What Do You Do When Your Alter Ego Gets Too Big For Its Boots?

Haley Fohr's upcoming Circuit des Yeux tour will mark her first trip to Australia, but not to the Southern Hemisphere. In 2009, she accompanied an Ecuadorian boyfriend back home for New Year's Eve and had a wild experience. "It was the year Michael Jackson died," Fohr recounts. "The way they celebrate New Year's Eve in Ecuador is [to] build these huge fireworks statues of icons who died that year and they burn them in the street. So, there were hundreds of statues of Michael Jackson on fire. It was bizarre and amazing."

"Things in Circuit des Yeux got really heavy, so I wanted to create something really light."

Fohr grew up in the "factory town" of Lafayette, Indiana, yearning to see the world. Both her parents were police officers and she'd go on to study nuclear engineering, but singing was "always [her] favourite thing". Only, her voice - a deep baritone she uses to dramatic effect on Circuit des Yeux's dark, shadowy, experimental records - made pursuing music in a small town "challenging"; Fohr always passed over for "the blonde woman with the pretty soprano" at every musical casting. 

Her first run of Circuit des Yeux LPs — 2008's Symphone, 2009's Sirenum, 2011's Portrait — were made in Indiana ("no one gave a shit," she offers, dryly), but she moved to Chicago and got a job working as an archivist for the Numero Group, making digital transfers from old 1/4-inch tapes. "In some ways, it was a very magical job: listening to studio master reels that hadn't been opened since, like, 1960," she recounts. But, eventually her "problem with authority" led to her growing frustrated working in the music-biz backrooms; so she found a "closet" to live in for $150 a month, and set about making music her bona fide career.

2015's In Plain Speech conjured grand, ambitious soundscapes to match her voice, and then Fohr alighted on a wacky side-project that would unexpectedly transform her life. "Things in Circuit des Yeux got really heavy, so I wanted to create something really light." Dreaming of making "a country record that sounded like Emmylou Harris backed by Suicide", she came up with the "Kill Bill meets Dolly Parton" character of Jackie Lynn, and made a "musical theatre"-styled 2016 LP as her.

Recording and performing as Jackie Lynn, in character, "revitalised" Fohr, inspiring her to make her forthcoming sixth Circuit des Yeux album "the biggest-sounding" thing she's worked on. But, now, she's worried that people are more interested in her side-project than her main thing. "Jackie Lynn was a side-project that was supposed to buy me some time away from Circuit des Yeux, but now there are people who like it more. At my shows, now, people yell out Jackie Lynn songs," says Fohr. "It's made me realise how much I really love Circuit des Yeux, how much I have to do it. My fear is that this other thing snowballs, and I'm caught up doing Jackie Lynn my whole life, and Circuit des Yeux is no more. Circuit des Yeux is so meaningful to me, I have to hold onto it."