Caroline Polachek Loves Mess

For her mucky, bold, feminine new album, the singer gets primal.

- By Rachel Handler

Caroline Polachek wasn't out to scandalize the zoo. She made the three-hour journey from Los Angeles, where she was deep in final-edit mode for her new album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a wildlife preserve in Escondido, with the purest of intentions: She wanted to see Kurt. He's the world's first successfully cloned Przewalski's horse, an endangered breed with a fun little mohawk that needed some scientific intervention to survive. As a self-proclaimed Connecticut "horse girl" who obsessed over and rode horses until she was 15, Polachek hoped to spend a couple of hours learning about Kurt's unconventional genesis and marveling at his unnatural splendor. "It feels kind of symbolic and beautiful to do this," she tells me from the back of a truck, riding bumpily to Kurt's habitat.

The mood is cheerful, for now: she and I, two extremely polite zoo staff members, and a photographer. Polachek is particularly moved by the mud around us, which has oozed and twisted into new shapes after the recent torrential rains; the zoo team describes this as "a mess," but she longingly calls it "mud architecture." "A lot of the motifs I'm playing with on this record are about using elemental, primal textures. Dirt and the earth coming up in different ways volcanoes, especially-as a metaphor for the subconscious and for everything we've repressed during the pandemic," Polachek says. "The elemental vitality that springs up again." I ask if she's referring to the thick brown lava that she graphically vomits up in the video for the album's fourth single, "Welcome to My Island." She laughs. "I mean, literally, yes."