Cate Le Bon Breaks Down 7 Perfectly Produced Records

The Producers is an interview series where our favorite artists and producers discuss their favorite music production.

It’s the evening before her seventh solo album arrives, and Cate Le Bon’s plans for the next morning are simple. She’s looking forward to taking a long walk near her family home in Wales, she says at the top of our Zoom call. Tomorrow is just like any other day, even though Michelangelo Dying is Le Bon’s most personal album yet, an abstractionist’s take on a breakup record. 

“I was experiencing this heartache in real time,” she says. “The lyrics, the arrangements, the production—they were all informing each other, like an echo chamber of their own making.” She was shocked she actually finished it. But that was last year, and Le Bon’s tour doesn’t start until January. For now, things are calm. “By the time you start playing the songs live,” she adds, “you have to find a way to stand forward-facing in front of them again.” 

Le Bon’s songs have always held a certain geometry—elegant, slightly surreal—but on Michelangelo Dying, that geometry softens. The piano becomes more fluid, the percussion more porous, and her typically droll, serene voice grows unbound. If Cate Le Bon albums are like an empty box, I’m usually drawn in because of the moody, cool-toned lighting (imagine a James Turrell installation), or the wonky sloping floor. With Michelangelo Dying, stepping into that room feels less mysterious because the artist is present, sifting through pieces of her past without ever glancing up. 

The album being as intimate as it is, Le Bon kept her circle of collaborators relatively tight—her co-producer is longtime cohort Samur Khouja—but not so tight that it excluded one of Le Bon’s musical heroes, John Cale. “There’s this idea that he’s somehow more accessible to other Welsh people, but he’s inaccessible for everyone,” she jokes. The experimental legend and Velvet Underground co-founder submitted his vocals over email for “Ride,” something of a dirge but one that accepts life’s long and strange road. It’s one of Michelangelo Dying’s more affecting moments; as soon as Le Bon heard Cale’s voice, she cried. 

Much like Cale, Le Bon nurtures the next generation of like-minded musicians through her production work. She produced Phonetics On and On, the excellently noisy second LP from Chicago’s Horsegirl, earlier this year, and her touch can be felt on the forthcoming Dry Cleaning album. Having gone through less-than-ideal recording sessions earlier in her career, Le Bon’s main goal in the studio is to make the artist feel comfortable getting lost. “You never want to go into a session with an idea of what something should be,” she says. “Especially when you’re working with young artists, you don’t want to put something upon someone. I try to debug this idea of the hierarchical role of a producer. My job is to be honest, and that honesty is something for them to respond to, not necessarily agree with.”

Below, Le Bon shares a few songs and albums that inspire her when she goes into the studio. Making Michelangelo Dying, she sought out music that affirmed her impulse to loosen up on precision and symmetry, and to just feel through it. (Her soundscapes seem particularly attuned to the emotional impact of spatial positioning; it’s as though saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood recorded his parts from a faraway hilltop, which only intensifies the forlorn feeling.) The Blue Nile’s Hats offered a model for carving a world “out of one piece of rock,” while an Eno ambient supergroup embodied a kind of “machine with a heart”—a vision of music with no hierarchy, where every sound breathes together.

Mary Margaret O’Hara: “Body’s in Trouble” (1988)

Producers: Mary Margaret O'Hara and Michael Brook

Cate Le Bon: This album [1988’s Miss America] is on a lot of musicians’ lists, it’s a cult record. And “Body’s in Trouble” especially has affected a lot of people, I know Perfume Genius has covered it. So I was aware of Miss America, but sometimes it takes you a long time to actually sit down and really connect with something. Maybe a year before I started working on Michelangelo Dying, I bought it on vinyl. It was recorded at Rockfield, in Wales, a studio that I worked in producing H. Hawkline’s album [2023’s Milk for Flowers]. So I knew the room, I knew the space, which may have contributed to the song’s tactility. It's so regimented in one sense, and it's so free and loose in another sense. But they total: one reinforces the other, as opposed to detracts or pulls away from it.  

The song made me realize the piano for this record needed to be much more fluid and emotional, as opposed to my usual mechanical arrangements where every part slots together. I can get by on a piano, but I'm quite limited in how much movement I can pour into it. So when I kept coming back to “Body’s in Trouble,” it really solidified my decision to bring Paul Jones in to play on my record. He is next-level good on the piano, he really pushes things but it’s always on the right side of taste. He's in a band called Group Listening, and we made an EP together, which was a reimagining of songs from [Le Bon’s 2019 LP] Reward. He's really sweet, generous, thoughtful—I knew he was the right person to bring into the fold. I was feeling very vulnerable, and the record’s about heartache. So it's good to be cautious about the people you bring into that vacuum. 

