At a corner table on the expansive patio of a trendy Frogtown restaurant, Peaches’ blue eyes focus on the hovering waiter. “The vodka is gonna be rested on oyster shells,” he proffers. “It’s kind of inheriting that briny character, like a martini of the sea.”
“Lovely, great. Love it,” Peaches says quickly.
“Two of those, perfect,” the waiter replies.
Peaches is, as she sings in her new song “Panna Cotta Delight,” “a woman in control of all her holes,” and mistress of a creative life where nothing appears outside of the realm of possibility. She’s collaborated or toured with Yoko Ono, Marilyn Manson and Iggy Pop, among more underground artists (NYC “drag terrorist” Christeene, the spirit “entity” The Squirt Deluxe) across genres and countries and languages (Yiddish, Italian). But it’s Peaches own music and stage show — ugly-beautiful DIY aesthetics and pulsing Electroclash musicality — where it all comes together in a powerfully freeing frenzy.
In 11 songs on “No Lube So Rude,” her seventh full-length album since 1995’s “Fancypants Hoodlum” (released under her birth name Merrill Nisker), Peaches sings, vociferously, what most people are fearful to express out loud. Topics include (lots of) dirty sex, pointed political rants and pithy observations — she coins SpaceX’s satellites “Starlink anal beads” in one song.
The Canadian-born, two-time L.A. dweller and longtime resident of Berlin will turn 60 this year. She owns it. In song, she name-checks abortion pill mifepristone and rhymes “Roe versus Wade” with “pleather and suede” in “F— How You Wanna F—,” a song that begins: “F— Kavanaugh, I’m a cougar.” Several four-letter c-words are used liberally.
She came up playing acoustic folky guitar and singing in clubs in her hometown of Toronto for years. The future Peaches eventually strapped on an electric axe, then found she could do everything a band could do by herself, using electronics. During a short stint at York University, she wanted to be a theater director who made “cool musicals,” while her Sartre- and Ibsen-reading classmates scoffed. She’s likely having the last laugh.
Her career launched large via “The Teaches of Peaches.” Released in 2020, the LP featured the track that became her signature: “F— the Pain Away.” Sofia Coppola used the song in 2003’s “Lost in Translation,” and it’s been in “Jackass Number Two”; romantic comedies; a 2017 episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale”; and in “30 Rock,” in which Tina Fey as Liz Lemon uses the song as a ringtone.
Peaches turns 60 with “No Lube So Rude,” her seventh album featuring unapologetic lyrics on sexuality, politics, bodily autonomy and cultural disruption.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
The lyrical profanity that makes Peaches’ approach so delightfully profane is no accident. A songwriting goal? “To try and make it in a way that it’s tough, but also palatable,” she explains. “You have a humor to it, but it’s not to get away from [topics], but to bring you in.”
She adds: “Disarming people is so important.”
And that she does, charming and thoughtful and present in person with a wild, free compassion and willingness onstage. In concert, she’s powerful, hardly a princess of perfection but gorgeously garish, a fun and funny powerhouse provocateur, dripping in costumes, onstage audience members and sweat.
Does true vulnerability come as easily as the sexual expression seems to onstage? “No,” she says, almost before the question is asked.
“I don’t think either are easy, to be honest. Like, performatively, yes, I can ‘Barbra Streisand’ a song. I was thinking about her because she’s one of the first singers I ever heard. She can perform an emotion out of ABCs, you know? You could cry, and she’s just saying the ABCs. So, performatively, sexually and vulnerably, yes. But dealing with the realness of that underneath is never easy.”
With repetition — touring, performing live — songs don’t necessarily become easier for her to emotionally perform, and nor are they ever by rote.
“Usually my songs become what I’m doing. So I wear them like suits, and then I become them, but the suit falls off sometimes, and you’re like, ‘Whoa, I gotta pull this up here,’” she said.
In the new track “Not in Your Mouth None of Your Business,” Peaches sings, “I cannot be squashed or minimized/ you will never take away our pride/ Orders won’t make us lie down and die/ We will stop you f— up our lives.”
When I surmise that the printed version of our conversation may have a lot of “redacted, redacted, redacted,” Peaches is quick to respond. “Everybody uses this language all day long. That I find very funny; who are we protecting?”
“It’s very interesting. It’s also very frustrating for me, and why I say these things and why I perform the way I do,” she continues. “Also on social platforms, algorithmically and through AI, they see me as a sexual deviant. So if I’m putting nipple covers on they just see that as sexual anyways. Or I say a certain word and it’s like, ‘oh, you’re violating terms.’ You want to be a disruptor for reasons of progression, but you’re not able to. I keep trying, though,” she says.
Peaches is currently on tour with Model/Actriz opening East Coast dates and Pixel Grip on the West Coast. “I think I’m gonna see a lot of young and a lot of older people — people my age. People are not 60 and dying. It’s not like when we were young, and our grandparents turned 60, and you’re like, ‘oh my god.’ It’s not the end of your life; it’s sort of like another quarter.”
Thoughtful and easygoing offstage, Peaches’ seemingly rebellious onstage shenanigans are hardly a reaction to her upbringing. The product of two lovely, supportive and intellectual Jewish parents, Peaches is the youngest of three.
“My dad was a very big supporter of my music. … I remember the last show where he saw me … I’m gonna choke up,” she says, choking up slightly. “It was a special show in this theater, Massey Hall, in Toronto. Usually, if my parents or my sister were there, I would ‘stage dive’ over to them. I’m making my way over to my dad, and I’m just seeing him bawl. I’m like, ‘I cannot.’ I had to, like, take a turn. I was like, ‘I’m just gonna cry. This is gonna be too much.’ He passed away. And then my sister passed away, yeah, so it’s been a lot.”
While songs on “No Lube So Rude” generally feel more like fury and rabble-rousing and educating and freedom and togetherness, “I feel like some of the grief definitely came through,” Peaches says about her familial losses. “When I think about a song like ‘Take It,’ it’s more about loss and more in the guise of a relationship. But I think,” she admits, “it’s talking to myself.”
“I cannot be squashed or minimized,” the Canadian artist declares, addressing abortion rights, trans rights, solidarity with Palestinians and intergenerational dialogue through music and performance.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Times)
While she’s toured with Marilyn Manson, and some might slot Peaches into a sort of “shock rock” category, she definitively knows where she stands. “It’s not about shock. It’s about provoking. For reasons. In this time,” she says with a little laugh, “that’s not too hard. I’m very proud of a lot of musicians who are standing up and talking about bodily autonomy, about trans rights, about abortion rights, about Palestine, about genocide in general, about the wealth gap. We haven’t seen artists speak out like this since I don’t know when. It’s healthy, and I think it’s part of the whole community, part of our work.”
While the album title did indeed spawn a personal lubricant, the “Peaches x Medicine Mama Intimate Glide” available on the singer’s website, the phrase is hardly purely sexual. “The album is called ‘No Lube So Rude’ because of all the friction in the world. And let’s find something, some magical way to talk to each other, intergenerational conversations. Not to all agree with each other,” she explains, “but talk to each other. Find a way to gel, or at least smooth around.”
Peaches plays the Bellwether on March 20 and 21.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
