People captured in their final moments.” More recently, it had brought to mind other environmental catastrophes, “and the way we try to palm off tragedies or qualify them in ways that mean we’re safe. “I was always struck by the idea of someone’s final gestures-something so private-turned into something so public and permanent. “I remember first hearing about it in primary school,” she said. I asked what the lost city of Pompeii meant to her. Le Bon told me that she usually thought of an album’s title long before recording it. Heba Kadry, the Brooklyn-based mastering engineer who worked on the album, told me that she’d been delighted when she first listened to the recordings-“all these amazing, New Wave-y kinds of sounds, way more synth-heavy than Cate’s earlier albums, but also still minimal, sharp, architectural.” Kadry said the tracks were so fully realized that she felt a “beautiful kind of pressure not to fuck them up.” But the music often has an up-tempo eighties vibe, with whining, Eno-esque guitars in “Remembering Me,” lashings of synthesizer and saxophone, and a head-nodding danceability throughout. The result, Le Bon’s sixth solo album, wades into bleak themes-loss, memory, legacy, the destruction of the planet. In the mornings, the three housemates cheered themselves up, Le Bon said, by “commuting”-leaving, making a big loop, and coming home with coffee to start the workday. (The drummer Stella Mozgawa joined via Zoom from Australia, adding her tracks to Le Bon’s guitar, bass, piano, and vocals.) From the upstairs windows, Le Bon could see seagulls wheeling through the gray winter sky. Le Bon had spent time there in her twenties, and she was joined by her romantic partner, the musician Tim Presley of White Fence, and her co-producer Samur Khouja. Le Bon’s was mostly recorded on a residential street in Cardiff, Wales, in a terrace house lent to her by her friend Gruff Rhys, of the Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals. ![]() “Pompeii” is one of a wave of albums made by artists in various iterations of isolation. “What you said was nice, when you said my heart broke a century.” Much of the time, I have no idea what Le Bon is singing about, but find myself moved anyway. “What you said was nice, when you said my face turned a memory,” she sings on “Harbour,” from the new album. And then there are her lyrics-enigmatic, aphoristic, packed with oddly juxtaposed concrete images, like a Dadaist collage. In the videos for her captivating new album, “Pompeii,” she strikes theatrical poses, unsmiling, in a color wheel of eccentric costumes, some of which encase her like carapaces. She sings in a slightly detached voice, punctuated by occasional, inscrutable sighs. Le Bon was born in Wales in 1983, and lived there until 2013, when she moved first to Los Angeles, and then, in 2021, to Joshua Tree, in the Mojave Desert. She sometimes repeats a word or phrase until it sounds uncanny. She will write a lovely melody, then thread it through patches of dissonance. All three of them say that, for this version of the song, the chemistry between them was undeniable.The music of Cate Le Bon, the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, has a rigorous, art-school weirdness that can be both entrancing and estranging. ![]() ![]() Child wrote the song first for Bonnie Tyler with a different title, but he later re-wrote the song with Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora about a more universal feeling. While there were rumors floating around that the song was about Jon Bon Jovi’s breakup with actress Diane Lane, the idea for “You Give Love a Bad Name” started before Bon Jovi put his spin on it. ![]() Ultimately, “You Give Love a Bad Name” is one of the hardest rocking reinventions of the idiom “don’t judge a book by its cover.” This Bon Jovi song recounts the damage done when looks drive decisions in love. He acknowledges that he played his part in her game. Yet, our rock ‘n’ roll narrator isn’t completely innocent, either. He fell for her angel’s smile, then she put through hell. The narrator of the song has been fooled by his lover’s looks and commits to a relationship that doesn’t fit him. It’s a cautionary tale of love gone wrong.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |