On stage in New York recently, Celeste was delighted to discover that many in the audience were new to her music. It felt like a kind of freedom to the Brit Award-winning, Mercury Prize-nominated singer-songwriter. New songs, old songs – all were received at face value. If only life could be like that all the time.
“Sometimes you play to an audience that is [semi-familiar] with your new song. They’re waiting for the ones they do know. But when you play to people who have no context or idea of what you do, everything’s new to them anyway. It gives you a lot of freedom.”
The 31-year-old was performing at Brooklyn’s 1,100-capacity Warsaw venue, as support to Sam Smyth. She was delighted to bring out older hits, such as Strange, a pulsating, ominous ballad from 2019, on which her voice glimmers like a knife against a soft-rock throb suggestive of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song.
But there was also new room for newer material, including her recent single This Is Who I Am, which features a keening violin riff and harks back to the glory days of trip-hop acts such as Portishead.
RM Block
Most importantly of all, the trip across the Atlantic offered a welcome respite from the pressure building around the release of her second album, Woman of Faces, the long-awaited follow-up to Not Your Muse, her critically lauded debut, from 2021.
The artist born Celeste Epiphany Waite has a complicated relationship with the recording industry and the expectations it places on young musicians. She doesn’t come from a very glamorous background – no stage-school graduate, she – and sees herself as an artist first and pop performer very much second.
Musicians say that kind of thing all the time, yet in Celeste’s case it has the novelty of being true: her new album, a rollercoaster of discovery, takes all sorts of risks. The single On With the Show, for instance, is a downbeat ballad brimming with strings but without guitars or percussion; the LP’s midpoint centrepiece, People Always Change, is built around a descending piano motif by the great minimalist composer Philip Glass.
Heavy and strange, it is not a record to pop on while trying to whistle your troubles away.
An edge of weariness enters Celeste’s voice as she reflects on the long struggle to bring Woman of Faces into the world. Her new album is effortlessly beautiful and endlessly surprising, yet getting it out into the world has clearly involved a degree of pushing uphill.
There’s probably quite a few moments that have given the impression of something that I could be that I’m not
“I feel like I continuously have to fight to preserve my true identity and true sense of what my feeling of authenticity is within myself,” she says. “And I feel like I have to negotiate my identity in the way that it is understood in my music ...
“And then I suppose the way it actually gets put out into the world is another thing in itself. Both times I found that certain figures make a beeline to make a huge impact and impression upon the way that it all sounds, the way that you come across. I find that really difficult.”
Celeste’s mother is English, her late father Jamaican. (He died when she was in her teens.) She believes her mixed-race background means she has had to negotiate preconceived ideas about people of colour and what sort of music they should or shouldn’t be making.
People “want to heavily assign you to what they deem to be a black identity. Which is a stereotypical, mainstream idea of what a black identity is, which can actually be quite damaging to the black community. It only gives one version of what it is. And then, if you don’t take that kind of moulding on as a mixed-race artist, you’re deemed to be too white. So you’re having to figure out the balance in it.”
One problem, she says, is that men continue to wield most of the power in the industry. When women do get to the top, they are often ignored.
“Sometimes it’s as simple as not being listened to. Having to say something six times before someone hears you and takes action. I remember hearing a female CEO say, before the pandemic, ‘This is going to be a tough wave. We need to get prepared. Things are probably going to shut down.’ There was this massive meeting. She was the only woman, and no one listened to her.”
The business has never entirely known what to do with artists who know their own minds. In the case of Celeste, there was a tendency early on to categorise her as a soul or R&B singer. The pigeonholing perhaps began in earnest when she soundtracked the John Lewis Christmas ad in 2021.
She broke with convention by performing her own song, A Little Love, rather than a cover. But the John Lewis ad is still a byword for cosy pop. Did it create a misleading impression about who she was?
“There’s probably quite a few moments that have given the impression of something that I could be that I’m not. Stop This Flame” – the second single from Not Your Muse – “is probably one of those songs. There’s one called Little Runaway too,” she adds, referring to an Adele-style belter from 2020 written with the Robbie Williams collaborator Gary Go.
Celeste believes her videos have sometimes misled audiences, too – that they are too slick and mainstream. That, “along with some of my music on my first album, was not really, really who I truly am. At a record label you have a video commissioner. They go out and they find the directors and who is going to work on your video.
