Annette Peacock’s “I’m the One” Is an Avant-Funk Affirmation for the Ages

There’s more action and ambition in the first seconds of Annette Peacock’s “I’m the One” than in many entire pop albums. A burst of crescendoing free-jazz orchestration sweeps us up to a realm between MGM grandeur and Sun Ra’s interstellar swing, as if sucking out the song’s gravity so it can float. Each millisecond of this seven-minute psychedelic pop prophecy is an opportunity for Peacock—intrepid jazz composer, Moog pioneer, vocal acrobat, mother—to go beyond. To start, the instrumentation is spacious, inquisitive: a light-touch melange of resonant reeds and buzzing synths and unbound heartbeat drumming. We are journeying under the direction of a woman turning herself inside-out, suspending us in the sky, crashing us back down expanded, at which point, nearly two minutes in, a drum break clears the air. Peacock then steps up to the mic, declaring:

I’m the one
I’m the one
You don’t have to look any further
I’m the one

Instantly, and without question, you believe her.

A teenaged tourmate of free-jazz legend Albert Ayler, acolyte of ecstasy oracle Timothy Leary, and chief architect of the wintry ballads that helped define the sound of vanguard jazz label ECM, Annette Peacock makes the classification of “original” itself feel trite. Regarding her brief experiment with psychedelics at Leary’s infamous Millbrook mansion in the early 1960s, Peacock once joked, “I only ever took one LSD trip and… I don’t think I ever really came back from it! I’ve been fighting my way back into reality ever since.” Lucky for us, that search has gone on pretty long.

Decades before “post-genre” was a part of the lexicon of pop, Peacock simply called herself a freeform songwriter, who in the mid-’60s was mostly composing for her husband, the jazz pianist Paul Bley. “It was an aggressively masculine texture assaulting you,” she once said of the ’60s jazz avant-garde. “It seemed like I had to carve space out… to slow things down. So I started writing ballads, with two notes basically, just intervals. No chords. Very minimal… an architecture.”

A 27-year-old Peacock was living in her native New York when she had an epiphany encountering Wendy Carlos’ 1968 early-electronic curio Switched-On Bach, after which she and Bley swiftly tracked down Bob Moog himself to procure a prototype of one of his synthesizers. They dragged the clunky machine onto the hallowed stage of The Village Vanguard in 1969—and were never invited back. Originally recording as the Bley-Peacock Synthesizer Show, Peacock was the first documented artist to even think to use synth circuitry to augment her vocals. 

Early evidence of her delightfully hardcore distortions endures on the 1971 album she later reissued as I Belong to a World That’s Destroying Itself. “It was just a case of working out how to get in there and control the oscillators and the envelopes and then how to control the sound once you had made contact with it,” she said in 2014, explaining her groundbreaking innovation with the nonchalance of a seasoned mechanic. Her initial recordings are those of a woman inventing the shapeshifting sound of modern music from scratch. A live take of “I’m the One” from 1969 appeared on I Belong to a World That’s Destroying Itself, but Peacock naturally had to revive this masterpiece for her major-label entry.

That sleeker solo debut came with 1972’s I’m the One, on RCA Records, who had recently signed David Bowie and Lou Reed, too. The album’s titular opening track became her signature song, a visionary ballad that not only makes trailblazing use of the Moog but synthesizes jazz, rock, soul, funk, and singer-songwriter smarts into a triptych of pure passion, a torch song on an acid trip.

She sounds on the edge of an edge the whole time. You have no idea where the song is going or how it will get there. Most striking is how swiftly and coherently it 180s from head to heart, cerebral to corporeal—from improvisatory energy to a deep in-the-pocket, full-body groove, from the shrieks of “ONE! ONE! ONE!” that distill her campaign into single punches to the coasting release of a true virtuoso. When her elegant voice contorts in accordance with these emergent electronic oddities, the whole experiment just dares you to smile. It’s a jazz-funk fusion anticipating Herbie Hancock’s iconoclastic crossover Head Hunters by a year and a half but far too far-out for the charts.

Midway through “I’m the One” is a soul breakdown of tectonic proportions. “I looked all over/Put my head on somebody’s shoulder/And there is no one else,” Peacock sings in her cool, seductive alto. She knows exactly what she wants and boldly makes the case with every screeching device at her disposal. Lyrically, “I’m the One” might sound like a vulnerable romantic proposal, a visceral bid to be chosen, but in every note it’s also more, a testament to complete confidence in the self: “Can’t you feel it in my voice?/Can you feel it in my skin?” Peacock’s red energy, like James Brown on Saturn, maxes out into screams and grunts within galactic synth rips, as if it’s trying to ignite words and transcend form—as if using the first new instrument of consequence in over a century should obviously produce a sound beyond comprehension.

All that got Bowie’s attention. In the throes of pondering life on Mars, with his Ziggy era looming, he heard “I’m the One” loud and clear, and quickly grew obsessed with his adventurous RCA labelmate. But Peacock declined the Starman’s offers to collaborate on Diamond Dogs or open a tour; she knew the pop stage was a dunk tank for an avant-gardist like herself. One night, Bowie requested her presence at his hotel. When she arrived, he had a question: Could you put me in touch with your piano player? She obliged. Mike Garson went on to become one of rock’s most in-demand accompanists, recording with the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, and St. Vincent, and remained Bowie’s most consistent sideman until the icon’s 2016 death.

I’m the One did lead Peacock to sign with Bowie’s management for a spell—she used their $300-per-week stipend to install astroturf and a sauna into her Soho loft—but the partnership didn’t last. Now 84 and living in Woodstock, New York, Peacock has, since 1982’s Sky-skating, self-released most of her idiosyncratic records on her own label, Ironic.

The world is still catching up to Annette Peacock. In 2024, “I’m the One” feels to me more spiritually akin to Patti Smith or Nina Simone than any of Peacock’s free-jazz contemporaries. A foundational influence on current art-pop heroes like Jenny Hval and Circuit des Yeux, Peacock’s physicality and audacity also seem to predict the kind of artist Fiona Apple has become, as if her Fetch the Bolt Cutters opener “I Want You to Love Me” were a distant cousin of “I’m the One.” Peacock’s synth innovations are proto-Kate Bush, her jazz-pop poetry firmly proto-Joni Mitchell. But such comparisons feel beside the point when faced with this self-fulfilling adventure of a jam in its totality. The formal fearlessness and raw honesty of “I’m the One” are what make it eternal. It is a sterling example of what is possible when a woman retains full agency of her sound and artistry on atomic and structural levels—a relatively new idea in the early ’70s.

“I’m the One” doesn’t end so much as move on so quickly you’re left wondering what happened. Of course, we all know that if you have to work this hard to persuade someone that you’re “the one,” romantically-speaking anyway, you are likely doomed. But a maverick composition like “I’m the One” never seemed out to “convince” anyone of anything, or to satisfy any vision but its own, whether its genius is understood or not. This is why the pageantry and pleasure and humor and strength of “I’m the One” cohere into such a timeless balm when you might find your misread heart in need of reconstitution. A playful affirmation that pushed a new musical frontier, “I’m the One” is an invitation to step through the looking glass and steel the most singularly strange parts of yourself, leaving with armor.

Below is a playlist highlighting more of Annette Peacock’s most fascinating work, available to paying subscribers only.