An Interview with Cate Le Bon

“You don’t necessarily always have to understand it. It’s about allowing yourself to wonder, and trusting yourself to wonder, and often in doing that after the fact I’ll be singing a song somewhere and I’ll all of a sudden understand it, and it’s almost like a letter that I’ve written to myself from the past. I’ve trusted myself to stand by it even though I maybe don’t necessarily fully understand it in the moment.”

Furniture-making:
Changes the economy of time
Beholds you to the behavior of the material
Allows you to forget about music

To dream of escape is to dream of being separate from the day-to-day of your own life, to leave behind but the daily desperation and insecurity that can result from your environment. We all know the cliche that insists on the impossibility of fulfilling this desire: no matter where you go, there you are. At its peaks, Cate Le Bon’s fourth record Reward takes an almost optimistic view of this truth—running away only to end up feeling closer to oneself doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Reward is the product of Le Bon’s solitude when she was making furniture in a workshop in an English village, away from Los Angeles which was her home at the time, reconnecting to what attracted her to music by playing piano after long days of concentrating on a more material form of creativity by creating furniture of all kinds. The throng of instruments Le Bon employs on the album provides an experience that feels something like an escape. The array includes the clarinet, synth, and saxophone, among others, each of which she stretches to unexpected ends. The sounds the instruments omit swirl around her voice then theatrically clash into each other, mimicking the unusual drama that can occur in one’s own mind as a result of self-induced loneliness. This feeling of loneliness is a space of invention, a place to toss and turn, ruminating sometimes to the point of mania, but more often to a feeling of contentedness. 

Le Bon and I talked about trusting your instincts, discovering the meaning of her songs after releasing them, and collaboration.

—Rachel Davies

THE BELIEVER: I wanted to talk to you about when you were taking the furniture course. When you had decided to go to this course, were you intending to be making music as well?

CATE LE BON: I guess so, but the way that I thought I would make music and write ended up being completely different. I suppose in taking time away to try and readjust my relationship with music and reidentify my motives with making music I kind of...