Today we’d like to introduce you to Pearl & the Oysters.
Hi Pearl & the Oysters, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
We’re a band composed of Juliette Davis (vocals, flute, synths) and Joachim Polack (keys and production). Both of us are French-American, and both of us were born in Paris, France. We met in high school and started playing music together more consistently in college. In 2015, when we were 24 and 25 respectively we moved to the US. Joachim had been accepted into a Ph.D. program in musicology at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Juliette spent that first year in the US in New York going to jazz clubs and soaking in the city vibes while Joachim was doing coursework in swampy Florida and setting up a pretty quirky home studio situation in a student apartment right off campus.
By the end of 2015, we had begun working on a new batch of songs (some written in France and some in Florida) for a project we had wanted to call “pearl & the oysters” but which wasn’t exactly a band yet.
We finished our first album in the Summer of 2016, which coincided with Juliette’s move to Gainesville. That album came out a year later in the Fall of 2017. In the months leading up to the release, the record labels involved (Elestial Sound and Croque Macadam) had been pushing for us to try to form a live band and take these songs on the road, which we did and that’s essentially how we caught the touring bug, haha. Originally we were touring the Southeast and the East Coast mostly, but as the band’s profile was (slowly) growing, we ventured as far West as California and played some shows in LA in the Summer of 2018. After getting this short but lasting impression of the music scene here, we more or less decided that we wanted to move to LA at some point, which is exactly what we did about a year and a half (and an album) later, in January 2020.
Since then we put out our third album Flowerland on the amazing Chicago label Feeltrip Records (2021). Obviously, the pandemic put a damper on our plans at first but this album was a turning point in terms of us having honed in our craft as songwriters and producers, plus we were working with Shags Chamberlain on the mixing, and he really took our sound to the next level. That record and the shows we played in LA around its release got the attention of Peanut Butter Wolf and Jason McGuire of Stones Throw Records, and we ended up signing to Stones Throw which was a big dream of ours! We’ve been so grateful for all the love we’ve been getting in LA for the past three years and this whole moment seems like the beginning of a new era for the band, so we’re pretty excited. :))
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
From a pragmatic/logistical perspective, the main struggle was for us to manage being in school and working full-time with growing a band by touring and what that implies in terms of time management and brain compartmentalizing. The mental exertion and emotional overload actually got pretty bad at one point and that became the subject of a lot of songs on our last album haha. Being far from our family and friends was tough too. And then the pandemic hit us, which was hard for everybody, but weirdly enough that became a pretty prolific and fruitful moment for us artistically, although maybe not initially.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We’re musicians, we’ve been writing and recording music mostly at home in what’s generally dubbed ‘bedroom studios’ these days. Our sound started up very lofi but also kinda crafty in terms of the songwriting itself because we’d both gone to music school. The tension between (what felt to us like) a sense of command/control and a form of classicism in the songwriting versus a more tentative/wacky bedroom approach to the production is what characterized the sound of our first two albums. Since then we tried to improve on the fidelity of the recordings.
In sonic terms, we’re very influenced by early electronic music, what we fondly refer to as ‘bleeps and bloops’ (Raymond Scott, Dick Hyman, Delia Derbyshire), and the space age/lounge revival of the 90s (High Llamas, Stereolab, Cardigans, April March, etc.). In terms of songwriting, it’s kinda all over the place, but we’re influenced by a lot of 70s pop, Todd Rundgren, Wings, ELO, Stevie Wonder, Beach Boys, Carole King and also the lower fidelity/home studio-y music of Sly Stone, Shuggie Otis, and Margo Guryan. We love Japanese music from that era too: Haruomi Hosono’s late-70s music and early YMO albums have been a huge influence. And of course, we’ve been listening to Brazilian music since high school and we’re huge fans of AC Jobim, Chico Buarque, Marcos Valle, and João Donato. That hodgepodge of influences combined with a sound that’s heavily reliant on electronic bleeps and toy-like synths is probably what sets our style apart.
What sort of changes in the industry are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
It’s hard to tell, really. As musicians, our hope is to keep honing our craft and try not to worry too much about large-scale changes in the industry, hopefully we can stay focused on music-making and keep getting better at writing and producing. 🙂
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pearlandtheoystersband/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pearlandtheoystersmusic
Image Credits
Laura Moreau
