Cate Le Bon's Installation of Healing

I fell madly and unmistakably in love with Cate Le Bon the day after Christmas in 2019, where a world about to freeze over for our foreseeable future first froze for only a few days in downtown Manhattan, as it does every year when the locals sleep in and the tourists bunch together in Midtown. I’d already heard and enjoyed Crab Day, her record released three years prior, from which I’d scrounged up hints of that love in the loaded, hammering repetition of a track like “What’s Not Mine.” Yet, it was a solo walk through a ghost town of a city listening to that year’s Reward that made me fall hard—an abstract strain of art-pop so thoughtfully constructed, with a distinct strangeness so deeply baked into it that you’re convinced it’s a sound this woman’s voice and guitar simply can’t help but make. I didn’t know that it was the record where Le Bon, in her own estimation, felt she had finally found her voice in her writing and production, evoking brutality and tenderness unspoken even in the record’s sleekest moments. I only fell deeper with the arid emotionality of 2022’s Pompeii, where walls of manipulated saxophones, played by her longtime collaborator Euan Hinshelwood, could be sent tumbling by an economical aside like, “I’m not cold by nature / This could bring me to my knees,” as we all sat alone with no concrete way to cope with our isolation.

Despite the overwhelming sensation her work held for me, Cate Le Bon insists she does not know how to write a love song. In the aftermath of a major breakup and a move back to her home country of Wales from California, as well as the onset of debilitating physical ailments, she insisted she didn’t want to write about the personal tumult—but found it chasing her between studios and over borders anyway, forcing her to face the heartbreak head on despite her general impulse to express emotion obliquely. The resulting record, Michelangelo Dying, contains a similar musical palette to its predecessor, but sprawls more freely, as if grandiosity is the only cure. What might be usually perceived as a sense of remoteness in her writing bubbles over into a stirring plainspokenness she had to force herself to choke up—as if the heaviness was too much to keep to herself, seeping out in the thickness of her voice.

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“I always find things that are abstract or absurd to actually be more evocative, in a way, because they can hold lots of different meanings at any moment,” Le Bon says from her home in Wales, having just walked her dog before settling in for a day of press. She speaks elliptically and softly on the phone, understandably finding it difficult to describe the intuitive process of creation, which fits with her approach to the subject matter on the record. “Things that are absolute or declarations are quite two-dimensional in a sense. For me, it’s not a case of writing lyrics and fitting them to music. Both things emerge at the same time, so there is meaning in the melody or emotional meaning that informs the lyrics in whatever is happening musically with the arrangement.”

Given the weight of expression the arrangements on Michelangelo Dying hold—leaving the lyrical imagery cryptically potent—Le Bon also finds it difficult to explain, in broader strokes, how the record finally emerged in its finished state. “It’s hard to describe emotion sometimes, and it’s hard to put certain things into words, but as long as something feels real…” she starts, then interrupts herself. “There’s lots of moments where I don’t really understand what I’m singing about, but I know it’s real. Then I’ll come back to it at a later date, when I’m re-learning a song to sing it live, and I realize that I know what it means now. I know what that feeling was or what that sentiment was. They’re almost like letters from the past to your future self—trusting that a sentiment is real, even if you’re not fully aware of why it’s real in the moment.”

When she says this, she’s almost directly quoting a line from the album track “Ride,” a towering ballad featuring a guest vocal from the legendary John Cale: “I don’t see it like I used to / That’s not true, but it’s real.” Perhaps more so than any of her previous work, Le Bon encodes her “real” experience of excavating her identity into a subjective mythology for her to decode later, creating something “biographical in an abstract way,” in her view. The resulting work is maybe her most dense collection of songs to date—a record that will take multiple spins to hack into the breadth of it, purposely created to hold a thought or feeling without casting those things in concrete. By running away from the album she eventually realized she needed to make, she eventually found herself meticulously working through numerous iterations of each song, creating intricate tracks that wear the weight of the history they document.

