MADELEINE PEYROUX

Madeleine Peyroux doesn’t simply interpret songs, she possesses them…and vice versa. Peyroux is either an old soul or was “born with it” (depending on one’s theory about the flashpoint of artistry); that became apparent in 1996, with the release of her debut album, Dreamland, a remarkably knowing work in which the then-22-year-old singer brought commensurate insightfulness to material associated with Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Patsy Cline. Her decision to cover Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” reflected the decade that the Georgia-born Peyroux had spent living in Paris, from ages 13 to 22. In the twelve years since then, she has brought a wealth of life experience to her natural affinities, first manifested on the long-in-coming sophomore album Careless Love and brought to fruition on Peyroux’s new album Half the Perfect World.

“This record is different from Careless Love in the sense that there’s aunison of joy on it,” Peyroux says of the new album. “It’s pushing certain boundaries for me.”

Half the Perfect World is an album in which time stands still. It is filled with performances in which the spaces between the sounds are as crucial to the effect as the sounds themselves. As Peyroux puts it, “Silence is not just an absence of sound.” Producer Larry Klein echoes this sentiment in discussing Peyroux’s particular gift: “She gets at this almost indescribable, ineffable kind of poetry. You see it in Picasso’s work; you hear it in Miles’ playing. I’d say 90 percent of what she does is implied.”

Connoisseurs of eloquent, understated delivery now have a core artist in Madeleine Peyroux, and while Half the Perfect World provides dramatic evidence of her rarefied power of suggestion, it’s also hard to avoid the impression that this album is merely the tip of the iceberg.