Dusted's Destined series kicks off with Bachelorette

You’ve undoubtedly heard me whining about how nobody will let me cover breaking bands anymore (if you haven’t and want to, drop me an email, it’s one of my favorite things to complain about)…

In any case, Dusted does a feature early every year called “Destined” where we focus on 10 emerging artists. Last year we had Hercules and Love Affair and Fuck Buttons and I forget who else, but it’s worth watching. Anyway, this the first time I’ve ever been asked to participate. I got Bachelorette, a New Zealand-based singer who sits somewhere between Animal Collective and Joanna Newsom. She’ll have a new album out on Drag City this year.

Here’s a bit of my piece:

You get the sense that Annabel Alpers, the New Zealand electro-pop artist known as Bachelorette, doesn’t much care for talking about her delicate, multilayered songs. She’d rather not theorize about the nexus between synthetic tools and raw human feeling. She has no clear idea of where she’s heading musically, after My Electric Family, the album she’s mixing right now in New Zealand for release on Drag City this spring. She’s perfectly happy to let that question resolve itself later, when she gets back to her computer to write new songs.

“I don’t have a particular direction that I want to go in at all,” she says, by phone, early on New Year’s Eve 2008. “Every time I work on a song or an album, I’m always surprised with how it comes out, because it’s not how I started out with it.”

Yet you can’t mistake this flexibility, this open-ness to the vagaries of inspiration, this refusal to articulate an artistic philosophy, for lack of purpose. “Sometimes I think the reason why I play music is that it’s the way that I’m able to communicate to people,” she says. “It’s better than the way that I’m capable of communicating just through talking or the conventional kinds of communication that other people are satisfied with. That doesn’t satisfy me. So, it’s a way of trying to be satisfied with communicating with other people.”

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