Instead, she found herself holed up at a friend’s Cardiff place-together with Presley and her co-producer, Samur Khouja-where she had lived in her mid-20s.
She describes her original hopes for a 2020 hibernation: maybe a studio in Chile or Norway, “a place that was really remote, where you could completely shed any preconceptions or any idea of an audience.” The pandemic upended all that. Le Bon, 39, is wearing an olive knit hat over her ash-brown hair, the ends peeking out in an unassuming shag.
#ULTIMATE SPACIE SLIPPY FULL#
The full line, from Woolf’s 1930 “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” is worth repeating: “The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” But to make something new, Le Bon needed to strip away familiar comforts: “what I think Woolf calls the ‘enormous eye,’ being somewhere where you are suddenly tapped into this level of creativity that's unencumbered and uninhibited,” she tells me, drawing on a Rebecca Solnit essay. Her stylized hand gestures and an air of coolly distant intelligence reverberated at the same frequency as a Tilda Swinton performance. Any hint of that solitude had flashed off by the time I saw Le Bon perform in Central Park that summer, with a shock of platinum blonde hair. That meandering and allowing yourself to disappear is something that I really lean into.”įor her last record, 2019’s acclaimed Reward, Le Bon embarked on a rather monastic retreat, studying furniture making in England’s Lake District by day and keeping company with a piano by night. “I thought maybe there was something wrong with my work ethic because I didn't have a repeatable process I couldn't sit behind a desk and draft and have any kind of successful results. It took her a while to recognize the link between those escapes and her output as a musician and writer. Those, to me, were the places where you could shed and become invisible and get lost in daydreams,” Le Bon explains at a café down the road. “The last six months I spent waking up really early and leaving the city, to come to Topanga to go on hikes or to go to Malibu to swim in the ocean. while recording her third album, 2013’s Mug Museum she ended up staying more than three years. Le Bon, who owns a house in Joshua Tree with her partner, Tim Presley, along with a place in Wales, initially set down roots in L.A. Across the street, a folksy Smokey Bear sign issues a report in calming green: FIRE DANGER LOW TODAY! (It arrived in February via the label Mexican Summer, with a summer tour that is now winding through Europe and parts of the U.S.) Le Bon has suggested coffee and a hike, as if doling out medicine to a penned-in New Yorker. At the top of the steep hill behind her, Le Bon is at work producing Devendra Banhart’s forthcoming album while gearing up to release her own sixth full-length effort-the shimmering, synth-heavy Pompeii.
#ULTIMATE SPACIE SLIPPY UPGRADE#
A roadside fender bender stalled my arrival by a few minutes-the glimpse of crumpled metal a reminder to play it safe in my rental Prius, a welcome-to-California upgrade that chirped with unidentifiable alerts. The winding slip of road that makes for a slow, scenic entry is the same route out.Ĭate Le Bon, the Welsh musician, is waiting on a bench outside Topanga’s Country Natural Foods on a crisp Sunday morning when I pull up. (Last year’s neighboring Palisades Fire was visible from certain Topanga hilltops.) The coexistence of risk and reward is a routine consideration for people who spend time there, even outside of peak fire season. Wildfires have ripped through the area periodically over the decades, with the most recent one, in 1993, claiming 18,000 acres and three lives. There is unadulterated beauty, accessible via 36 miles of hiking trails across protected land. Topanga, a canyon community tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains, an hour’s drive west of downtown Los Angeles, is a place of contradiction.
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