In the immediate aftermath of her daughter’s birth, Natasha Khan experienced a profound disconnection from reality. “When you’ve had a kid, you’re almost in a world between two worlds. It was very open and very pure,” says the British singer-songwriter, who records as Bat for Lashes. “I was like an animal being, living on instinct. And then going into the studio, I was needing to make sense of everything that was happening and documenting it somehow.”
These experiences were the basis for Bat for Lashes’s meditative and otherworldly sixth album, The Dream of Delphi. Khan has named the LP after her daughter, who serves as her muse across a moving collection of beautifully melodramatic ballads and pensive instrumentals. But in addition to delivering a vivid portrait of parenthood, the project is an intriguing chapter for Khan, who has been compared to Björk and Kate Bush, and prompted the NME to compare her music to fairy tales “soundtracked by skin-prickling electro”.
There are plenty of skin-prickling moments on The Dream of Delphi, which explores the entire emotional spectrum of new parenthood, from elation to exhaustion. It starts with the upheaval of childbirth, which she evokes on the stark piano composition The Midwives Have Left.
“I had her at home with no drugs at all. I threw myself in 200 per cent,” says Khan, whose collaborators have included Beck and Damon Albarn. “I’m going to go for this and feel it all and grab it. I went into it with a very careful, quite disciplined preparation – to get to the point where I could let go and let it take me. I felt like I was making really weird sounds, moving my body. Trying to wriggle out the pain in a way – move her down. I was in the bath at home for a lot of it. I was like, ‘F***, this is a roller coaster I cannot get off.’ It was like a bad trip.”
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Delphi was born during the six years Khan lived in Los Angeles with her then partner, the Australian actor and model Sam Watkins. They have since separated, and Khan has moved back to London. The pain of that split is scorched into the DNA of the album. But the record does not deal with these upheavals in a diaristic fashion – it isn’t like Taylor Swift’s songs, where sleuths can pinpoint the precise meaning of each lyric.
‘Now that I’m a bit older I can get away with saying, “I’ve got my kids on the half-term. I can’t do that… I don’t want to do that.” It’s quite nice. I get a bit more choice now about what I want to spend my time on’
The Dream of Delphi instead unfolds as a series of blurred snapshots from Khan’s life. She sings about the bittersweet experience of seeing her daughter grow on the keening track Christmas Day, and ruminates on what the child’s future holds on the woozy and contemplative Letter to My Daughter.
It isn’t all heavy and po-faced, either. Inspired by Delphi’s “early love of house piano bangers”, Khan covers the Baauer and Bipolar Sunshine track Home – her daughter’s favourite tune to listen to in the car. She also sees the album as bigger than her personal experiences.
“The album is a devotional lovesong to motherhood in all its forms,” she says. “Not my own raw experience of that, but how that sort of reminded me or helped me to remember my first relationship with Mother Nature and how, sometimes, I’ve forgotten that I need that rely on that connection.”
Khan is speaking over Zoom, where she is fresh-faced and dressed in understated beiges and whites. It’s quite a change from her early career, when she would pose in photoshoots wearing sparkling headbands with streaks of glitter beneath her eyes, as if she had come straight from an all-night rave inspired by Edwardian children’s fiction.
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The look was a perfect metaphor for her music: her first LP, Fur and Gold, from 2006, featured big Björkesque elegies and thrilling harpsichord solos. Initially an underground hit, it quickly gained momentum. It was the first of three of her albums to be shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.
She followed that project in 2009 with her major-label debut, Two Suns. The reviews were ecstatic – “the next Kate Bush”, said Rolling Stone – and she had a quasi-chart smash with the single Daniel, a phantasmagorical banger that sounded like a thrift-shop Fleetwood Mac and went top 40 in the UK.
Despite the acclaim, disillusion was beginning to set in. Her label, EMI, was undergoing a slow death as file-sharing started to hollow out the major-label music industry. The woman who signed Khan was let go. Her replacement had one priority: to shift units. The stress led Khan, she believes, to develop a thyroid condition.
