Cate Le Bon recently relocated to Joshua tree, a vast desertscape of surreal serenity. It seems a fitting metaphor for the Welsh musician’s sixth studio record, Pompeii, a work of great experimentation that, despite being created during a period of unprecedented stillness, seems to weave through time and space.

Composed entirely alone and recorded in Cardiff during lockdown in the UK (having been shut out from the US) with longstanding collaborator Samur Khouja, Le Bon’s usual intimate process was heightened as ubiquitous timekeeping mechanisms were blurred, doors sealed and external noise silenced. Ruminations forged in one room, the result is a longplay that moves unlike any other, introspective yet interstellar, there’s a purposeful, guiding pulse – Le Bon wrote the record primarily on bass – that steers the listener through abstract spiritual and existential grapples: the album title itself ponders how a devastating natural disaster can become a tourist hotspot.

Back in Joshua Tree, here Le Bon reconnects with longtime friend, the legendary journalist, writer and musician Vivien Goldman, as the two discuss the power and struggle of creativity and why it’s the greatest release we have.

Vivien Goldman: Welcome to my pad in Jackson Heights.
Cate Le Bon: How’ve you been?

VG: It’s hard to say because I’ve been so many things in this intervening period.
CLB: You were in Jamaica, right?

VG: Yes. I was in Jamaica, and then the pandemic started just as I was saying, “I think I need another ten days.”
CLB: I found myself in Iceland, which when a global crisis hits, you want to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere. [laughs] I was lucky, I stayed and worked, which I think I needed to occupy my brain in that way. Otherwise I think I probably would’ve – well, I had an existential crisis periodically along the way. But I managed to stave it off for a bit longer.

VG: On your fantastic new record, Pompeii, your original sound still resonates, you’ve got a consistency. I’ve been listening to the old music and you play almost everything, which is so extremely impressive, all that concentration over such a terrain, playing different instruments as well and thinking up the costumes.
CLB: Yeah. When I was in Iceland and I was working on John’s [Grant, Cate produced Boy From Michigan] record, I started playing… I’ve always loved the bass guitar, but I started playing it often. I loved how it would occupy my brain. It stopped me thinking and became this meditative thing. So I was always going to play the bass and the guitars and the synths, and then I always have Stella Mozgawa [Warpaint] on drums. She’s just incredible. It’s so lovely when you find those people who you’re totally comfortable working with. When it’s a continuous flow and there’s no friction, no oppositional, it’s a really beautiful thing. It can take a long time to find that in a collaborator.

VG: Absolutely.
CLB: When I produce records, Samur [Khouja] engineers, so we’ve got that kind of shorthand. He’s so respectful of my role. He never oversteps the mark, never tries to obstruct me or belittle me. He’s very conscious of it, very respectful. So we have this really beautiful working and familial relationship. I spent most of my advance having the luxury of time, having me and him in a room for two months. I’m forever evolving in the way I want to make records and that kind of intimacy… I’m always looking for a vacuum, but I didn’t really expect the world to throw me such an extreme one. [laughs] But you’ve got to make the most of it.

At the moment I feel like the happiest I’ve been making music was when I was also studying furniture-making. I had those two things going on and it didn’t mean that the onus was on one thing, that you’re gripping so tightly to it. I’ll always make music and I always love to collaborate with people, but I feel like right now I’m again looking for that other thing that balances me out a bit.

VG: Interesting.
CLB: You’ve always had that. You wear so many hats.

“I’m always looking for a vacuum, but I didn’t really expect the world to throw me such an extreme one.”

VG: I do. I’m still a broadcaster and professor. When we hang up, you’ll be glad to know I’m grading like a true professor. It’s all going on. I assumed you might go back to doing some more furniture, or maybe you’re thinking of another craft entirely? I mean, look at your video. In my video [for I Have a Voice], I prance around in a red t-shirt dress that I got in the market for nine dollars, whereas you have a series of imaginative costumes that transport the viewer to different worlds. You’ve always costumed, it’s part of your performance.
CLB: Yeah, there’s always that desire to – I just fear stagnating. Like you’re saying, if your brain is occupied doing something else, then the music will only benefit from it. I don’t know; it’s a hard thing to – I’ve just moved out to Joshua Tree in California, and it’s quite a big undertaking to set up a workshop.

“When you feel like all the exits are sealed, you resonate at different frequencies.”

VG: You remember Carlos Castaneda and ‘finding your spot’? Remember that old trope?
CLB: Yeah.

