Caroline Polachek on Her Influences, Her Bandmates and Boulder

Caroline Polachek is about a month into her tour — the only time of year she has a semblance of a scheduled routine, she says. When she's not on the road, she's floating between her homes in London and Los Angeles, working on slick, electronic-infused ballads that have made her a unique standout in modern pop music.

That tour will be coming to the Mission Ballroom on Sunday, May 14, and according to Polachek, the performances just keep getting better. "We really hit our stride in the last few weeks, and the shows are feeling really, really, really special," she says.

"I've got an incredible trio of bandmates: a drummer called Russell Holzman, who is sort of known for playing drum and bass; a bassist named Maya Laner, who has her own project that I'm an obsessive fan of, which is called True Blue — she's from New York and she's putting out an album next year that I have heard, and I can't wait till it comes out; and then the third member is a guitarist, Matt Horton, who's sort of more of a prog, experimental-style guitarist," she explains. "They all kind of come from quite different backgrounds and are just incredible, incredible tourmates. We're having a lot of fun."

But she doesn't have much extra time. If she did, she says that she'd visit some of her old stamping grounds in Boulder, where she went to college for two years. "I love hiking in the Flatirons and visiting the Dushanbe Tea House in Boulder," she adds. "Those are like my spots when I go back."

While she was at the University of Colorado Boulder, her music career began when she joined the indie band Chairlift. But she "outgrew" the CU music program, she says, and moved on to one at NYU. And while Chairlift had a good fourteen-year run, Polachek grew out of that, too. But her time with the band in New York made an indelible impact on her and her future sound.

"Once arriving in New York, we found ourselves immediately drawn toward the sort of electro-pop underground scene that was developing there, with bands like MGMT, in the wake of bands like TV on the Radio or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but a very distinctly different generation," she says. "Because we were using computer music production, which was becoming very cheap and easy to use and available at that time. So it was a really interesting moment culturally, where there was this real underground, DIY spirit, but using all the same tools that pop-music producers had access to via cracks and leaks of software that we were accessing on our laptop. So it was this interesting kind of hi-fi, lo-fi blend that was happening in Brooklyn. Chairlift signed a major-label deal to Columbia off the back of us getting an iPod ad. And we worked and made records for fourteen years before we disbanded. And I went solo."

Polachek, who was born in New York and lived in Tokyo until the age of six before moving back to the New York suburbs, remembers the ethereal enlightenment she experienced as a child while listening to a variety of genres.

"I remember hearing the Beatles and Enya when I was really little, and sort of seeing something really special in both and what they were doing — these different forms of sort of transcendence, or accessing the dream world, that they both created in very different ways," she says. "I realized at a young age that music has this sort of potential to do that."

Her solo music reflects some of Chairlift's electro-pop underground elements, but Polachek wants to be clear about her influences. "It's better to ask artists what the references are than tell them," she says.

"I'm drawing from dynamics of my lived life," she adds. "This sort of desire to reconcile all the kinds of layers of modern existence, you know, the spiritual with the banal, the kind of online meme language with romanticism. I feel so hamstrung between all these kinds of code-switching that we live with, that we all are expressing ourselves through in the contemporary landscape, and whether it has to do with our fondness for nostalgia or our desire to be connected with something way more ancient. And, of course, also with humor and sensuality. And for me, music is an experiment to see if I can reconcile all these conflicting needs and communication styles and the use of something you can listen to in under an hour."

Overall, she says, she wants her music to make listeners "feel like they belong."

At Sunday's show, she also wants to be sure they pay attention to the opener. "I hope everyone is as excited as I am to see Alex G, who's one of my favorite artists, period," she concludes. "I can't wait for us all to be together."

Caroline Polachek, 7 p.m. Sunday, May 14, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street; tickets are $40-$100.