Madeleine Peyroux may be best known as a jazz singer, but she's just as fearless and illuminating in her songwriting. To mark the release of her new album Let’s Walk, she talks Alan Pedder through the five songs she’s most proud of.
Nine albums into her career, Madeleine Peyroux is colouring further outside the lines of jazz than ever before, marbling her stylish arrangements with streaks of upgraded daring.
Released last month, Let’s Walk is more than just an exercise in loosening the reins. It’s an invitation to go deeper into the American artist’s internal dialogue, revealing her to be as biting and witty as she is self-reflective and wise.
There’s a galvanising intention behind many of the songs, not least the call to action of the nimble, gospel-kissed title track – inspired by the history of marches and protests – and the sultry invocations of “Please Come on Inside”, where de-escalation and healing await. There are powerfully charged and thorny narratives, too. Peyroux’s pen is particularly unsparing in her painful and prickly takedown of a sexual abuser (“Nothing Personal”), while the dolorous waltz “How I Wish” finds her picking at the scab of centuries of racial division in a nation jolted into conscience by the Black Lives Matter movement.
As a musician, Peyroux says she has been blessed with an escapist’s perspective on the world. It’s no coincidence that she named her debut album Dreamland (“because the dreaming mind was where I found my healing in life”), and, until recently, she’s been all too ready to bring her audiences with her through the looking glass. But, as she sings in the haunting close of “How I Wish”, “no more, no more.” “Escapism is all well and good, and it’s very healthy in some ways, but I’ve been struggling with whether or not I can accept that as the way in which I present myself as an artist,” she tells Best Fit, speaking from her home in Brooklyn. “I don’t live the life of an escapist in my mind and in my heart.”
That’s not to say that Peyroux doesn’t still venture into whimsy. Let’s Walk may be rooted in the streets and fraying social fabric of the West, but there are side quests into showbiz (“Showman Dan”, a rollicking tribute to a dear friend and mentor), swooning coquetry (the vampish “Blues for Heaven”) and insouciant Caribbean cool (the amusingly murderous “Me & The Mosquito”).
She saves her most frivolous moment for last with album closer “Take Care”, which, on paper, reads like a motivational Instagram reel from a Bed-Stuy wellness influencer. It’s here that Peyroux’s vocal acting comes into its own, toying with the material in a tone somewhere between sardonic and pizazzy, served over fairground organ, sampled marimba and a relentlessly perky rhythm section. Let’s Walk’s last words? “Hi mom!”
When Peyroux says that Let’s Walk means more to her than any other record she’s made in the past, it’s not just a rote line trotted out to sell a few more copies. She means it with 100% sincerity. “It’s the closest to my heart, and to who I am at this time, as a person just trying to be in the world and face the world with any kind of clarity and grounding,” she says, gently. “It means everything to me, so I’m just grateful if anybody gets anything out of it.”
As a songwriter, Peyroux tends to be cautiously autocritical, often leaning on her co-writers to confirm her instincts. She jokes that, when asked to choose the five songs she’s most proud of writing, she only really feels good about two. She says she imagined the exercise as showing up to the pearly gates for her final judgement, though quickly clarifies that she doesn’t believe in either heaven or the afterlife.
“It was very difficult, but as my dad used to say, sometimes you need a kick in the pants,” she says, laughing. “I haven’t written that many songs in proportion to the number that I’ve recorded, so I feel honoured to be asked. But, I guess like anyone who does these interviews, it was kind of a struggle to look back at my life and ask, ‘Did I really do anything? Is this valuable?’”
Peyroux knows that relationships in music are always changing, not only between artists and their audience but also between artists and their own work, so any list like this is dependent on context. She might have a particularly great show that makes her feel alive and certain songs feel precious in the moment, but to step away from the experience of live music and “think about music as a static monument unto itself” was a tall order. “I’m trying to find intrinsic value in that, and it’s hard,” she says. “Music is a performance art. It doesn’t exist on paper, really.”
"Once in a While" (2008)
BEST FIT: This is one of four original songs that you wrote for your album Half the Perfect World, which was the most you’d had on a record up to that point. How important was this song and that record to you and your evolution as a songwriter?