VG: Is Joshua Tree your spot that unblocks certain things for you?
CLB: I think it will be. I waited eighteen months to get here, because I went twice after Tim [Presley, Cate’s partner] got the place, and then I got stuck in Europe. So there’s been this huge delay in getting here; it’s a bit like putting your Christmas tree up in February and then when Christmas comes around, you’re a bit confused about how you feel. You’re not sure if you’re manufacturing feelings or if you really feel them.  I love being here, but since moving I’ve been so busy and occupied I haven’t really sat with myself in the quiet. When did you return from Jamaica?

“If your brain is occupied doing something else, then the music will only benefit from it.”

VG: About two and a half months ago. But all being well, I will return to that island and have a splendid life. We’ll see how it all pans out, because life can be very… lifelike. Sort of like Joshua Tree for you, you aspire to spend a lot of time there and can tap into your different forms of creativity in a low-stress way. There’s a purity to being almost completely on your own with your writing or music for all that time, like a monk, really. Or rather like the nun you portray in your album artwork. I noticed that. You weren’t raised by nuns or anything, were you?
CLB: No, no. The front cover of the record is a replica of a painting that my partner Tim made that became so… I don’t know, it’s hard to remember and empathise with the people we were when everything was so heightened and we were locked down in this house in Cardiff. Samur and I were in one room working on the record; Tim was in the next room painting. He painted this portrait of a woman he said was me, and it was one of the best things. It was so beautiful, not because it was supposed to be me, but his choice of colours… it had this haunting feeling. We continually looked back to it when we were making the record, to try to make a record that sounded like the painting.

VG: A kind of touchstone.
CLB: Yeah, this presence. Again, it’s hard to even imagine how important it was now we’re all a bit freer to move around. When you feel like all the exits are sealed, you resonate at different frequencies. I couldn’t bring myself to put the painting on the record – so I replicated it in a photo, as not to disturb the spirit of the painting. Which sounds ridiculous now, but it made so much sense to me at the time.

VG: No, honestly, it gave you an idea that you followed through with the process.
CLB: Whenever you’re speaking about a record you’ve made and you have to put it into words, sometimes it’s not really possible. That’s why you make music, because you turn the things that you feel into something else. I felt like the painting evoked a feeling I couldn’t quite express in words. There was just something about it that lent itself to the kind of record I wanted to make. They fed into each other.

VG: In the video [Running Away], it’s interesting, it’s got a bit of ‘twisted disco’ feel. I wondered if that was some sort of release that had occurred in this creative period of sunny solitude: you’re moving a lot in the video. Has something happened? Did you feel it?
CLB: I don’t know. I feel so connected to this record, more than any other because it was such – not laborious in a bad way, but so much labour went into extracting it, working on the basslines and fitting everything else around it. The bass was central – the backbone of the record. I had to learn how to play guitar differently to fit around that structure. So maybe it’s that connection to it physically as well.

VG: I know what you mean. When I did Next Is Now I was in London during Brexit and it was going mental, it was so intense and I was very much affected by it. I wrote that book Revenge of the She-Punks and then wrote this album and it tapped into a new anger. Always I was just, “Okay, we duck and we dive and we find our way through,” – I found that letting actual anger come in tended to mess up my thinking and be counterproductive. But this was the first time I allowed myself to feel more – and it came out in these different sorts of writing and music.
CLB: In a crisis, you kind of feel those peaks of being fatalistic and being really angry alongside being hopeful – it’s hard to ignore those things when you feel the squeeze of everything.

VG: But I’m obsessed with hope, I know hope saves lives.
CLB: For sure. But there were moments when it was hard, when the forces were diminishing that hope. But that’s life, isn’t it? It comes, and – yeah, it was quite a bumpy ride. We’re lucky we can react to something and express it. It’s almost like an exorcism, in a way, isn’t it?

VG: It’s cathartic. Well, I’m glad we got our, as it were, babies out in the world. I very much enjoyed yours.
CLB: Tim and I have been listening to yours a lot in the desert. It’s so lovely. We were taken back to your live shows in Mahomet in Texas, which were just so joyful, the crowd was incredible and you and your band were amazing. I hope we get to play together sometime.

VG: I would love that.

Pompeii is out 4th February via Mexican Summer.
Cate Le Bon is on tour across the US, UK and EU in 2022 – dates.

Vivien Goldman‘s debut solo record Next is Now is out now via Youth Sounds / Cadiz Entertainment.