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<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tOn Michelangelo Dying, the fearless Welsh artist reconciles aloneness and being alone.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tPhotos by H. Hawkline \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBanal or not, there\u2019s something about autumn that just makes you want to feel artful grief. For those of us looking to usher in the creeping cold weather with some dusky heartbreak and an immaculate musical backdrop, Cate Le Bon is here to accommodate.\u00a0\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The courtly Welsh songwriter (born Cate Timothy) is back after three years with a new album and a looming tour. Over the years, her catalog has slowly revealed itself to be a long and intricate composite of her life up to this point, with each record acting as a notch in a performative trajectory marked with dedication and internalized longing. Much like the undoing of the relationship that fuelled her most recent LP, Michelangelo Dying, Le Bon has never been afraid of letting the listener in, into the thick of all the frailty, fallacy and felicity of being alive.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis record became a vehicle to log this heartache and painful period of my life. It served a healing purpose. The medium of music is a very healing and reassuring medium for me. There\u2019s a restfulness that comes at the end of it,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was sometime around 2016\u2019s Crab Day that Le Bon began moving further and further away from the indie and folk modalities of her youth and more into avant-pop and a baroque flux. Her arrangements began blossoming into highly patient odes, rich in musical detail and utterly her own. Understandably, the process of writing these smoggy, layered, beatific pieces altered Le Bon\u2019s approach to even beginning to compose.<\/p>\n
\u201cBass guitar has become one of my favourite instruments. It changes the vantage point for writing songs. It changes everything. It helped get what I was feeling into a shape that made sense,\u201d she muses.<\/p>\n
Increasingly so, in order to extract these tiered, subtle songs from such racked lived moments, Le Bon has been seeking intensely private locales, and her yen for remoteness and a sustained quietude brought her to a very particular place. Michelangelo Dying was recorded in and around the desert of Joshua Tree in Southern California. It\u2019s an arid and remote place, a desolate landscape of rugged, uncompromising nature. To many fans, Le Bon\u2019s fascination with Joshua Tree as a place to commune with her material perhaps might seem odd. But when I mention that to plenty of people, the Mojave is a place most often associated with generator metal parties, strange off-the-grid cults, Burning Man, and a patently American brutality, she interjects to offer instead what her own relationship with Joshua Tree has been.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, it can be all of these things. But for me, it was a place of solace,\u201d she says. \u201cA place of feeling insignificant in a reassuring way. Of feeling like you\u2019re every age all at once. It\u2019s a special place. When you aren\u2019t there, it\u2019s hard to believe it exists.\u201d<\/p>\n
As we talk, Le Bon, more and more, projects as a reflective, private person, full of stately dignity. There\u2019s a feeling there that suggests\u00a0 she\u2019s someone who treats promotional interviews as something that is an expected process, perhaps even a vital one in some regard, but ultimately, a needless one (not an altogether incorrect conclusion). She takes measured breaks between thoughts to calibrate her wording, lapses into tacit responses and, on occasion, gives subtle cues for me to move on.<\/p>\n
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There are two moments in our talk, though, when she comes fully alight, speaking eagerly and without modulation. The first is when I bring up her recently rescued dog, Mila, who has brought scruffy joy and a grounding element into her life. The second is when I ask about John Cale.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI can talk about John Cale for days! What do you want to know?!\u201d she says brightly, her otherwise steadfast lilt rising a pitch for the first time since we started chatting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cale\u2019s name isn\u2019t one that needs an introduction to even casual music listeners. From his early days with the Velvet Underground, producing Patti Smith\u2019s Horses and Nico\u2019s The Marble Index, to his brilliant solo compositions, collaborations with Brian Eno and Terry Riley, and arthouse film scores, he has carved out a vast body of work, doing more to expand and deconstruct sound than perhaps any other living musician.<\/p>\n
Over the years, Cale has chosen his cohorts with a knowing, curating hand, and his unostentatious yet magnetic appearance on Michelangelo Dying\u2019s penultimate track is a huge feather in Le Bon\u2019s proverbial hat, as it would be for basically any artist. For all the dense, unabashed beauty she puts on display on her album, there are some gauzily glam, erotically paranoid aspects of Michelangelo Dying that channel one of Cale\u2019s most underrated records, 1975\u2019s Slow Dazzle.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe has a vision and that\u2019s what he is loyal to, and because of that, he exists in a space that his own,\u201d Le Bon says with a tender reverence, humbly neglecting to mention her own ascension\u00a0 into a growing body of production work that has brought artists like Deerhunter and St. Vincent into her orbit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So there we have Cate Le Bon, now nearing her second decade of recording albums that palpitate with graceful independence and a focused vision. With a keen and convergent hand, Le Bon has assembled yet another collection of songs that are as adept at teasing the brain as they are at rattling the heart. And much like the painstaking work that goes into writing something like Michelangelo, listening to it is no casual moment, but rather a ritual. For Le Bon, at any rate, her art has seemingly long since become a backbone of life itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of getting older and continuing to create,\u201d she says. \u201cYou learn to untether yourself from things that don\u2019t matter. You become more authentic. I don\u2019t want to compromise that. I love music and I want to take care of my relationship with it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Michelangelo Dying, the fearless Welsh artist reconciles aloneness and being alone. Photos by H. Hawkline Banal or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-40016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}