Lael Neale wants to burn the museums down
A brief interview with American chanteuse Lael Neale on the beauty ( & ugliness) of personal experience composed in a universal language, all on the trails of her very own, dead poet society.
As a music maker, Lael Neale is not easy to pin down. She inhabits a space where folk singers may turn to find their references, a garden cultivated by words spoken a few centuries ago, evoking an ever-growing cascade of wisdom and longing. Some may call it Eden, Shangri La or a fictitious form of the Silver Factory. Her words and music come from a folk tradition where singers appeal to our dreaming minds, challenging us to focus, reconsider and perchance to dream. All laid bare within the plastic context of an Omnichord, guitar-like textures and the glimmering contrasts of LoFi.
Do you feel more like an alien or a human at the moment?
“Definitely more like an alien now.”
On Monday night at Doka, the performance of Lael Neale was reminiscent of a sermon. An attentive audience bathed themselves in the grand sounds of her small Omnichord synthesizer, drum computers and guitars. With Guy Blakeslee the duo performs songs of her latest album Altogether Stranger, released via Sub Pop released in the beginning of May. It is an evolved sound compared to 2023’s Star Eaters Delight and even more so, to Lael Neales 2021’s Sub Pop debut Aquainted With Night. Together with her partner in time & co-producer Guy Blakeslee, they are more and more becoming the 1960s counter culture act they could’ve been, if only Ed Sullivan had hosted them with members of the Wrecking Crew in an abandoned church building next to the beaches of LA half a century ago.
Fittingly, being out of place describes a modus operandi they are both very familiar with. In the liner notes for the new album you can read about a specific flavor of alienation: returning from rural Virginia to L.A., after the pandemic “I felt like an extraterrestrial landing on a dystopian planet so I’m writing from the perspective of a being from another realm witnessing the peculiarities of humanity.” In this sense, the songs of Altogether Stranger are existing in a very personal, but also very American landscape. There are mentions of motel signs, shadows of choppers and various noises from the big city. During the concert I often find myself musing about the human capabilities of adaption and the underlying myth of whatever is being sold as ‘normality’, ‘modernity’ and ‘traditionalism’. As an encore they play a song by the Paris Sisters, a band made infamous by another not-so-normal Lynchian structure: Twin Peaks.
Off stage, Lael Neale is a well-mannered, soft-spoken person. She greets her fans, signs their records and is happy to do an interview with me, even after the show and what has been, admittedly, a long day. Her and Guy Blakeslee are doing their whole tour on their own, just the two of them, which sounds romantic and exhausting at the same time. As we are sitting down with Lael Neale at the backstage area, we are finding ourselves in a space, of which the main feature seems that it is painted black. Here, in conversation, she doubles down, saying the feeling of strangeness, or alienation, follows her around, everywhere and especially in Europe. She muses:
“As we were driving into Amsterdam, there's the old windmills and stuff, and then right next to it are the golden arches of McDonald's. “
She elaborates how she holds Europe in high regard, how to her, its architecture and aesthetics are some of the highest forms of art and beauty, but that she can also see the spread of modernity across the globe. It is a sentiment that can be gathered from various songs on the album, especially on the center piece: Tell Me How To Be Here. It’s fragile shimmers and vulnerable lyrics speak of a delicate uneasiness. Is there a right way to act, think, and proceed?
Lael Neale doesn’t dare to speak of right or wrongs. Rather, she presents us with a synchrony of things, where nothing is either good or bad. She likes to shift our attention to different layers of the so-called moralism. Just like the Greek gods were defined by the best and worst of humankind a thousandfold, she writes her own adaptation of the old testaments Genesis, in All Good Things Will Come To Pass, transcending some of her best bars to a divine, plastic gospel experience: We’ll take the whole world in our hands / Make mistakes / Make amends / Make amusement parks / Prison yards / Salad bars / And shiny, shiny cars / And all good things will come to pass.
You manage to make our minds refocus about what's really in front of us, maybe how crazy things are. Is it a challenge for you to keep that focus?
“[…] There's some value in being critical, but I think it can also suffocate you ultimately. So I try to find a balance between observation and critical judgment and then loosening the focus a little bit and just breathing and appreciating that there's [both] beauty and ugliness in our modern world the way it is. “
It is one of the great challenges of our time, to be able to accept a polyphonous multitude of experiences simultaneously. But is it enough? When Guy Blakeslee performed as a supporting act that night, he asked the audience if anyone was from the US and emphatically stated that they would not agree with everything that is happening there right now, undoubtedly talking about the current political leadership. Though the songs he sang were more in the realm of old school lovesongs and troubadourist nostalgia. When I asked Lael Neale, if she thinks her music has gotten more political in recent years (for example, there are hints of environmentalism: I’m heavy as plastic/In the belly Atlantic) she strays away from it, avoiding altruistic judgement:
“I feel like the environmental stuff is not political. I don't want to be political. I don't want to engage with that paradigm at all because I think it's what's ruining our world. So, to me, taking care of the land and the earth and each other is not political […]”
We are all children of our times and have been socialized by our circumstances. It may be hard for a European (let alone Swiss person) to fully sympathize with this wish, to not take part in something so banal as a political discourse. But as the political system in the US is dominated by two major parties and the algorithms are running on rage, scandal and cloud-based opulence, Lael Neale’s music gives us room to breathe. But the question begs again, is it enough? Is Listening the penultimate frontier, to preserve us from mutual destruction?
If alienation is the price we pay for ‘modernity’ we may all be lost souls, playing catch up to the rhythms of globalization (and evidently, capitalism). But if we are crazy, we are at least sane enough to realize it. In several moments, the songs of Altogether Stranger reign high above the mundane, like sacral paintings, to be put on the walls of a museum currently in flames. In such a scenario, I ask her, if we have time to ponder the serene beauty, when the whole room is about to be turned to ashes? In a wry response, she calls to another shift of perspective:
“Yeah, I think museums are over. Like, paint on the walls of the old buildings or something. The museums are… yeah, maybe they should be burned”
In that world, there would be no more room for elitism and no more rulebook for art history canon, the things that were once set in stone, more fluid now. It is ironic for her to make such a statement after also saying how much she cherishes the history that is engraved into the European landscape, but maybe that’s just the way Utopia goes – a nuanced portrait of multiplicity. Lael Neale says she could argue all night why she would like to burn museums down, and how one should paint on the walls instead of hanging pictures on frames, but as the vision of such a conversation well-nigh manifests our evening comes to an end, and I’m left intrigued, fatigued and mystified. One last question I quickly needed to get off my chest:
Lael Neale, do you believe in the goodness of human nature?
“Yes, I do”
Hi Reader! If you are interested in a transcript of the interview / would like to listen to it you can do so at my dayjob here: https://radiox.ch/news-archiv/lael-neale-interview-mai-2025.html