Light living with Lael Neale

Of course, she knew that already, but moving back to the city after three years on her parents’ farm in Virginia really hammered the point home. “I kind of felt like I had been dropped down into Babylon,” she reflects. “I mean, the city hadn’t changed that much, but I think I was sensitised to it after being on the farm so long.”

In fact, Lael Neale has been vacillating between city and country for much of her adult life, trying to figure out where she belongs. These feelings of estrangement come to a head in her latest album, Altogether Stranger, whose nine tracks capture both L.A.’s magic and its air of impending calamity, to which she had a front-row seat. “Where I live is a house perched up in the hills of Echo Park – you can constantly hear helicopters and sirens, trash trucks and cars,” she adds. “And when I write, I look out the window, so I’m sure the landscape impressed itself on my subconscious.”

But if our future is doomed, at least L.A. is upfront about it. There’s a grimy truthfulness to the city Neale describes, casting herself as a bewildered spectator left to wander trash-lined streets while alarms clang from every direction. With their use of pulsing tape loops and haunting, gossamer vocals, the songs have an ephemeral quality, as if Neale is observing the passage of time while almost vanishing. Sometimes, it sounds as though she wished she could.

“Escape is definitely a theme of the record,” she agrees. “It’s funny how writing is a means of letting myself know what I actually feel about things. It was only listening back to the songs I realised, oh god, I want to get out of the city.” In “Down on the Freeway”, for instance, she hops on a bus only to realise she’s going nowhere – the drum machine conjuring up the ceaseless traffic passing through the city’s arteries, while background drones buzz like overheated engines. Similarly, the record’s first single, “Tell Me How To Be Here”, is a plea for some kind of L.A. user manual, as she watches workers march to and from their data-driven jobs.

But today, Neale is back in Virginia, where the pace sounds infinitely more tranquil. “I wake in the morning to the sound of birds and wind and leaves and trees, and walk without seeing a single person,” she says. “I wear the same clothes each day. I’m way more attuned to the natural rhythms of life and the seasons, all of which are conducive to making things and living simply, and not needing much.”

It’s tempting to picture the countryside as an uncomplicated Eden, and for Neale, moving here in 2020 (“like we were running out of a burning building”) was a decision that bore a lot of fruit. She’d barely unpacked before being signed to Sub Pop, putting out Acquainted With Night in 2021, and spending the rest of lockdown recording her third album, Star Eaters Delight (2023). Acquainted With Night also granted Los Angeles a starring role – she wrote it with “a kind of glimmering, romantic, glowing perception.” “But since I realised this isn’t how I want to live any more, it’s evolved into something darker,” she adds. “This record has a little more about how modern life feels unsustainable.”

That includes the farm, by the way. Her lyrics draw heavily on dichotomies: the urban wasteland versus the pastoral idyll, the solitary figure versus the swarming crowd. Beneath the surface, however, nothing is so neatly packaged. The Los Angeles of smog, substance abuse, and sirens is also the Los Angeles of super blooms and fateful encounters in coffee shops. The corner of Virginia she grew up in, where chickens, ducks, and cows might freely roam, is also a place that harbours deep-seated resentments and prejudices, which its inhabitants aren’t always willing to address.

“A lot of rural people are out of touch with what other humans are experiencing, so it’s easy to project all this stuff onto different types of people you’ve never interacted with,” she reflects. “Whereas when you live in a city, you’re way more sensitive to the fact that these are just humans, and we’re all just trying to do our best. You can have these really meaningful, special moments with people you might never see again – I still think about people I had a five-second interaction with. Those anonymous encounters can be really profound.”

Such flashes of connection mean even more when played out against a backdrop of modern malaise. Before Echo Park, Neale lived briefly in a crumbling 1920s hotel, whose wallpaper had been peeling for decades, as if to drive home her sense of impermanence. As well as multiple tenancies, she went through multiple jobs: nannying, waitressing, steering visitors around galleries, and manning boutiques, just about making rent. Meanwhile, L.A. was becoming more and more transactional, not helped by all the high-rolling tech bros sweeping into California.

