would be amazing. And then I did wander into Paris. Somehow we saw street musicians at one point. And I remember thinking, I've got to go back here to find these people. And I did like a trek through the city trying to find them. And that's when I saw Danny's band. And I didn't speak to him that day. But it was absolutely memorable because they all had hats on. They had microphones and amps.

21:41And it was so weird. It was a weird type of hybrid of American music. Like it brings kind of full circle to what we were talking about because he had this sort of black American musical culture that I had never heard. I had heard some early blues from my parents' records, but it was mostly like stuff that had gone into universities like Robert Johnson. Like there was a certain group of black artists that were part of the folk movement. But then there were all these other blues, jazz artists that, I don't know, that wasn't my experience. I didn't hear some of that stuff. I knew Fats Waller. I'd heard a lot of Fats Waller, a lot of some Louis Armstrong.

22:32But Danny was playing early, early stuff, early jazz. Almost like ragtime stuff? If you listen to Bessie Smith records, it's right in the middle. It's after ragtime, because I think of ragtime as like Scott Joplin. So that's 1890s, basically. And then if you think of swing, I think of the 1930s as post-depression. But then there's this period through the 20s where even the rhythm is not absolutely sort of the approach to how the shuffle feels is sort of like still in between those two spaces. It's not completely laid back yet, but you kind of feel it's starting to lay back. But Billie Holiday's first recording when she was 16 was in the 30s.

23:28And you can hear that the bands, the dance bands are now starting to do that thing where I suppose the Great Migration is influencing that too, right? Because you have country blues becoming urbanized. And if you listen to Bessie Smith, like Ma Rainey is really country. You don't have a lot of harmonic changes. It really is sort of in a folky world. It's a folk thing. But with Bessie, you've got piano players and guitar players and they're playing all these passing chords and there's like diminished chords and weird like little changes in tempo and these verses that never repeat or these sections that never repeat that are quite complicated.

24:17And I believe that that's more of like because of the urban influence where they go to the cities and you're hearing a lot more different kinds of music. What grabbed you about that music? Well, it's harmonically accessible to me. It's a pop dance type of music with some more complexity to it, but not to the point where it's ethereal and atonal yet. It hasn't really crossed over. So for me to learn music, to learn chords, because I was so fascinated by hearing some cool song like Across the Universe from the Beatles. I remember thinking, how are you supposed to play that on a ukulele? This is really hard.

25:07That was my biggest problem was like, well, where's the harmony coming from? I just don't get it. Well, you know, the key there is you only play the George Harrison songs because he used to write on ukuleles. Oh, really? Yeah. No, definitely. Here Comes the Sun is like one of the first ones that I was like, yay! Yeah, or something. I think he, yeah, he used to use a... Oh, that's beautiful. But it doesn't sound like that. He would just play it with a capo, right? When he played it on the guitar. So it'd be in the same. Yeah. I mean, I'm not that, I wasn't that good a ukulele player either. Let's get a ukulele out here right now.

25:39No, no, no. And I heard you like, when you started guitar, you liked Freddie Green. Is that right? Well, yeah, right, because he was in the small group with Billie Holiday and those incredible recordings that they made with Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Freddie Green, Philly Joe Jones, maybe on drums and some of those recordings. I think they made like 100 records during those two years, maybe two or three years, 39, 40. It was all wartime, too. I wonder if it wasn't like FDR grants that made that happen. Those records are absolutely like they're just so good. We have to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more from Madeline Peru and John Harrington.

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28:59One of the things I think is universal to nearly everyone is that warm feeling you get when you find someone you feel comfortable sharing parts of your life with that otherwise you might just keep to yourself. Often it's a friend, sometimes it's a loved one, but in those moments you really take a load off. That's one of the things I've enjoyed most about therapy, that there's someone regularly in my life that I'm able to talk to about things I'd probably keep to myself for longer than I really needed to. And they're clinically trained and licensed to help. Plus, if you regularly see them, they have most, if not all, the context they need to really understand how this item you're sharing might be affecting you or those around you.