FEATURE: Spotlight: Lael Neale — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Alexandra Cabral

Lael Neale

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AN artist I was recently introduced to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Raina Selene

via Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music, the wonderful Lael Neale is someone who I predict very big things from. Her 2023 album, Star Eaters Delight, is one that I would recommend everyone listen to. The Virginia-born artist’s third studio album marks her out as a very distinct and magnificent talent. I am going to come to some interviews with her soon. Before that, here is some biography regarding the simply amazing Lael Neale:

“Lael Neale still has a flip phone and there were no screens involved in the creation of her new record Star Eaters Delight.

The album is her second for Sub Pop and reveals an expansion of her sonic collaboration with producer and accompanist Guy Blakeslee.

In April of 2020, in the wake of transformations both personal and global, Lael moved from Los Angeles back to her family’s farm in rural Virginia. Looking at the world from a distance and getting in tune with her own rhythms, she wrote and recorded steadily for two dreamlike years, driven by a need to make order out of chaos. Forged in isolation, Star Eaters Delight is a vehicle for returning, not just to civilization, but to celebration.

She says, “Acquainted with Night (recorded in 2019, and released in 2021), was a focusing inward amidst the loud and bright Los Angeles surrounding me. It was an attempt to create spaciousness and quiet reverie within. When I moved back to the farm, I found that the unbroken silences compelled me to break them with sound. This album is more external. It is a reaching back out to the world, wanting to feel connected, to wake up, to come together again.”

Album opener and lead single “I Am The River” melts the ice with a dynamic explosion of minimalist transcendental pop clearly descended from the Velvets branch of modern music’s family tree.

“Lael is always telling me to play fewer notes,” says Blakeslee, whose spare yet cinematic arrangements create an ambient space in which Neale’s clear and unaffected voice can explore familiar themes in an unexpected way. Subtle but potent references to Shakespeare, Emerson and the Bible (which she hasn’t read) swirl together with deeply personal musings and touches of wry humor, always more optimistic than cynical.

"I like to use archetypal language because I want to get a rise out of people. I want to trigger a response. A single archetypal word carries more weight and punch than an ordinary word. Jesus means more to us than Joe,” she notes.

Album centerpiece “In Verona” is a sprawling gospel dirge in which the narrator-as-newscaster chants hypnotic incantations to lament a society plagued by divisions and hypocrisies, reimagining the Montagues and Capulets without mentioning them by name and cautioning the listener to “cast no stone.”

Lael continues, “The past few years have seen more mud slinging & finger pointing than I’ve witnessed in my life. When I found myself getting drawn into the fray, this phrase became a mantra helping me seek higher ground and a broader perspective.”

“Faster Than The Medicine” gallops across a misty imagined English countryside, frenetically propelled by the drum machine built into Neale’s signature Omnichord, while the bittersweet “Must Be Tears” invokes Nico with its pulsing Mellotron strings.

While this is a record about polarities- country vs. city, humanity vs. technology, solitude vs. relationship - the deeper intention is to heal; to come to terms with our differences and put the broken pieces back together again. Lael’s affinity with the Transcendentalists has to do with her quest to hold onto sovereignty over her own mind. In a time when our devices are constantly flooding us with information, opinions and propaganda, Lael is intentional about what she takes in - hence the flip phone and the cassette recorder.

She claims to be a minimalist “not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more”.

Let’s get to a few chats with Lael Neale. In April, The Guardian spoke with an artist who channels Hollywood’s darker side. Maybe still new to some in the U.K., I think that many more people will get to know Neale as we progress through this year. She is an extraordinary artist:

“Neale’s upbringing could not have been further from this kind of brazen bluster and the ostentatiousness so endemic to her adopted home of LA. The singer-songwriter and occasional watercolourist grew up on a farm in deepest rural Virginia, where her Grateful Dead-loving dad raised grass-fed beef cattle and her mother introduced her to the music of the Cure and Beastie Boys. Although no one in Neale’s family performed professionally, there was – and still is – a barn on the farm that moonlighted as a music room.

“It’s where dad would get stoned with his friends and play,” says Neale. “But it’s pretty grimy. It’s also where he works on his tractors and there’s a lot of tools around, so it has this greasy tractor smell ... “

Moving back to Virginia during the pandemic, Neale helped out with the chickens and recorded her third album, Star Eaters Delight. It’s a unique, boldly weird proposition, and one that proudly carries the faint hint of tractor grease. Half of it comes on like cult 70s folk artist Karen Dalton hanging out with the Velvet Underground and Suicide, while the rest offers somewhat more modern balladry, placing her more in the world of Angel Olsen and Cat Power.

