Sometimes getting lost is the best way to find your way home.
Madeleine Peyroux is regarded as one of the finest jazz singer-songwriters of her generation. She came of age in the 1990s, but so much about her feels from another era entirely. From the first moment you hear her sing, you know there’s something extraordinary happening.
Her sound is both unmistakably her own and deeply evocative of the classic voices she grew up with — Billie Holiday, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong. And like her music, her personal story could be a chapter out of an old novel.
I’d long heard that Madeleine spent her teenage years in Paris, singing on the streets, finding her voice as a busker. So in 2015, when I had the chance to hear her story firsthand at a café in Montmartre, I took it — and I documented it for my Third Story Podcast.
We sat outside as the sun began to set, upgraded our coffee for a bottle of wine, and Madeleine began to recall her journey.
“We moved to a suburb… then to an international high school. I was about to get kicked out, so they sent me to boarding school in England — and I ran away from that. I caused all kinds of hell for my mom. So in January of 1990… I moved to Paris. I was 15.”
She may have felt lost, but Paris was where she found herself. Armed with a guitar her mother had given her, she discovered a new world in performing.
“I had songbooks, a few records I loved… Sometimes I’d sit in the Metro and practice, and one day somebody threw me a coin. I was like — what is that? And then when we moved to Paris, street musicians were everywhere. And that was the end of that… or the beginning.”
Her parents’ record collection — Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong — turned out to be an unexpected inheritance.
“That’s kind of why it was easy to jump into playing in the street. A lot of the musicians here were playing that kind of music.”
And she discovered something else on those boulevards: her age didn’t matter.
“In that atmosphere, teenagers being out on the street isn’t surprising. Some people welcome you. There’s not a lot of ageism out there — and nobody’s trying to make a career or a big statement.”
Try or not, Madeleine Peyroux’s career has made a profound statement. And it all started with a runaway teenager who picked up a guitar in Paris.
She is currently on tour supporting her latest album Let’s Walk.
Hear my full conversation with Madeleine at that Paris café.
