Madeleine Peyroux confronts racism in America with “Let’s Walk”

Although Madeleine Peyroux has neither a television nor a radio in her New York home, she still feels inundated by politically explosive news, advertisements for hygiene products and even the loud music of passing cars.

“We are constantly bombarded with so much stuff. I can’t even hide in my own house,” says the jazz-folk singer Rolling Stone.

But Peyroux didn’t let all these stimuli stifle her creativity. Instead, she let them encourage her and lead her to explore some challenging themes, which resulted in her latest album. let’s go. The album is her first full-length in four years and reinforces the jazz style on which she has built her career. Unlike previous works, which included a regular dose of cover songs from Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen, let’s go consists of 100 percent Peyroux.

Peyroux co-wrote all ten songs and had three words as her mantra: truth, justice and love. The songwriter made the phrase her own after hearing activist Cornel West use it as a slogan for his 2024 presidential campaign.

“There’s something very powerful about those three words and portraying yourself as someone who believes in those three words,” she says. “With this record, I don’t want to convince individual people of that for myself, but I want to be able to say something along those lines clearly, namely that I believe in it.”

One of the cornerstones of Peyroux’s beliefs is an end to violence and racism, both of which she addresses in her outstanding album “How I Wish,” a song about the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020.

“There are many different perspectives on the issue of race in America and on our social situation, but I haven’t heard any of the discussions that I think deserve equal time,” she says of the song, in which she approaches with tenderness “every heinous act” in American history “that I was involved in.”

Born in the United States but raised in Paris, Peyroux has a particularly profound view of the cultures of the United States and France, but she refuses to see either culture as superior.

“We are all the same. Some things are worse there and some things are worse here. The quality of life is worse here, but there are more people here. We are more of a third world country than we realize,” she says. “We don’t know ourselves in this country. And many of us refuse to talk about it. I consider myself very ignorant, or at least someone who looks the other way, in the sense that I have not been civically engaged.”

In “Find True Love,” a mental and musical journey to New Orleans, Peyroux challenged herself to look within and face hard truths. “I promise to be open to joy and pain/The only way to live life is to fail and try again,” she sings.

In a statement let’s goPeyroux said the ideas in “Find True Love” allowed her to “imagine a place where I can become a better person.”

And, did she?

“I only find that place when I’m performing,” she admits. “In that fleeting moment that music takes me to, I can really appreciate life. But that song is very dear to my heart. For months, I sang the line ‘Let’s go down to the bayou/and eat, pray, love’ because I didn’t know how else to express that concept.”

She found it in “Truth, Justice and Love” and now proudly wears those words on a T-shirt as she walks through New York.

“Yesterday a guy stopped me on the street,” says Peyroux. “‘Truth, justice and love… I like that,’ he said. And I said, ‘Yes, I like that too.'”