“I don’t know how to write a record about heartache, I’d never done it before,” she admits. “I guess I thought maybe it was something that you write after the fact, once you’ve healed. I bought myself this drum machine that I thought was going to help me write a record that was more angular, but I suppose I was trying to not write the record that I ended up writing. I think that I realized I couldn’t sidestep this, it’s just something that I needed to write. Then, I just rolled up my sleeves and looked at it directly in the eye.”

With the help of co-producer and past collaborator Samur Khouja, who Le Bon calls “great at giving space and egging me on without saying something or doing something that interrupts or deflects,” she jumped from Cardiff to London to the Californian desert to get a hold of what these songs should sound like, eventually finding a natural evolution of the sonic texture they’d locked into Pompeii—flirting with airy sophisti-pop at certain turns, and relying on more visceral, percussive instrumentation at others.

“Pompeii was just me and Samur in a room for months, working,” she notes, recalling the how the isolation of the time informed the level of fear or detachment evident in that project, “and it was the first record that I played everything on, apart from the drums and the saxophone.” Just as she was coming into her own as a producer for other artist’s work, the process trained her ear into being able to work and re-work song arrangements, pinpointing what each one needed to be molded into: “It was a pandemic, so we were all locked up and losing our minds. We had time to be intricate with things.” She remembers becoming fascinated by “the manipulation of the saxophone sound and uncoupling it from traditional saxophone playing, which isn’t new territory, but felt like an emotional synth to me.”

This investment in her “emotional synth” finds itself deftly deployed across Michelangelo Dying’s tracklist, adding extra dimension to the widescreen grandiosity of a life thrown into disarray. Though she’s worked seemingly nonstop in a producer capacity with everyone from beloved, storied bands like Wilco or indie darlings Horsegirl (“I want to really listen to them and want them to sound as much like them as possible, and I think that comes from listening and being porous,” she says of her producer-for-hire process), there is a distinct maximalism to her work that she doesn’t project onto any of that other work—a language that develops and makes the sound of wrestling with an impossible situation, an amorphous shape that sounds how the emotion feels. It’s a record of questions lined up, back to back, with no answers to offer, buried beneath layers of pedal effects. These things require work to excavate.

Yet, there are moments that attempt to seek some form of clarity, even if they come up empty-handed. First single “Heaven Is No Feeling” recalls a breezy, synth-driven spin on an Avalon-era Roxy Music hit, but emerges sounding wounded as the effort it takes to make the noise of Le Bon’s “emotional synth” matches her fumbling for the correct language to encapsulate the slow, painful breakup and why it has to happen: “What now? The night? / It all ends / And you smoke our love / And you smoke it in silence.” Where this relies on a half-cocked groove to drive the line of questioning along, “Is it Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” almost seems to relish the slow drag of the decaying relationship, emerging as an epic poem of self-loathing that punctures deeper with each subsequent passage. “Dig deep are you dumb or devout,” she pleads over a wailing wall of sound, “I try to figure it out / Everyone will lose / I spill over.” In that couplet, Le Bon reveals the record’s dilemma: the desire to steer herself away from the extremity of her feelings, only to find she must dig for the salve she might discover in the situation’s many complicated wrinkles.

A track like “Mother of Riches,” too, seems to revel in the push and pull of self that happens when someone who served as a vital limb has been severed, letting one synth (or is it a horn?) note bent sideways hammer along to serve as a beat before the chorus appears to almost shatter and melt into crystalline shards, loosening up as she loses herself in the darkness: “It’s all you know / How to let yourself fold / It’s in your love / How you let yourself fold into nothing.” Le Bon’s voice does its equal share of revealing where words try to obscure, letting her bold, gorgeously misshapen alto serve as a mourning call for her sense of self. “I dreamed you helpless in your arms,” she sings between the skipping bars of “Pieces of My Heart,” “I bruised out of reach / And I pledged my love to America, then I ran so far.”