PHOTO CREDIT: Alexandra Cabral

Although its lyrics circle round death, holy water, purity and prayer, the fuzzy, hypnotic, eight-minute In Verona was written after Neale saw the critically unacclaimed 2010 film Letters to Juliet, a Romeo and Juliet-inspired romcom starring Amanda Seyfried. Shakespeare it was not. “I watched about 15 minutes of it and I could feel my brain atrophy – it was so terrible,” remembers Neale of seeing it with her mother during lockdown. Despite its relentless banality, it somehow still sparked Neale’s creativity. “So I left, but then I felt bad because we were gonna do this nice mother-daughter thing, and I was like: ‘I’m out of here!’ Then I started writing the song.”

In Verona’s self-directed video was in part inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s take on the story, 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, a pivotal part of Neale’s sonic and visual education. “I saw it when I was in my early teens, and I was just listening to things like the Beatles at that time. That introduced me to Radiohead,” she remembers. “There’s this amazing alchemy that happens when music goes perfectly with film – it’s the same with Harold and Maude and that Cat Stevens soundtrack.”

Some of the footage came from when Neale and her boyfriend were living in a past-its-prime 1920s hotel turned apartment building. “It was a really unique place, just a couple of blocks away from the Walk of Fame, and it was incredibly cheap; full of musicians and artists and strange older people who’d been there for ever,” says Neale. “It was actually the hotel that the Black Dahlia lived in.” Would we be right to suggest that such a historical Hollywood landmark was possibly haunted? “Definitely,” confirms Neale. “We Palo Santo-ed the room [by burning the plant] to clear the energy – not to be too Californian – and then a couple of weeks into our stay there we found out that the last guy there nodded out in the window and fell and died”.

Aquarium Drunkard caught up with Lael Neale to talk about Star Eaters Delight. Not only is that one of the best album titles of this year. The album itself is one of the best of the year. I should say 2023, as we are technically in 2024 now – and it is force of habit! Anyway, the fact that the album was recorded to tape gives is a sound that ensures the songs lodge in the head:

“But this restraint is also a form of resistance, as in: Neale is fighting against something. Maybe modernity, with all of its hollow digital worship—Star Eater’s Delight, like her previous for Sub Pop, was recorded on cassette, and tape hiss acts like a third band member here. She sings of flowers, rivers, seas, and trees; holy water, perfect deaths; bells of time, patience, and the speed of medicine. Carried by words and rhythm, she’s barreling towards something just beyond the horizon.

Before embarking on her first European tour, Neale called in from a tour stop in Baltimore to talk about hiss aesthetics, finding her voice, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jane Eyre seeped into her timeless minimalism. | a levy

AD: All the songs [on the record] sound like the first take in a good way, you know?

Lael Neale: Cool.

AD: Have you always been that way or is that something you had to find through time? Because I know for some musicians that’s their philosophy: “I’m not going to do it any more than that.” And others can get bogged down in the perfectionism.

Lael Neale: I spent a lot of years doing the “right” way of recording, where you just sit there and try a bunch of things. I started officially recording probably when I was like 20 [years old] or something. And I was doing it with these older session guys, and I must have done 20 to 40 takes. They spliced together each of the lines—like the words, or half of a word. So that was how it started. And by the end of it, I was like, “Oh my God, this sounds dead like a robot. Robotic dead.” From that extreme, it kept moving toward this final philosophy. It has become a philosophy because I’ll never do [the prior way of recording] again. What’s important to me about recordings is that they feel as present and as alive as possible. That’s why we record on tape cassette.

And honestly, it took years of looking for a producer to help me record things until Guy came along and was like, “I’m just going to give you my tape machine, set it all up, teach you how to press record, and I think that that will solve your problem.” So he was the first [producer] after many, many different tries with people who are amazing, who I think are great producers and everything, but he was the first one to make me see that this was possible.

The previous album [Acquainted With Night] we did on tape machine [too]. Both of us were shocked when Sub Pop wanted to put it out because it is so hissy. This one’s hissy, Star Eater’s Delight, but that first one…I listen now and I’m like, “Oh my God!” That’s so cool that they let us put it out as it was. I think that’s a huge reason people don’t do it this way, because it’s so lo fi that it’s almost like our ears aren’t accustomed to it.

AD: Did you have any sort of overarching idea for this record when you were starting it?

Lael Neale: When I sit down to write in a concentrated period of time, the songs all are of a piece, but I’m not really intending that. And I would say that Guy has a better sense of the overarching tone and the theme or thesis statement of it all in terms of sound. I’m way more intuitive. I really don’t think about about it too much and that’s what’s cool about working with Guy. As I was writing those songs, we were playing them together so they became what they are very organically. I don’t think he had to do too much thinking about it either.

AD: Neil Young said, “when you think, you stink.”

Lael Neale: I love that! That’s great.

