“Hold on a sec.”
I’m on the phone with British
multi-instrumentalist/singer-songwriter Natasha Khan (better known as
Bat for Lashes), but the background chatter in her London press office
is a bit overwhelming, so there’s a furtive rustle as she scuttles to a
quiet spot. “Okay, that’s better. Sorry about that.”
No need for apologies. I’m getting a glimpse into a recurring motif
for Bat for Lashes, that of escaping the fray for a secluded spot to
think and create. For Khan this sort of forced seclusion has resulted
in music rich with imagery and built on its own internal mythology. And
it’s all guided by her peculiarly beguiling voice, spiraling and
rising, fading and enveloping. When she finds a nook in the offices and
we’re able to speak in relative quiet, I feel as if I were being let in
on a secret.
I’m not, of course. Khan’s 2006 debut,
Fur and Gold (Caroline), was nominated for Britain’s Mercury
Prize, and no discussion of Bat for Lashes neglects to point out that
her early supporters range from Björk to Yorke (who brought her on
tour with Radiohead). But hype and famous fans notwithstanding, her
musical world is often a solitary and strange place swirling with
mythic and emotional tempests. Trembling midnight lands/I travel
with the wizard/Drink his blood and he’s our leader would be
perfectly at home in the realm of Viking metal. But this particular
verse is from Khan’s debut single, “The Wizard,” and it’s got all her
Bat for Lashy trademarks: the starkness, the seriousness, the crystal
clarion calls of the vocal high points. She’s like an R&B Joan of
Arc with a toy piano tossed into the wilderness without her
superproducer.
Khan’s tangling of the otherworldly with the personal occurred
through a strange confluence. “When I left university at 23 [she’s now
29], I went to become a nursery-school teacher to kind of pay my rent
and stuff. At the time, I was reading a lot of Carl Jung, as well as a
lot of old fairy tales, and I just absorbed all of this information. I
worked on songs when I would get home from work, and all of this stuff
just kind of came out.”
The result was Fur and Gold, a gorgeously bizarre effort
that’s as lush as it is raw. “I still think it’s a small record, my
personal baby — I feel that it’s very pure and minimal and where
I was at that point without any external interruptions. I was just
living in Brighton, working, and indulging myself at that time with all
sorts of instruments. That record, it’s like a secret, almost to me. I
suppose that one’s first album is kind of imbued with the story of your
whole life up to that point.”
Khan’s parents (an English Christian mother and a Pakistani Muslim
father) split when she was twelve. She has lived with both her father
in Pakistan and her mother in England, but her hyperactive imagination
ensured that wherever she was, part of her surroundings would always be
of her own creation. “Growing up with religious parents, I think a lot
of us can recognize symbols and metaphors and archetypal characters
without even knowing. I think that mythology is extremely embedded in
our culture, extremely important. If you look at the last fifty years,
things have changed very quickly. Until then, you had the birth of the
written word and storytelling and folkloric beginnings and pagan and
religious stories, and I think there’s something universal about them.
The Bible might be fairly far-fetched, but the metaphors still make
some sense, you know?”
For all the hubbub over Khan’s predilection for fairy-tale lyrical
elements, it’s important to note that her music always works at the
intersection between myth and reality. “In my songs, sometimes the
mythic elements outweigh the ‘real’ ones, but other songs are kind of
straightforward and don’t use mythical language at all and are more
naked, emotionally. I mean, I love fairy tales, but I also love Raymond
Carver; I love E.T., but I like David Lynch as well. They all
kind of say the same thing to me.”
This juxtaposition of reality and fantasy continues on Two
Suns (Astralwerks), only this time Khan’s sonic palette has
broadened to fit the wide-screen vistas of her recent experiences. It’s
a record of her touring the world for a few years after the success of
Fur and Gold. But it’s also a documentation of jubilation and
heartbreak.
“I definitely went into this record knowing that I wanted to make a
much more powerful-sounding, lush, much bolder record. I’d have loved
to make another magical childlike sort of thing, but I had to be
faithful to my — well, I had more going on, for me, and it’s not
always pretty.”
For Khan, the years after Fur and Gold were spent in motion,
whether traveling on tour or relocating to New York for a romance that,
in ending, was the fulcrum for the album’s melancholy heart and its
themes of duality and spectral coupling. “There are interplanetary
things on this record: big skies and huge planets crashing into each
other as a metaphor for relationships. I definitely felt a need for a
more expansive sonic quality, you know?”
Two Suns‘ recording locations included the desert expanses of
Joshua Tree, California. The wide-open panoramas are palpable in the
opening “Glass,” with its tribal drumming, shimmering synths, and
thousand-mile-canyon-echo vocal treatments. A thousand crystal
towers/A hundred emerald cities/And the hand of the watchman in the
night sky/Points to my beloved is the sort of fantastical couplet
that’s gotten Khan pegged as a few dice rolls from Dungeons &
Dragons territory. But for her, it’s all about making the mythic
personal, taking ancient and personal touchstones and mixing them
together till they feel not just sensible but inevitable. The lead
single, “Daniel,” a darkly dance-y anthem to running in the dark “under
a sheet of rain in my heart,” is alleged to be an ode to Ralph
Macchio’s title character from The Karate Kid. (The cover of the
single shows Khan on the beach, her naked back emblazoned with a large
portrait of Larusso-san himself.) How does this all fit?
“I think that my attraction to myth doesn’t just come through
ancient sources; I’m fortunate to have grown up in a decade where there
were so many amazing films about children experiencing epiphanies and
having relationships with things much bigger than themselves. I think
we all desire some sort of god or some kind of religious experience,
whether it’s with an alien or with giants or whatever it is. I don’t
separate science from religion, I don’t think that one is right and the
other is wrong. I think that they are just different ways of looking at
the very fundamental basic thing, which is that we’re all here and
we’re all connected and we all go through the same things, and there
isn’t an easy way to describe that.”