MADELEINE PEYROUX: “Once in a While” is a breakup song, as it were. I don’t know if it’s necessarily true of other cultures, but breakup songs do seem to be the front door for modern songwriting. They kind of force you to get real and say something that needs to be said. There’s something inspiring in the controversy and cognitive dissonance of having part of you and part of your life still being deeply attached to someone and having to move on. There’s no ritual that can do that for you. You just have to do what you can to remake yourself.
“Once in a While” is a song that articulates the feeling I had of being able to say goodbye while knowing that’s there’s no such thing as goodbye, really, and I’m proud of that song in retrospect. I think the recording that Larry Klein produced is stunning. Half the Perfect World is the second record we made together, and I’d had quite a bit more time to think about what songs we were going to put on it. It was quite a challenging process, because even though it was my third record overall, it felt more like a sophomore album at the time because I had kind of restarted.
Having that extra time to think was actually not pleasant at all. I remember I had stomach issues during that period. I went to the doctor and had some tests done because I was having all these pains, but he said there was nothing wrong with me. Sometimes that’s the worst news you can get.
What’s your overriding memory of that time?
I spent a lot of time alone, sort of going through the motions of being in the world by myself and feeling very isolated. As was always the case when I worked with Larry, I would move to Los Angeles for the time that it took to go through all the pre-production and everything. This time I was maybe there for three months or so, renting a furnished apartment out by Venice Beach where you don’t need a car. I was nowhere near any friends or family or acquaintances, which was a good thing for the purpose of songwriting and getting some work done, but it was an intense and pretty isolating experience.
I think, in the end, that’s why art is so close to spirituality, because it’s an intense practice. There’s a certain amount of social fasting, if that makes any sense. It’s not necessarily a physical fasting, but more from an aesthetic aspect.
You’ve described Larry as a genius and that he has a kind of impressionistic approach to jazz. How do you think that comes through on Half the Perfect World? Or what did you learn from him that you could put into this song?
Working with Larry was magic. He does have an impressionistic approach to all the music that he produces, in terms of the arranging, but I don’t know that I would necessarily say that about this song in particular. What I would say is that I think that Larry took the essence and the dreamlike, unfinished quality of impressionism and added that.
I think he leaves a lot of unanswered questions in terms of the overall harmonic structure. Harmonies are not resolved and there’s dissonance everywhere all the time, but just enough to be entrancing rather than in any way jarring. Things become blurry. The songs don’t end in a perfect circle from where they started. I don’t understand how he does it, and obviously I don’t have the ability that he has. To me, it’s a very magical thing. I tend to just feel my way through harmony, which means it takes me a long time to get somewhere that a studied person could get to. But once I get there, I feel the meaning and everything so deeply. For me, it’s an intuitive process.
There’s another track on Half the Perfect World that has this blurry quality, “La Javanaise”, which was written by Serge Gainsbourg. I was so honoured to record that song, and that it was picked up for the movie The Shape of Water. It was used in the sex scene between the woman and the creature, and it turns out that she’s half creature – sorry, spoiler alert! – and it just worked so well. I’m a great fan of Guillermo del Toro, so I went to the theatre to see the movie and when the song came on during that amazing scene I was like, “Ohhh shit!”
It's interesting to me that the movie is called The Shape of Water, because that’s kind of how I think of the sounds in “Once in a While” as well. I always have a problem with how to describe something in music, and that’s maybe because I am always trying to create something new. Why would you bother doing something if you’re not trying to do what hasn’t been done before, or at least trying to do something better? In essence, we are all different from each other so anything we create is therefore going to be different, whatever we choose to do, even if it’s just in the slightest way.
I totally agree. Is this a song that has stayed with you in terms of playing live?
I haven't played it live in many, many years. I think it’s a song that has the power to be very moving, but it’s one of the ones I would probably only play if I was doing a longer show. I feel that people would rather hear “La Javanaise”, which I think is a better song that has a similar story to “Once in a While”.
"Our Lady of Pigalle" (2009)
BEST FIT: This track comes from your album Bare Bones, which was your first album of completely original songs. It’s so artfully done, too, almost as though you’re painting a picture. I’m curious as to what inspired it.
MADELEINE PEYROUX: I remember it being quite exciting when the idea for this song came to me. I was hanging out for several days in New York with David Batteau, who co-wrote the song with me, just sitting around and talking about anything and everything. David is a very literary guy so we could talk about all kinds of random stuff, inspired by things that he’d read. We were trying to come up with some ideas for songs so there was a lot of free associating. I think sometimes I need to do less of that when I am alone, because not every idea is precious. I think at one point we hadn’t come up with a good idea for maybe a whole day.
