A voice from the past

Perhaps you found yourself marooned in traffic recently, or stranded at some too-hip fete, when over the speakers you heard just a scrap of something haunting: a voice familiar and somewhat forlorn. Not just old, but antique, as if drifting out of mothballs. Bessie maybe? Patsy? Billie? Yes, but not quite. It’s not a cut you know. Maybe something plucked from someone’s vaults. A hidden track? Something lost but found.

Whoever it might be, you can’t quite shake it -- it’s like a stubborn blue mood.

That’s the sort of spell that singer-songwriter Madeleine Peyroux has been casting lately -- making people scratch their heads and play 20 questions with themselves. Her new album, “Careless Love,” is the long-awaited follow-up to her debut, “Dreamland,” which was released in 1996 and sold a surprising 200,000 copies.

Peyroux, 30, is perhaps as well known for her eerie ability to channel Billie Holiday as for her eight-year disappearing act. Lost but found again. “Careless Love” seems to take up naturally where she left off -- Peyroux’s voice still burnished and deeply grooved, brimming with seen-it-all languor. There are old songs and new songs. Early blues, midcentury blues, modern-day blues adorned by guitars and organs and pianos, plucked from the diverse repertoire of Holiday, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and two Smiths -- Bessie and Elliott.

She was in town recently for a one-night gig at the Echo. “Yeah, in the time I’ve been away, you’d think that I had traveled the world and the seven seas,” she says with a chuckle, sitting in the verdant courtyard of a Santa Monica cafe, a quick stroll from her motel and a few blocks more from where she recorded “Careless Love.” “Was I here? This doesn’t feel like where I was. It’s funny how L.A. does that do you.”

Peyroux indeed seems to occupy some indistinct territory -- out of place and time. She was born in Athens, Ga., grew up in Brooklyn and relocated to the Paris suburbs with her mother after her parents divorced. Paris proper, says Peyroux, “was all it was cracked up to be.”

She took up with a group of itinerant musicians, the Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band, who toured the continent and overseas. “There is this freedom of being able to choose what you want to do and when,” she says, cutting into a lemon-sugar crepe. “There is such a wonderful spirit involved in the idea of being free like that....”

They traveled year-round, sleeping on friends’ cold floors and hard sofas. But, she says, “by the time I was 18 I was done.” Her life quickly turned from picaresque adventure to fairy tale when a record producer, Yves Beauvais, heard her on the bandstand at a New York club. Beauvais tailed Peyroux for years with recording offers. “He visited me in France. I’d say no. And then he’d call again.”

The singer was intent on something else. “I wanted to pursue things of more of a literary nature,” she says, her speaking voice much like her singing voice, tart and sweet and rubbed raw in some places. “Finally, I got to the point where I didn’t see why not.”

Produced by Beauvais and Greg Cohen, “Dreamland,” on Atlantic Records, was a sultry, sepia-toned set of songs that gave listeners pause -- it was a grab-bag mix of styles and moods merging originals with nostalgia. Peyroux made a splash and found herself on bills with an eclectic array of performers, from Sarah McLachlan to Cape Verde diva Cesaria Evora.

Fresh on a scene that was then without a Norah Jones, she was hailed as “unpretentious,” “bewitching” and “original”: “[Her] compositions ... work well as blank canvases for the chiaroscuro of her voice,” wrote Christopher John Farley in Time magazine after “Dreamland’s” release. “Peyroux’s voice tells the listener that her lovesickness is not the first case, or the last.”

But all of it carried a weight that she was unprepared for. Her voice was taxed, and so was her spirit, by the grind and the expectations. A doctor found a cyst on her vocal cords and she had surgery in 1999, giving her a formal excuse to pause and embark on a different journey -- inward.

“It’s when you don’t know why you’re doing something that it becomes an issue,” she says.

Peyroux took the time to reassess. “I spent a lot of time with family. I spent a whole year investigating the possibility of being religious.”

That time away gave her breathing space, literally. She’s a subtle interpreter, and those who may be skimming the surface will get to the top layer of what she is: an aural travel journal with jottings from every corner of emotion -- wistfulness, longing, joy, hope.

Moving to a smaller record label, Rounder, might have reduced her sales potential (“Careless Love” has sold a modest 26,000, though that puts it in the top 5 on the Billboard Jazz Chart), but it also allowed for a sense of intimacy on the record.

As for producer Larry Klein, a former husband and longtime collaborator of Joni Mitchell, “He was just really into it. He’d been working with singer-songwriters -- female singer-songwriters -- for a very long time, so he knows what works, the whole stylistic science for how to support the singer, especially in jazz, where there is more communication going.”

Cloudy-day contemplations

For Klein it was completely simpatico. “She sings with no artifice. No ambition is connoted in her voice. No wanting to be anything other than what she is. Just singing from a pure place. My job was to put it into a landscape that supports it. To create depth and pathos but not distract from what she’s doing.”

It’s a set of cloudy-day contemplations, some that swing, some that brood. There’s a touch of French musette, with that happy-go-lucky Django Reinhardt lope; there are honky-tonk laments in which Peyroux’s voice feels as if it were illuminated by the aural equivalent of a key light.

While her vocals toss in some of the sass of Bessie Smith and a touch of Patsy Cline, comparisons to Holiday are inescapable, particularly in the way she opens vowels and exhales a note as if she were channeling it through the mouthpiece of a horn.

Holiday was not just her muse but her model. “I felt not only akin to but encouraged by the music Billie Holiday made as a person. But it’s not the tragic side of Billie Holiday. I think it is the fact that she overcomes tragedy.... Very subtly. Here you are falling in love with this whole show.... There’s rhythm and style and romance and ambience and familiarity ... and it’s not until later on that you realize that you just got a lesson in character. For that reason, I stuck with her.”

Peyroux is more than a bit of an anachronism -- she’s fond of old voices, old arrangements, vintage and unlikely instruments such as ukuleles, accordions. But she’s attracted to modern music that has a sense of history and context.

“There’s no story otherwise. The more ironic and layered the music is, the more true to life. Because we’re always experiencing so many emotions at once,” says Peyroux, cutting into the last quarter of her crepe, enjoying the burst of the bitter and the sweet. “Things are never very clean and clear. Especially things that are important to us. And those are the things that need attention. And that comes from necessity.”