Man versus machine: another favourite dichotomy of Neale’s. Technology in the 21st century seems to have mostly involved codifying behaviour, dulling people’s natural responses and optimising our every step. In her Substack, Consensual Sound, Neale writes about its negative effect on the psyche: “The algorithm of these platforms begins harmlessly – mirroring our real life actions, accounting for what we like and dislike and sharing our routines and preferences with others. But in a short time, and without full consciousness, we start to slowly lose autonomy as we are encouraged into what actions to take, entrained toward certain preferences and aversions, and compelled into routines that structure our days.”

Still, Neale seems better than most at going offline. Taking our call on a borrowed iPhone, she describes the seclusion needed to make an album, the spells of doing nothing but writing or painting for days on end. Her unusual song structures and lack of embellishment are a far cry from glossy mainstream pop, a result of being able to shut out the world when she needs to. “It’s my subtle rebellion against the way that music is now,” she says. “The main revelation I keep coming to is that the more I continue to pare back and strip things down, the stronger the message comes through.”

Other creative revelations include the Omnichord, whose twinkly, harp-like synths granted her sound its eerie, nostalgic quality. There was also the four-track recorder presented to her by long-time collaborator Guy Blakeslee “after one of my final frustrations.” Recording straight into the machine, she could express (or erase) her ideas without hesitation, something she’s still thankful about: “He gave me permission to lean into my own approach, which is much more raw. Other things I’d been trying to do were suffocating the songs immediately. With the four-track, I could actually breathe, because it’s simple and it’s quick, and I don’t have to overthink anything – it can just be pure.”

Given her devotion to the cassette as an artistic medium, I’m curious if she ever stumbles upon her old tapes, worn-out mixes maybe, or made-up radio shows broadcast from her childhood bedroom. She doesn’t. “I definitely had those, but not now. I’ve really been so unsentimental my whole life,” she says. “The last thing I was holding onto was my journals, but I threw them all away. I’d much rather live light and not be weighed down.”

Her listening habits are just as uncluttered. She might stick a Mississippi Records compilation on the stereo, or something by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the Ethiopian nun who wrote piano compositions from her convent bedroom. But given the choice, she would almost always pick silence. External influences crackle like unwelcome static, interrupting her flow of thought.

The same goes for poetry. “I love poetry so much, but I really hate most of it,” she laughs. Her most-thumbed volumes include Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, and the Coleman Barks translation of Rumi. “My favourite poets talk about mundane things, and so if I feel like I'm going too lofty or something, I have to insert some really mundane thing too,” she says. “I try to make it so that it’s grounded and relatable and not like, you know, really airy and romantic.”

Her lyrics are grounded, but they still have a spiritual streak. The track “All Good Things Will Come to Pass” could be a consolation or curse – the sound of someone calling time on civilisation, or seeking out some higher plane of understanding. The ambivalence, she says, was intentional, and is in keeping with the album’s core themes. “I chose that line because I feel like society could go either way. This could be a new age and the most beautiful awakening of humanity,” she says. “Or maybe the good has already come and it’s all down the drain now.”

In closing track “There From Here” she makes one final, desperate bid for freedom, only to wind up in an airport where the material trappings of society are even harder to escape; the clouds of unsolicited perfume, the constant motion of people who never reach their destination but sit paused in replica restaurants, glued to a screen for news of cancellations or delays. “I wanna go somewhere sunny and clear,” she sings, softly. “But I’m sad as the last unsold souvenir.

Despite it all, Neale believes there’s a shred of hope, if we can just look out of the window and confront our illusions. “I definitely don’t want the record to come across as a condemnation of cities, or humans even,” she continues. “I think a lot of the time we don’t want to be made to feel guilty, so things get swept under the rug and ignored. But we need to start seeing clearly and understanding that we have power.” The difficulty lies in figuring out when to listen to the sirens, and when to tune them out for our own sanity.