There was a moment when David was thinking about going to the store but he hadn’t actually said so. Instead he said something like “Can I buy you something? Can I get you a beer?” and I totally misheard him and thought he said “Can I buy you something? Can I stroke your hair?” I laughed and told him he sounded like he was some man on the street in Paris in the middle of the night propositioning me. He got upset by that, actually, and didn’t want me to use that in the song. Of course, I don’t associate David with anything negative at all so I thought it was fair play and kind of insisted that he let me use the lines to start the song. He was a bit crestfallen and went off the store, and while he was out I sat there and wrote the lyrics to “Our Lady of Pigalle” in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way.
The idea of being propositioned by somebody in the streets of Paris, was, for me as a young, white American girl from Brooklyn, really one of the first things I encountered when I moved there in my early teens. I felt too young to be exposed to that. I mean, we had the same culture in New York, but in Paris I felt like it was a little bit less of a secret. I think the culture there is more aware of itself. It’s funny because you have Notre Dame, or ‘Our Lady’, right there in the centre, so I thought it was quite a fascinating dichotomy.
I find it interesting to think about the symbol of a woman in religion, especially a patriarchal religion like Catholicism, where women weren’t even really allowed to speak in public church gatherings for hundreds of years. There’s this weird symbolic thing of Mother Mary being so pure that she had to be a virgin even as a mother, and then you have Mary Magdalene as her opposite. She isn’t ever really acknowledged as a prostitute, necessarily, but they’re supposed to be opposites of each other. One has never, ever been touched by a man but has a baby, and the other is worthless, from the lowest stratum of society. The dichotomy of that has always been so striking to me.
Anyway, David ended up getting over the initial trauma that I put him through and we finished writing the song. It meant a lot to me in that moment, and it still does. I’m happy to have given voice to this dichotomy. As a woman, is just seems ironic that it’s such a big part of our culture, that a woman is always going to have to be both a sinner and a saint. Well, it’s a crazy world for men, too. In fact, I think part of why I was so attracted to writing this song was being able to embody the man’s voice. My bandmates would describe this song as being about daddy issues. I’m like, “Really?! I spent so much time trying to find words for this, and you’re just going to sum it up in two words?”
It’s interesting that this song uses the nyckelharpa, which is a traditional Swedish instrument, played here by Carla Kihlstedt, who you’ve worked with a lot.
Yeah, she was also in the string quartet that played on Half the Perfect World. Oh my gosh, she has such a wonderful, wonderful energy, and the nyckelharpa was just fascinating. It’s so beautiful to be in the presence of such an old instrument. It’s got its own life and its own creature-ness. It’s like a whole other animal, and I just love the sound. Carla did a lot of very simple drones with it, because it’s actually quite hard to keep it in tune for very long.
I just found out today that you also recorded a version of this in French as a bonus track.
Yeah, I did. I translated the lyric myself, and it went through several iterations. I even had somebody telling me that it doesn’t really work as well in French, and I realised myself once I got into it that it’s just not the same. But I think it was a good exercise, and it gives French-speaking people the opportunity to perhaps better see what it means in English.
I have finally written a song in French from scratch, for this new album (“Et Puis”). I worked pretty hard on it and everybody I've checked with has said that it makes sense and all the jokes come through. There’s a lot of wordplay in that song, which is so hard to do in a foreign language. But, yeah, “Our Lady of Pigalle” lives in English, I think.
"The Party Oughta Be Comin’ Soon" (2011)
BEST FIT: This song appeared on the deluxe edition of your 2011 album, Standing on the Rooftop. What’s your special connection with this track?
MADELEINE PEYROUX: Yeah, this is not a song that probably anybody's heard. It never got very much of a response, but I felt very strongly about it at the time, and I still love it now.
I met Allen Toussaint around the time that I was working on this song. I brought it to him and asked if he would help me to finish it, but he said, “It’s basically done,” which I took as getting his blessing on it. So, instead I asked if he would please come and play on the song, and he did, and in doing that he brought something to the song that I didn’t even know was there. It’s perhaps hard to discern exactly what he did, but he brought something quite thematically central to the song in that, basically, he embraced it. One of the interesting things about Allen, as a songwriter, is that he has some songs that are so simple. They’re deceptive in that there’s no trick or secret to them, except that you just have to embrace them for what they are.
