Basia Bulat

BASIA'S PALACE

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Basia Bulat doesn’t live in a château. The property at the heart of the songwriter’s new studio album is at once her cozy apartment, her ramshackle jam-space, and the inside of her head. It’s a place festooned with love and memory, dream and hope, bad wiring, cat fur, and groovy West German wallpaper. Basia’s Palace is a paradise that comes alive in the wee hours of the night–a time that’s suited to video games and dusty old records, when you sit in all that richness and take in all the mess we inherit.

Basia’s Palace got its start in 2022, as Bulat surfaced from the first time in years that she had not been obliged to keep moving. A new home, a new family, a pause: the singer was finally finding time to be alone and hear her own thoughts, thinking about old stories, booting up a classic Nintendo to play Dragon Warrior 4. It brought to mind a story Bulat had heard about Leonard Cohen, how he used to do his best writing at three or four a.m. before his kids woke up, when he’d sit and toy with his Casio’s presets. Now it was Bulat sneaking down to play RPGs (Role Playing Games) or to make music on her MacBook, listening for the spirit-world at a time when the veil felt thinnest. The songs she was creating didn’t feel like anything she had recorded before—MIDI soundscapes that floated and gleamed, like hidden levels above (or below) the action. And as she looked around at the relics and heirlooms of life, she found herself thinking about her memories differently, too, as if there were photographs concealed in these frames of her childhood, and new ways of understanding all that happened in her life across the years.

The album that emerged from all this—that started in dawn-kissed synth instrumentals, lyrics scribbled down in a Hayao Miyazaki notebook—is the softest and most searching of her career. Co-produced by frequent collaborator Mark Lawson (who worked with her on Tall Tall Shadow and The Garden), and mixed by legendary engineer Tucker Martine (Beth Orton, Neko Case, The National), Basia’s Palace is like a time-travel score, with the singer-songwriter akin to Chrono Trigger’s intrepid adventurer, going back into the past to shape the events of the future. Across the album, Bulat moves through a dreamworld of whispers, synths, and early Eurovision tunes–and her great uncle’s gauzy Maryla Rodowicz and Marek Grechuta LPs. For years she’d been releasing records where live performance came first: real people playing real instruments, often live to tape. This culminated with 2022’s The Garden, where Bulat reinterpreted some of her best-loved songs with help from a string quartet. Having done that, she says, “I felt like I could do anything I wanted.” Could she still express the essence of a song without using guitar or piano? Composing with MIDI, creating the structure of a song from scratch, could she get the same feeling across?

The answer is a shimmering yes. It’s clear from the opening track, “My Angel,” where mystery and romance mingle over squelchy synths, staggering drum machine, and a soaring string arrangement by Grammy-nominated Drew Jurecka (Dua Lipa, Metric, Alvvays). “Spirit” named for an Ensoniq preset, is a swooning message from Bulat’s teenage self, whereas “Baby” makes an elegant dance number out of an all-too-familiar predicament: “Baby, baby, baby,” she sings, “I don’t learn!” “Laughter” takes a quiet garden scene and sees it build to a deafening tribute to the sublime. At times these songs evoke Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s “Bonnie and Clyde” or Charles Aznavour’s “Emmenez-Moi” and at others it’s the silicon-shiny sweetness of The Cardigans’ “Lovefool” or Air’s "Moon Safari": a little bit of yesterday, a little bit of today, and a generous dash of tomorrow.

“Disco Polo” is a track Bulat’s been threatening to make for years: a folk-song named for a genre of Polish dance music that was beloved by her late father. “I wanted to write a song about the two sides of what was given to me” she says. Bulat’s classically trained mother brought her piano and guitar and Polish folk carols; her dad threw on cheesy tunes like “Blondyneczka (Little Blondie),” which Bulat quotes here. While it pained her as a girl, disco polo’s become a kind of portal now, pointing to the parts of her father she never got to know. “This song became an ode to the stories, both funny and sad, that I’d overhear being told around the dining table by my family long after I was supposed to be asleep.”

Basia’s Palace ends with “Curtain Call”. It’s a ballad for that moment at the end of every show when the applause rises and the masks all fall away. Curtain calls are endings but also rebirths, and Bulat sings this finale with her whole chest, acknowledging how alive she feels when she’s sung her secrets and shown her face. “When the lights go on again / My love, forgive me for it all,” she sings. “… [I] let myself be loved again / with every line of every single song.”

That is the truest location of Basia’s Palace. Not just the Mile End jam-space where she recorded much of this LP; not just her home, her family, or the loose silhouette of her spirit or her mind. But the moment itself—the one that happens on stage, or in the instant of creation—when a song leaves Basia’s heart and leaps onto her lips. It’s a palace she can take with her, so long as she doesn’t forget.

Catch a glimpse of it here, before the threshold blinks closed.