“It was happening in real time,” she reflects, recalling the recording process and trying to find what the breakup sounded like while she was still in the throes of it, “and it was almost a strange diary of sorts—looking heartache in the eye and trying to feel everything so that I could heal and move on from it. I suppose there’s lots of moments where I thought I was singing to someone and I was actually singing to myself. It was quite a fractured, frantic, emotional period of trying to document and experience and heal from something. I have a much quieter mind looking at it now.”

She also recalls a myriad of health issues she experienced while writing—including breaking out into full-body hives and dealing with back pain—and how they forced her to come to grips with things she hadn’t been facing head on amidst the arduous process of working to find herself again. This period is most clearly documented on “Body As a River,” the album’s starkest, most percussive track: “I read what I write / And it’s never without shame / My body as a river / A river running dry / And I’m sick all the time.” She describes it as the track that went through the most changes during the recording process, and you can hear those seams in the best possible way. Yet, the final version stands uniform with the tracklist’s overflow through its restlessness, even while singing about scarcity.

Given the sensitivity around the album’s inspiration, as well as her own hesitance to put into words what so clearly affected her on an excruciatingly physical level, Le Bon mentions very few direct influences own the album, continuously recalling an attempt to channel purely from her situation instead of referencing a solid point of inspiration. Yet, one thing she refers back to during our conversation is an art installation titled “Recently Discovered Ruins of a Dream” by Tunisian-American artist Colette Lumiere. The piece in question initially featured Lumiere herself lounging in the center of a room draped in bunched-up fabric and decked out with mirrors—though later displays of the work have featured a sculpture of Lumiere lounging in the artist’s place. Le Bon was taken by how it depicted the artist at rest after the exhaustive act of creation.

“There’s this feeling in it that I don’t think I really understood as I was making the record,” she explains, “but after you’ve done the work of staring yourself down and meeting yourself over and over, you know that there is this rest and this nourishment that comes after it. I’m probably putting a lot of my own experience into making the record of this love that was very painful and ruined me in many ways. But there is this sense that with anything you experience in life, you’re making decisions and you’re meeting yourself over and over. There is the work of healing in that installation, with a woman who’s been able to put things down, who’s been able to look at herself in the mirror in that room and is able to rest. It’s still a really powerful image to me.” By the time Michelangelo Dying is finally able to lurch to a halt on closer “I Know What’s Nice,” Le Bon makes a last-ditch attempt to describe the load she’s been forced to carry (“I know you, I do / Do you see yourself as me and me as you?”; “I can’t breathe for someone I love”). There is a sense of relief in the moment where rest arrives. The difficult work is done. Fittingly, while writing about Lumiere’s work in 1981, art dealer Jeffrey Deitch summed it up in a single line: “There isn’t much of a gap between art and death.”

As such, it stands as a continuation of Le Bon’s unspoken artistic mission: to take the insurmountable way you can feel about another person, or the world at large, and chisel it out of marble, offering the sound of the effort it takes to express the inexpressible, or even the morbid. She herself chooses not to dwell on such an evolution, as she tries “not to be retrospective” and thinks of her artistic process as “shedding a skin, and for a while, you go, ‘Gross, get away from me.’ Then, when you play a record live, you reclaim it in a different way. There are some songs that I don’t feel connected to anymore, and there’ll be an emptiness to performing them that I don’t want [if I play them]. I want to connect with them. I want to feel it too, and that changes.” She pauses. “Things can take a different shape, but as long as it feels right, that’s okay.”
When the exhaustive work is done and the gap between art and death has closed, all that remains will be how she bottled it, stripped of all context specific to the life of a person named Cate Le Bon, the feeling contained will linger. The second you hear her heart twinge as hard, it’s difficult not to fall. A wound might heal over, but I wonder where she’ll catch me next, which deserted street I’ll be stalking when a line jumps out—both true and real—and I press repeat.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.

Cate Le Bon’s Installation of Healing

The Welsh musician spoke with Paste about shedding skin on Michelangelo Dying and then reclaiming it, living with the multiple meanings of her art, and the “strange diary” that became her seventh album.