Around the time of writing “The Party Oughta Be Comin’ Soon” I was seeing Allen playing every Sunday during a residency at Joe’s Pub in New York City. I think he had a new record out, but he was mostly doing solo renditions of older songs that he’d written. I was just trying to learn from being around him. The idea behind this song was to talk about America, which is something that I’ve written a lot more about since then. If you look at the lyrics, I’m saying Louis Armstrong isn’t smiling anymore, Richard Pryor isn’t laughing. All of these amazing, wonderful things about America that define us are not being celebrated. So when I say party, what I mean is the celebration, the recognition and acknowledgement oughta be coming soon. I’m waiting for this good shit to be happen. For America to turn around and celebrate itself for the right things, for the right people.
I remember when Ray Charles died. Ronald Reagan had died a few days before that and, for me, it completely stole Ray’s thunder. The American media focused all of its time on Reagan. My dad was alive at the time, and he was the kind of person who always had the television on, 24/7, and it was just Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. There were parades for him, and I remember being so upset that there were no marches or parades for a man like Ray Charles. Honestly, I was surprised, because maybe I’d been mistaken about how important he was. Or maybe I was just too much of an escapist myself to realise the truth, which is that America is not with me. The public persona of America has nothing to do with who I am and the way I see the country.
I was living over in Paris at the time, so I hope it doesn’t sound too ignorant when I say I was surprised. You know, it’s an ongoing battle for me, trying to figure out what the heck we think we’re doing in this world if we’re not going to celebrate who we really are. So “The Party Oughta Be Coming Soon” was supposed to a sort of tongue-in-cheek complaint about where America was going.
When I wrote the song in 2010, it was in the earlyish days of Obama’s presidency and that was an exciting time, at first. I’m so glad I got to live through that because it was really an amazing period of time when he was first elected. The air was lighter, in this country. Life was better, for a little while, just because we had some belief that it could be better. I don’t want to come across as emo. I don’t want to just be a complainer. I’d like to say that “The Party Oughta Be Coming Soon” was also supposed to be a bit of a celebration. But maybe a better song would have been clearer and wouldn’t need any explanations.
As well as Allen Toussaint, you had another great Black American musician on this album, Meshell Ndegeocello.
Yeah, that was the first and only time I've worked with Meshell, who is such a great bass player. She’s incredible. I feel like I respond so much to the way that she plays music. I mean, bass is an interesting instrument in and of itself, right? A lot of people say that the bassist basically runs the show, because they have the most effect on the music with the least amount of notes. Meshell’s playing is just so beautiful, and I think her presence on this record was probably, mostly just her being very generous to be there.
See, Meshell is really a solo artist and a songwriter. When she plays with her band, she’ll have another bassist with her so she can put hers down and sing sometimes, and it’s fascinating to watch. As an artist, she’s incredibly versatile. I talked to her about producing a record with me right after we did that project. She was willing, and she’d sent me some amazing songs to learn, but it didn’t work out for us at the time. That’s the thing about when you get to a certain point in your career, you want to work with great people but those people are also formidable artists and a whole world unto themselves. Working at that level is a challenge. I’m always like, “Do I deserve this?”
Recording “The Party Oughta Be Coming Soon” was a real highlight for me, having Meshell, having the great Chris Bruce on guitar, having Charley Drayton, who’s a wonderful drummer that I love. Marc Ribot was on it, too. I’ve known him a long time. I also had Allen Toussaint on piano. It was such a phenomenal band, and we tracked live together, which was really exciting. So, yeah, I’ve chosen this song because making it was absolutely a highlight of my life. Even if it’s not the best song, or even close to the best song ever made, it just means a lot to me.
"We Might as Well Dance" (2018)
BEST FIT: This song comes from your album Anthem, which is where you really got into talking about the state of America in real depth.
MADELEINE PEYROUX: Yeah. I guess it follows in the path of the previous song, as part of my journey in facing America and the American music that has essentially made my life. I think that the next step for that journey was really to find some hope and to find a proactive approach to things instead of being negative.
