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.