One of the brightest rock talents to emerge in the last half-decade, as far as I am aware or am fit to judge, is the “folky-psychedelic” songstress Cate Le Bon, from Wales. She and her band have an intuitive feel for late 60s rock of a melancholic, folk-rooted, and noise-friendly manner—60s artists like the Velvet Underground of the third album, Syd Barrett, as well as the “60s-ish” 80s-to-90s David Roback bands The Rain Parade, Opal, and Mazzy Star come to mind in trying to describe her sound.
Now in 2013, prior to recording her third album Mug Museum, which has a less overtly 60s-ish feel, Le Bon and band moved from Wales to Los Angeles. For those of us acquainted with her image and bio, this was surprising, like hearing that Wendell Berry had abandoned his native Kentucky for a Soho flat. Berry, of course, is our most eloquent advocate of small-town rural life, and of “sticking” with the home-place, a role Le Bon never claimed. Still, she was known to have grown up on a farm, to have written a few songs about the animals and landscape there, and most remarkably, to have featured songs in Welsh during the more folk-ish stage of her career.
And then there were her lyrics, quite a few of which seem to extoll, but also to thoughtfully meditate upon, rural living, or which seemed concerned about place and impermanence. Take these distinct lines from “Cyrk”:
I’ve always loved the, movement of the trees. Find me a place where, I can watch the breeze.
I’ve always loved the, turning of the screw. Find me a place that, I can fold into.
People they change, and often come and go, but I’m raising flags for the long-haul.
I’ll always love the summer till I die, find me a place where real birds fly by.
While those lyrics are a little hard to make out at first, their meaning is fairly clear, which is only the case about a third of the time with Cate—she is a lover of the elusive lyric and the puzzle you have to work at, and in not a few instances it appears her words keep the main meaning of the song to herself.
So Le Bon “raised flags” for sticking, but for whatever reason, couldn’t stick with this, or arrange for this. Again, she also raised flags for rural living—in “January,” one of the five songs presented on the (highly recommended) E.P. Cyrk II, we get this: Well, now, you know you’ve got it made, when the days are yours alone. Go out, employ the country. Similar agrarian sentiments, while more mysteriously expressed, seem at the heart of three of the trippiest songs on the regular Cyrk album: “Fold the Cloth,” “Puts Me to Work,” and “Ploughing Out.” And then there is “Shoeing the Bones” from her first album, complete with a farm-horse video, but also featuring the haunting refrain these are hard times, to fall in love.
Why are these hard times to fall in love? It’s unclear from the lyrics there, but perhaps it’s because, as “Cyrk” suggested, they are ones in which people, they change, and often come and go. How this works in love-relationships is suggested by a line apparently about one from the intriguing–but to me still half-indecipherable–“Puts Me to Work”: And someday our needs will change, and we’ll slip beyond the range; tomorrow’s another day, already been sold. I cannot but hear an echo in this of Philippe Bénéton’s account in Equality by Default of the way modern mobility and individualism infect the family itself:
Children…are increasingly considered as a passing moment in the lives of their parents. This is particularly noticeable in the United States, where the child is treated like a guest passing through, a guest to whom one owes certain courtesies but who will before long fly off on his own wings. The thought of separation is already a separation.
Apply this to eros. On one hand, Le Bon’s narrator appears to be wisely resigning herself to the impermanence of love—she’s learned that purported “fact of life,” one taught right from the get-go of the sexual revolution in songs such as Jefferson Airplane’s “And I Like It.” But on the other hand, she sings of the inevitability of love’s impermanence not in the language of nature, but in that of commerce. That’s unlikely to be a sign of approval. And we might note that in another Cyrk II song, “Seaside, Lowtide,” she is in dread of the moment in which she detects the love-look depart from her beloved’s eyes. That dread belongs to the low moment, the one worthy of harrowing guitar-noise.
Le Bon does not, however, “raise the flag” for permanence in love in a manner that denies her own responsibility for the specter of impermanence. Now, an interview tells us that one of her band’s members has been her boyfriend for some time, but keep that fact to the side and concentrate instead on the persona she presents in her body of song. She does have a few songs that describe falling in love, but as we’re seeing, there are more that describe partings or the threat of them, and in some of these she is the one breaking off—these songs often feel as if they could be also apply to friends and family, and they are all connected at the hip with Le Bon’s feelings about place and moving.
For example, while “Eiggy Sea” seems primarily about the narrator identifying her spirit with the flight of a sea-bird, there are several striking repeats of the line, And in the morning, I am gone. Apparently, either family, friends, lovers, or all three, find she has crept out without telling them. There is also a reference there to our journeyings (hers and the bird’s?) being overdue and the statement there is nothing you can bring, to attract us home. And then there’s this from “What Is Worse”: They come to my room, and tell me I’m so cruel, ‘cause I’ve no plans to settle down. Of course, in some instances she’s the one who might or does get left behind. The recent single-only “He’s Leaving” is a straightforward lament about some fellow’s leaving town making her feel like dying; at one point in it she admits, Now what’s a soul like me to do? I like moving, too.
That line reminds me of perhaps the key song to all of this, “January,” the final one of the set of songs that make up Cryk and Cyrk II. In retrospect, it seems many of those are focused on the home-place and the possibility of leaving it because Cate already had the move to LA in mind. The song begins, And moving kills me, and sets me on fire… and after yet more sea-bird imagery, the likelihood of leaving is front and center:
January’s comin’ back;
I don’t’ know if I’ll be here for that,
but, I’ll still love something,
I still love something…real.
“January” is thus the sister-song to “Cyrk.” In fact, we can think of most of the Cyrk-songs as both celebrating the Welsh countryside and sadly bidding it goodbye. The songs long for the real and to be placed, and yet they are real about Cate’s own longing to journey to new places. This would not matter to us here at Postmodern Conservative, except that they are done with a superior rock artistry, and that they seem particularly clued into the dismayingly change-infused and thus displacing character of the modern age. In a coming post we will consider what Cate’s songs indicate about this also being a secular age, as some have said. These are hard times, in any case, for actually pulling off the long haul with one person and one place, as opposed to simply raising flags for such.
Speaking of flags, nice pillow! I have a feeling Cate and her band will one day return to Wales to stay, but who can know? As Pierre Manent said—see my recent globalism essay—today it seems any person in the world might become a citizen of America. If Cate does so, well, I’ll say “welcome aboard,” and wish her good days discovering the real things to be found in my Southern California homeland, which I miss.
But in my mind’s eye I cannot but now see a lone bird soaring above the fields and cliffs of Wales, and, an implicitly-present scene not shown in the Whit Stillman film Barcelona, where the character Montserrat explains to her family that she’s going to marry an American and live in the U.S. for good. Scenes like that play out all over the world now. The moving to America, and the moving within it, have set the pace. Sure, mobility has actually diminished in the extended recession, but it still seems any of us might wind up anywhere, or at least, that none of us ought to count on making a home place beyond one or two generations. As Tocqueville taught, Tomorrow’s… already been sold. So, while I hope I’m not entirely too cool for the immigration-celebrating “America” by Neil Diamond if the moment is right, “Cyrk” and “January” are far truer to the feel of our times.