Kate Bush: “The Morning Fog” (1985)

Producer: Kate Bush 

There’s a grandiosity to it that is played so well. There’s something about the lyrics, the arrangements, the melodies: everything feels like it’s informing the other. And so it feels like that grandiosity is self made and self appreciated, that it is entirely for its own perverse satisfaction. Within the grandiosity, there’s real restraint. When that fracas comes in you think, God, that could have been in from the beginning, and it would have been absolutely gorgeous. Instead it comes in from nowhere, and it is a real moment. It’s how she instinctively wrote it and needs it to be. 

The Blue Nile: Hats (1989)

Producer: The Blue Nile

There’s a coldness to it, but it’s blossoming with emotion too. His [Paul Buchanan’s] voice is just there with you, and it’s really transporting. There’s this direct, down-the-line groove to everything that is often uninterrupted. I find that propulsion really affecting.

When Samur [Khouja] and I were working on Michelangelo Dying, Hats was a record that I sent to him. I was like, “Check out the drums on this,” but also just the overall feel of the record. The listening experience of that record as a whole feels like it’s carved out of one piece of rock. And then coming out of the record, you feel like you’ve really been somewhere. A part of me wasn’t really sure if it was going to resonate with Samur, and he just absolutely fell in love with it. He listened to Hats every night, sometimes twice a night [while we were recording]. So that was a really beautiful thing. 

Eno Moebius Roedelius: “Foreign Affairs” (1978)

Producers: Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Conny Plank

It’s minimal, it’s rhythmical. Each instrument is working in this machine-like way, almost like a woven tapestry. There’s no hierarchy to any of the instruments, which I really love. It’s all one living, breathing thing—not music and lyrics separately, just one landscape. It blossoms and things pop out, but there’s no hierarchy.

That idea was important when it came to mixing the vocals on this record. It always felt wrong when they were pushed as loud as they should have been, or whatever. Mixing the vocals was making me feel quite nervous that people would like it to be louder. This track was informative and reassuring to me. This sense of everything coming into formation and informing the next thing. A machine with a heart, I suppose.

Absent Music: 11000 Dreams (2017)

Producer: Jan Van den Broeke

11000 Dreams is a compilation of music by [Belgian artist] Jan Van den Broeke. That record was a big influence—more like sonically, with digital drum sounds and manipulating drums. It’s chaotic, but then there’s this gorgeous cinematic track “June 11 - Who Is Still Dreaming?”. That collagey-ness, being able to switch from something cold and hard to something unbearably beautiful, but it still feels like it’s all happening under the same roof.

I did a session with [percussionist] Valentina Magaletti, playing with contact mics and triggers and different things to have that kind of depth of field between the real straight groove of Dylan [Hadley]’s drums, and then these experimental motifs that Valentina was composing. One thing Samur and I both took from 11000 Dreams was the depth of having those two things simultaneously. 

Faust: “The Sad Skinhead” (1973)

Producer: Uwe Nettelbeck

Faust IV is a record that I reference in every session I do. It’s the perfect record, my number one. But this song is on the list more because the first time I heard it—there's something about the tactility and the space of the production in the mix that made me become aware of production all of a sudden for the first time. I was in my mid to late 20s, and suddenly something shifted and I could see the formation of the sounds in a different way. It's a record that in so many different ways—whether you’re referencing an arrangement, or the playful sensibility, or even the tracklisting—is an endless wealth of inspiration to me when making a record. 

IV is considered a classic of krautrock so I’m curious, how would you describe krautrock production for us non-producers? 

For me, it's playfulness, groove, tactility, and experimentation. It was a rejection of something, and a headlong fall into something else. There’s a joyfulness to it that I find really infectious. Discovering Faust’s IV was like the most delicious, refreshing glass of water. At the time it was all psych music [around me], and I was so sick of it. When I heard that record I really understood what krautrock was, and it is still the music that excites me the most. There’s a total disregard to hierarchy. You make your own sense of order. 

Germs: “Forming” (1977)

Producer: Chris Ashford

To me, it’s a lesson in making a big production choice without ruining the authenticity of the song. It’s not interrupted per se, it’s just the spatial way that it’s absorbed that’s different [from its live performance]. But the authenticity and integrity of the song is unchanged. It’s always a really good example to pull up in the studio, especially if people are feeling unnerved by a suggestion.