There was this incredible disappointment when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. I was writing this record, Anthem, both pre- and post-election, with a total of five people in the room. “We Might as Well Dance” came at the very end of the sessions, when it was just David Batteau, Larry Klein and myself. Larry had a basic version of this track sitting around that he had recorded for a different project, and we decided to try and add to it. Working with Larry taught me a lot about record making, when I realised, you know, that anything is possible in the studio. Because he really lives in the studio, whereas I go to a studio like I go to a hotel. I’m only there to get the job done.
“We Might as Well Dance” was a collaboration, mostly in the lyric department, between David and me. David is still one of my favourite professional lyricists. He’s intuitive, but he’s also very skilled. He’ll have bursts of genius every once in a while, but there are also the songs where he’s willing to do the work and look at them, line by line. I think, in the end, that methodical approach can produce the very best songs. You don’t go with your first instinct, necessarily. You can explore what could be wrong with your first instinct, and if you come back to it then that’s what it was meant to be. For me, it’s worth making sure that what you said first is what you really meant to say.
I think the intentions behind songwriting need to be pure in order to make a good song, but the execution of those intentions is a combination of skill in using the tools that you have in language and music and rhythm, together with your ability to find your own voice. It’s a fine balance, to figure out how much of the skill and how much of your voice needs to be in there at any given moment for the message to come across. I feel like my approach to songwriting had finally begun to evolve to the point where, with “We Might as Well Dance”, I noticed that there was some nuance to it that was very important to me.
I definitely belaboured a few lines, here and there. There was a lot of work that went into getting those verses to say what I need to say. I wanted there to be, without being superficial, something redemptive and honest. Something positive, not soul-crushing. In my opinion, the closer we get to being precise about what we want to say, the closer we get to something universal. Something that is timeless. I think that the more specific you are about the moment that you’re in, and the more honest and true you are to the essence of what you’re dealing with, the more it becomes like a synecdoche of everything. It becomes transferable. At least, it seems that way to me.
When I wrote “We Might as Well Dance”, I was trying to find a way to articulate what I was living through in that moment, which was a sort of generalised despair. For me, the experience is not so much that I suffer America, but more that America doesn’t particularly care whether I live or die, no more or less than the average white woman of middle age. I’m not being actively pursued, like people of colour. No one is trying to kill me or deport me. No one’s trying to use me up by making me work for nothing. Nobody’s trying to hurt me or starve me to death. I also happen to be lucky to have my physical health. But, still, when I move through the world in this country and in the American commercial empire, I feel this indifference to my life.
I used to think that this was a kind of nonspecific experience, but then I realised that it was privilege, and that it had been privilege all along. For me, the reason that is so upsetting is not because I’m afraid that privilege will be taken away from me, but because it is just so horrible for everyone who moves through this world without the same privilege. George Carlin used to say that nobody has any god-given rights, and that human rights are just another word for privileges given to us by the government. As we have seen, the government can take those privileges away, because those are fallible human beings.
The last song I’ve chosen is a continuation of everything I’ve just said, because it comes from the same process, for me, of trying to recognise that all human beings are equally precious. We’re equally precious to each other, because we are social beings. We don’t survive alone. If we’re going to survive from one day to the next, and life itself is going to be worth living, then we need to centre that kind of love and respect for each other. Every religion, every spiritual practice, and every philosophy – or at least the best philosophies – is forced to acknowledge at some point that nobody’s life is worth anything is we’re not equally valuable. An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.
I think a lot of people have woken up to a similar realisation in recent years, with everything that has been going on and continues to go on at this very moment in places like Palestine and Sudan.
There are so many tragic, really horrible things happening, and we are perhaps more aware of these things than ever. I think the most unconscionable thing is to be able to do something, anything to help, but to sit back, say nothing and do nothing. And, of course, to be financially profiteering from war is pure sin.
"How I Wish" (2024)
BEST FIT: I was interested to read in the bio for the new album that you regard 2020 as the year you woke up, because, as we’ve just discussed, you’ve been quite tapped into social issues for a long time. So my question is, what did you wake up to that you weren’t already aware of before?
MADELEINE PEYROUX: The immediacy of my failures, I think. To see something and say it’s wrong to yourself might be the first step to civic engagement, but then say it’s wrong to your neighbour or to your family, say it out in the street, write a letter or make a phone call to your representatives. These are all little drops in the bucket by themselves, but if we can join forces and continue to call out things that are wrong, the bucket fills up more quickly.