AD: There does feel like there’s a theme to these songs. I was just struck by your lyrics. They have so many images in them, bringing images to my mind when I’m listening. Was there anything that you were watching or reading when you were writing these songs that you think fell into the songs?

Lael Neale: At the time, I was reading this biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson called Mind On Fire [by Robert D. Richardson, Jr] . [I don’t usually have] an attention span for biographies, but I love Emerson so much, and this biography was incredible. Definitely looking back at the book now, I see that I underlined a lot of things that ended up cropping up in the songs a little bit. I definitely write songs based on what I’m reading at the time. I’m always reading bits and pieces of poetry and stuff. But something like [the song] “In Verona” was really surprising to me. That just kind of flowed out in the way that it was. I don’t know where that comes from, but I’m sure I was influenced by a number of things I was taking in. And going on really long walks. I was living on my family’s farm and there’s a rhythm to walking and words just kind of flow in that way. That’s how some of the songs feel. They’re moving in that kind of rhythmic way. I was [also] watching a lot of period pieces, which is maybe where [the song] “Faster Than The Medicine” comes from”.

Before round this off, there is one more interview that I want to come to. Under the Radar spent some time with Lael Neale to discuss the extraordinary Star Eaters Delight. This is an album and artist that needs to be in your life. A talent that everyone should follow through this year. I have passed through the album a few times and am always struck by its sheer quality and originality:

“If Lael Neale’s second album, 2021’s Acquainted with Night, was an attempt to find space and calm whilst surrounded by the neon and noise of Los Angeles, then her follow-up, Star Eaters Delight, is about reaching out from isolation and looking to reconnect with the world. As COVID restrictions began to impact travel, Neale moved back to her family’s farm in rural Virginia. “It genuinely is in the middle of nowhere,” she explains, “even the driveway is about two miles long, and it’s an hour from the nearest big town. After living in L.A. for so long, I began missing people and a sense of community. So this record certainly comes from a more agitated state.” Neale is quick to point out that this isn’t a “pandemic record,” although clearly, it did have an influence. “I was definitely feeling frustrated at being constrained, so I guess there’s that tension going on.”

She wrote and recorded steadily over a two-year period, working with her longtime musical collaborator Guy Blakeslee. It was Blakeslee who had been crucial to Neale when forging her own minimalist approach to recording and production. “Guy just gets it,” she says, “he’s the first person I’ve worked with who was sensitive enough to know how to create space around the songs.” Indeed the low-key production style of her recent work is in marked contrast to her 2015 debut album, I’ll Be Your Man, which had more of an on-trend acoustic singer/songwriter vibe with a subtle Lana Del Rey undercurrent. “It’s not that I disliked the way that album sounded,” Neale reflects, “it just sounded a bit too similar to other things that were around at the time. I didn’t feel it was really representative of my own true voice.” It took Neale a while to find that voice but when she first heard an Omnichord it was the lightbulb moment in terms of making the stylistic shift that’s apparent on her second and third albums.

Explaining her approach to Star Eaters Delight she continues, “Minimalism can be a hard thing to maintain as there’s always a tendency when you make something new, that it needs to be a little bit ‘more,’ and although this album is, I was still mindful of being able to give the songs space and create something that you can drop into that isn’t overburdened with noise.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Alexandra Cabral

Neale’s poetic lyrics touch on the mythical and the spiritual, she references Shakespeare, Emerson, and the Bible (which she hasn’t read) and she agrees that the stunning “In Verona” is the centrepiece of the album. “It has themes that all the other songs revolve around. I use archetypal language because I feel it resonates, I also kind of like the fact that people can still get upset when you reference Jesus. I’m not religious myself but quoting something he may have said—‘cast no stone’ was such an important line for me, something I kept returning to when I saw the divisions, arguments, and judgements being made throughout the pandemic.”

When we discuss spirituality, it’s not of the traditional religious variety but Neale’s work is clearly influenced by her love of nature. “That’s something my parents taught me, that nature was a space where you could commune with something greater than yourself.”

Creating space for herself also involves how she engages with technology. “I do use technology of course, but I intentionally don’t have a smart phone, I deliberately created a barrier. Without getting too sci-fi we are all becoming so permanently fused with technology you wonder what’s coming next? A computer in our head perhaps?” Neale laughs. “But I want to preserve my humanity and exist in more of a state of wonder and mystery, which technology can often take away. I do feel like we are already seeing the pendulum swinging, there’s certainly a push back and a desire to live life more simply again”.

If you have not discovered the wonders of Lael Neale, then make sure that you follow her on social media. The U.S. songwriter put out Star Eaters Delight earlier in the year. It was one of 2023’s best. I am going to wrap up there. I am looking forward to seeing where she heads next. Her music is like nothing else out there. This an artist that everybody…