“The email said, ‘John Cale is looking for you.’ It absolutely terrified me. I thought I was in trouble!” How the Velvet Underground icon voiced a powerful song on Cate Le Bon’s new album

(Image credit: Getty Images / H Hawkline)

It’s difficult to shake the feeling that Cate Le Bon’s return home to Wales gave her the grounding needed to face the heartache she’d been running from.

Her long-term romantic relationship with American musician Tim Presley, with whom she’d recorded two albums as DRINKS, had ended, leaving her in doubt about her next move. She decided to move back to Cardiff from the US.

“You can’t outrun these things,” she says. “So I ended up rolling up my sleeves and just letting it happen.” Ergo Michelangelo Dying, her seventh album which, she tells Prog, is not so much an artistic statement but a “necessary exorcism.”

“I was trying to overtake the emotional pain. By working on other people’s records and moving between Los Angeles and Chicago, I thought I was dodging heartbreak – but I was really just dragging it with me.”

Velvet Underground founder John Cale, a fellow Welsh outlier, appears on Ride, his voice carrying the kind of weariness that only decades of artistic experience can bring. The connection was made in 2018, when he sought out Le Bon, asking her to sing with him at London’s Barbican.

Cate Le Bon - Ride feat. John Cale (Official Audio) - YouTube

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“The email said, ‘John Cale is looking for you,’ and it absolutely terrified me,” she says with a laugh. “I thought I was in trouble!”

That initial meeting led to multiple collaborations, but Le Bon really wanted Cale to leave his mark on Michelangelo Dying – only she was too embarrassed to ask. While mixing the new album in London, she regretted not posing the question. However, a second round of mixing in Los Angeles gave her another chance.

“I finally asked him. And within 24 hours, he’d sent over his vocals and a beautiful message. I was in the control room crying – not even realising I was crying.”

Though completed some time ago, Michelangelo Dying was held back from release, giving Le Bon the rare chance to revisit her own pain from a whole new vantage point. Today she hears the songs differently.

You can’t suppress emotion. It’s no good for your health. You have to sit with it. Look it in the eye

“I understand the lyrics differently now,” she says. “They feel like letters from the past to my future self. I’m more protective of them. They’re real. They were true.”

While the record no longer hurts as it once did, the memories have left a deep mark – if the album was once a wound, it’s become a scar.

“The thing I’ve really learned,” she says, “is that you can’t suppress emotion. It’s no good for your health. You have to sit with it. Look it in the eye. That’s the only way to move through it.”

Michelangelo Dying is on sale now.

Artists

Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.

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