Welsh musician and producer Cate Le Bon moves between ‘Pompeii’ and the pandemic

In her typical surreal, eloquent and uncanny way, singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon has fought her way through the pandemic. Her latest attempt, Pompeii, is a strong plea not to let fear paralyse us.

Welsh musician and producer Cate Le Bon (39) is on her first tour since the pandemic struck. When we talk to her over Zoom, she has just landed on the European mainland and it feels like a liberation. “I am more grateful than ever for things I used to take for granted, like performing in front of real people,” she says laughingly. “I was very lucky that I had just finished a tour when the first lockdown came around. But I can ensure you that there was nothing more reassuring than to see my musicians live playing the music I had composed in a small bedroom in Cardiff. It was as if my music could breathe on its own again.”

Pompeii is the sixth studio album by the singer and multi-instrumentalist, who in 2013 traded her native Wales for Los Angeles. Since then, she has developed her own style and her name and fame have only grown. It is for artists like Cate Le Bon – birth name Cate Timothy, we read on our Zoom screen – that a term like idiosyncratic was invented. Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, compatriot John Cale, John Grant and Devendra Banhart are some of the fans who for a long time have enjoyed her hard-to-categorise musical universe unconditionally. The latter two recently confirmed this by inviting her as a producer for their new albums.

Your new album is called Pompeii. Have you ever visited the ancient Roman town, which in 79 AD was turned into stone by the suddenly erupting lava from Vesuvius?
Cate Le Bon: No, but I clearly remember how in primary school we were taught this, in my opinion, almost biblical story. Even as a child, I could imagine the horror of being permanently caught up in your last movement. The images of all those people transformed into statues have always haunted me. In a way, I found them resonating with how we experienced the pandemic: something temporary seemed to become permanent, something private suddenly public. We seemed to be standing on a precipice and could not get out. But it seems to be in the nature of man to smooth over terrible events and quickly think that everything will be all right. Do you remember how, at the beginning of the pandemic, we reassured each other by saying that a few weeks toughing it out would be enough?

As an artist, you are always making new plans, but they suddenly turned out to be incompatible with reality. The gift was that everyone got a reminder of what it was like to live in the moment. Even though I wanted to record my new album in a more exotic place, circumstances suddenly found me in a house in Wales where I briefly had spent some time fifteen years earlier. Instead of focusing on despair, I learned to embrace chaos. This is the story that Pompeii tells. Of a sometimes pretty fucked-up world that plays with reality, but also of a world where everything is blurred and daydreaming is once more allowed.

“In the remake of my life / I moved in straight lines,” you sing on “Remembering Me”, one of the key tracks. Would you really leave out the detours if you had a second chance?
Le Bon: I don't know, but aren't complex people always attracted by something simple and straightforward? (Laughs) Until you have it, of course, because then you want something complicated again.

Before the pandemic, you had just rented a house near Joshua Tree National Park with your partner Tim Presley, who also helped you with your new album. What is so special about the Mojave Desert?
Le Bon: Every time I visited that place, the child in me woke up. It is so alien, as if a different sense of time and space applies. The days are incredibly long and the light is also completely different. I sometimes compare the desert to the bottom of the ocean. You can really disappear in it. But during the first lockdown, the skies were closed and because I was still in Iceland producing John Grant's record, I couldn't get across the ocean and had no choice but to return back to my roots. It was only by October last year that we could fly back and carry on with the decision we had made two years earlier as if nothing had happened. That was surreal.

The lockdown atmosphere had already left a somewhat nebulous and ambiguous mark on your new record. Has the pandemic given your eternal quest for contrasts extra clout?
Le Bon: I have always been attracted to the tension that contrasts create. If something in a conversation is too narrowly defined, then for me the conversation is over. I need things to evolve. You'd better be constantly in flux and not a finished product. I like the idea that everything is energy that is constantly being transformed into something else. Isn't there a famous quote from the poet T.S. Eliot that says: A poem demands another poem? I agree with that. You may be able to pin something down in words for a brief moment, but it is then irrevocably gone because your thoughts, your emotions and the world around you are constantly changing.

On Pompeii, not only are the music and lyrics an extension of that constant transformation of feelings, which I can never really put my finger on, but the outfits worn in the video clips and the cover photo are too. The latter is a reproduction of the painting Tim was making during the filming. For me, it worked as a metaphor for that flux, but also for the pandemic, during which everything seemed to take place in my head. That's why I wanted to make a record that from beginning to end had the same mood. From the opener “Dirt on the Bed” to coda “Wheel”, nothing was allowed to break the tension. The story the songs tell is not so much a linear story, I see them more like siblings. They touch on the same themes, but with a different sting.

Except for the drums and the saxophones, you played all the instruments yourself. Has that changed your perspective on the songs?
Le Bon: The bass had to be the backbone of the record anyway and was allowed to sound exuberant. I did not want to mix anything behind its constant forward pulse. As a result, I had to change the way I played the guitar. The idea was to make all the instruments move together while remaining minimalist. My vocals, too, had to be part of that moving organism and not just sit on top of it. Getting that balance right was the biggest challenge.

During the recording of your last record, you took a course in woodworking to clear your head. Did you do something like that now?
Le Bon: No, but I am looking for something. If I spend all my time on my own music, it becomes too much like a full-time job. I need something else to offset that. Woodworking was very meditative, but working together with other musicians can also help you get that extra head space. For example, I am currently producing Devendra Banhart's new album.

During those recording sessions, is it true that you stayed in the same house in Topanga Canyon where Neil Young once recorded After the Gold Rush?
Le Bon: Yes, in his former bedroom. (Laughs) I find it important to be fully immersed in a creative process letting it enchant me. Dev, our engineer, and I stayed in that house for a while, so as not to be distracted. We got up at the same time every day to work together. Sessions like those are the most nourishing ones.

CATE LE BON
11/4, 19.00, Ancienne Belgique, www.abconcerts.be