The suggestion came down that Khan might consider working with outside songwriters – a new approach for her but standard practice with major pop stars. She agreed to give it a shot and wrote with the Rihanna and Lana Del Rey collaborator Justin Parker on Laura, a single for her 2012 album, The Haunted Man. While it’s a beautiful song, it wasn’t a hit, and she was not keen to repeat the experience.
“I don’t miss those days,” she says. “I was probably the least happy. I was excited, and it was cool to have singles [supported by a major label]. That’s obviously an amazing thing for an artist to have. But, on another level, I was rootless and lost in a way, and being buffeted around by music being looked at as a business.”
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She had started to feel less like an artist than an entry on EMI’s ledger. “The business model was very weird to me. I’m quite private. My music is my way of surviving in the world. It’s very precious to me. I was never really naturally a pop star or something like that. Now that I’m a bit older I can get away with saying, ‘I’ve got my kids on the half-term. I can’t do that… I don’t want to do that.’ It’s quite nice. I get a bit more choice now about what I want to spend my time on.”
Parenthood can lead us to reassess our own childhoods – to cast old memories in a new light. So it was with Khan, who grew up in the commuter town of Rickmansworth, on the northwestern fringes of London, the daughter of a champion squash coach from Pakistan. Her parents separated when she was 11, at which point her bedroom became her refuge from the outside world.
‘I think it’s not about whether your music is mysterious or blatant. It’s about the spirit beneath it. And the healing powers and the healing quality of that work – because I think [the purpose] of all art is to heal and to give revelation’
“If I’d grown up in London, in the middle of culture, I probably wouldn’t have cared so much [about art]. But I had my bedroom, my Walkman and cousins who played me cool stuff. Everyone was really straight and traditional, and it was quite boring. We spent a lot of time outdoors, a lot of rambling. I looked after a horse for a couple of years, and spent lots of time out in nature, listening to music and developing these otherworldly places to go. I think suburbia is a great place to grow up for creative people.”
New or old, Khan’s music is labyrinthine and brimming with mystery. Consider her early track, Horse and I. “Got woken in the night, by a mystic golden light,” goes the first verse, in a couplet that has more in common with John Boorman’s Excalibur than with something you might hear on the radio.
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That isn’t to say that Khan takes issue with songs that say exactly what they mean or that she thinks Swift or Olivia Rodrigo are committing musical heresy by writing lyrics that express their feelings in very literal terms. It’s okay to be on the nose – as long as you are coming from a place of integrity.
“I don’t know about on-the-nose writing. When I was younger I loved Nirvana – and that is pretty on the nose, isn’t it? There’s a place for that, definitely, if it’s good,” she says. “I think it’s not about whether your music is mysterious or blatant. It’s about the spirit beneath it. And the healing powers and the healing quality of that work – because I think [the purpose] of all art is to heal and to give revelation.”
You can lose yourself in a Nirvana song as much as you can in a 12-minute prog odyssey, she says. “What I don’t like is when there’s no soul to something. The problem with any art form, and especially maybe nowadays, is that our attention spans are so much shorter, and everything is so quick and surface, and we move from one thing to the next. It’s like making a meal and not seasoning it and eating it really quickly.”
Today music is just part of how Khan expresses her creativity. She has adapted her new record into a film, Dream of Delphi: A New Transmission, which will consist of choreographed interpretations of the music. She also has a line of tarot cards, the Motherwitch Oracle Deck. Meeting fans in London recently, she went beyond the usual selfies and autographs and told their fortunes instead.
“As the years have gone by, I’ve developed so many creative practices. The next thing I might do is a play. I love storytelling. I love music. But I also love costume and I love sets. I love creating worlds and universes. I love psychology and psychoanalysis and transformation. There’s so much more to me than the album or the music, which I still hold in high regard as an art form. I feel like there’s a lot more I want to give.”
The Dream of Delphi is released by Decca on Friday, May 31st