“I was always sure about the people that I wanted to work with – certain creators that I wanted to work with. But I wasn’t seasoned or aware of the processes that take place.
“And I suppose what would happen – which I only realise now, with hindsight – is it gets communicated to that production company and their director, perhaps a certain image that you need to represent alongside your music.
“You discuss the video extensively in an artistic way. When you get on to the set, not everything you have discussed is there. And a lot can be compromised. I feel that happened quite a bit on my first album.”
Celeste was born in California in 1994. Her mother is from Dagenham, in East London; her father lived in the United States. When she was three they split up, and she moved to Britain with her mother, growing up largely in Brighton.
She didn’t know her father as a child, though they reconnected during her teenage years, shortly before he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died at the age of 49, when Celeste was 16 – a tragedy she negotiates on Father’s Son, her single from 2019, which is about absent fathers and the void they can leave (“Maybe I’m lonely, maybe you’re lost. Maybe I’m an echo, or perhaps you’re a ghost”).
Grief gives way to heartache on Woman of Faces, recorded in London and in Culver City, an oceanside suburb of Los Angeles that sprawls between the city proper and Malibu. “Got a feeling I should go,” she croons on On With the Show, which is also the album’s opening track, a ballad about picking yourself up and moving on from an unhappy romance.
But Celeste wants to make clear that Woman of Faces is not a break-up record in any conventional sense. She had a high-profile split from the model Sonny Hall in 2021, but that was long before she started the new LP, so tabloid rubberneckers can jog on.
Woman of Faces is ultimately about her experience as a woman and learning to have the confidence to believe in herself. That said, she appreciates break-up songs have a universal reach and can express sentiments listeners can apply to their own lives.
“Actually, by the time that I got into producing the record, that had long passed. I’d say that Women of Faces is more ... political. But ... the tragedy of a relationship that’s gone wrong, I think a lot of people experience that in their life. Male, female, trans, everyone experiences that kind of loss ... a moment that feels like catastrophe but, ultimately, a moment that reaches its balance and equilibrium. And in the end you may actually be friends with each other. I think everyone experiences that.”
She has noted that women musicians often have short-lived relationships. This is not a coincidence. “The industry puts so much pressure on its artists to work in such a way that doesn’t allow any room for their recovery. It doesn’t allow them any room to breathe on their own [or] give much room for their relationships to be nurtured.”
Celeste comes across as grounded and with her head screwed on. But she does believe in faith and serendipity. She recalls, during the recording of Woman of Faces in Los Angeles, randomly meeting a bunch of middle-aged musical enthusiasts who were throwing a party next to the studio where she was working.
She later discovered that one of the group, an investment banker with apparently peerless taste in music, was friendly with Philip Glass. She believes this connection was crucial in securing Glass’s permission to use a sample of his piano piece “Glassworks: 1. Opening” on the new album.
The track on which it features, People Always Change, was the last recorded for the project; she talks with huge emotion about how hearing Glass’s piece for the first time brought clarity to her at a time of confusion. It also encouraged her to confront her assumptions about classical music and the people who make it.
“I felt these people don’t accept me. So I’m not going to go and listen to their thing. Then one day I was listening to songs on shuffle. This beautiful piece of music” – Glassworks: 1. Opening – “came on. I was cleaning my room. I suppose it made this huge shift in me.”
She had been sleepwalking through life and was in a place of “stagnancy”. She explains that “stagnancy can be through loss or depression or some huge catastrophic shift that you’re not quite expecting. It could be a health condition. Or anything. When stagnancy is in your life, it can take a lot to shift it.”
That downward spiral didn’t simply impact on her mentally; it had a physical effect, too.
“In feelings of grief, you can live in the same world and the same narrative, gathering dust for years at a time. You see people that gather that dust. It’s in their mind. But it’s also in their body. They might get physical ailments. They might get hunched over. And when I heard this piece of music, it was that shifting moment for me that made me realise, ‘Oh, I’ve been living in this state of decay for a couple of years, in a kind of depression.’”
She says that even her “room was covered in dust, and there’s clothes everywhere”. “And I was thinking, like, Okay, something needs to change now, because everybody else is moving on with their lives. Everybody else is moving towards what they want.
“You’re standing still, basically. So that’s where People Always Change came about. It just came in this moment of ‘Sh*t. I feel like everyone’s doing their thing, and I stood for a couple of years.’ So what are you going to do about it?”
Woman of Faces is released on Friday, November 14th