It’s a long road to understanding how change ever happens, or if it ever happens, frankly. There are a lot of people out there who believe that injustice is taking place but don’t believe that there’s anything that can be done about it. I mentioned George Carlin earlier, who was both an entertainer and a genius commentator, so articulate and funny. Even he, for maybe the last 10 or 20 years of his life, said that he was just going to sit back and watch the circus go on. He was just going to watch and not take part as we all kill ourselves, basically. Of course, when he said that he was saying it in front of an audience of millions of people on television, so he wasn’t actually not taking part. He was just trying to explain how bad things were. The sad thing is that you could probably listen back to most of what he said 20 years ago and it would blow your mind today, how much more obvious things are now.
You probably know that Black Lives Matter started over ten years ago, partly in response to the killing of a young boy named Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, outside of St. Louis. That was in 2013, when Obama was still president. I remember watching the news and feeling that it was an important moment. Then over the years, every few months, there would be another death of a Black man or a horribly young Black boy that would make it into the news, and often the police’s story didn’t add up. I remember hearing about the Black Lives Matter movement and wondered how I might get involved in that, but I never went proactively looking for opportunities because I failed to see what it was that I needed to do.
In 2020, when everything was shut down and I couldn’t tour, I couldn’t go anywhere, I began to see it. When George Floyd was murdered, on May 25, 2020 – after Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor had been killed earlier that year – I was overwhelmed with emotion and the need to make a comment. I do think of that moment as being an awakening, because it no longer seemed to matter what was going on with me that year. This injustice was more important.
For me, as a person who plays American music, I know that, for the most part, the most important American music has been influenced or inspired by, or point-blank created by, Black Americans. Whether it’s early blues, or all the jazz, pop and rock ‘n’ roll that came out of America in the 20th century, so much of it came out of the Black American tradition and the struggle of Black Americans to find a way to be in a world where, as Cornel West put it in a recent lecture, the Pharoah, the enslaver, is on both sides of the Red Sea. The injustice is everywhere. And it’s not like just getting away from the enslavers will make everything okay again. Black people have had to reinvent who they are in the world, and music has been a big part of that.
Was this a hard song to write? How much did you have to work on it?
I worked on that song more than I’ve ever worked on any song in my life. I wrote and rewrote it for several months, although the music was written quite quickly during the weeks after George Floyd’s murder. Melodically and form-wise, the entire song came together basically right away. I tried to change it a little, but [co-writer and longtime collaborator] Jon Herington told me not to. He said, “You did this thing where you move to that bass note and that’s what made it work, so don’t change it,” and I said, “Well, something is wrong and I don’t know what it is, so I have to change something.” He didn’t agree, but I did try to change it and eventually realised that he was right, and that it did actually work.
From then on, I knew the problem had to be in the lyrics, and that I’d have to rewrite them. It took me a while to figure out why it felt wrong, and why it didn’t produce the reaction that I was waiting to see in the faces of the people I sang it to, like my mum. Ideas started coming to me in my sleep, and that’s when I started to realise that you’ve got to get really specific to communicate with other human beings, and you’ve got to say things over and over and over again. That’s why we have all these devices and tricks in songwriting to keep people engaged, to keep them interested. It’s often about giving people something they can understand, that they can hear without working too hard.
In a way, it’s just like what any teacher has to do. There’s a goal in mind, of what you want to be understood. It’s way more interesting to think, ‘Ooh, I get to try to be understood,’ than ‘Ooh, I get to sing this.’ That’s the challenge for a performer, and a good song will be different almost every time you perform it. That’s what I’m hoping anyway, and I do perform this song a lot, at every show now. It’s the kind of song that creates a silent response, but it’s a pregnant silence.
Yeah, it’s one of those songs that people might have to take a beat to really think about and digest it.
Yeah, but I'm proud because I worked really hard on it and I think it's the closest that I could come – on this go around, at least – to saying exactly what I mean. I feel like my epiphany on this album was the realisation that songwriting, for me, is to just try to say what I mean, even just once, because it might be amazing.
Let's Walk is out now via Thirty Tigers Records. Madeleine Peyroux plays The Barbican on 21 July as part of the Summer Jazz Series.
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