“Bass guitar has become one of my favourite instruments. It changes the vantage point for writing songs. It changes everything. It helped get what I was feeling into a shape that made sense,” she muses.

Increasingly so, in order to extract these tiered, subtle songs from such racked lived moments, Le Bon has been seeking intensely private locales, and her yen for remoteness and a sustained quietude brought her to a very particular place. Michelangelo Dying was recorded in and around the desert of Joshua Tree in Southern California. It’s an arid and remote place, a desolate landscape of rugged, uncompromising nature. To many fans, Le Bon’s fascination with Joshua Tree as a place to commune with her material perhaps might seem odd. But when I mention that to plenty of people, the Mojave is a place most often associated with generator metal parties, strange off-the-grid cults, Burning Man, and a patently American brutality, she interjects to offer instead what her own relationship with Joshua Tree has been.

“Yes, it can be all of these things. But for me, it was a place of solace,” she says. “A place of feeling insignificant in a reassuring way. Of feeling like you’re every age all at once. It’s a special place. When you aren’t there, it’s hard to believe it exists.”

As we talk, Le Bon, more and more, projects as a reflective, private person, full of stately dignity. There’s a feeling there that suggests  she’s someone who treats promotional interviews as something that is an expected process, perhaps even a vital one in some regard, but ultimately, a needless one (not an altogether incorrect conclusion). She takes measured breaks between thoughts to calibrate her wording, lapses into tacit responses and, on occasion, gives subtle cues for me to move on.

There are two moments in our talk, though, when she comes fully alight, speaking eagerly and without modulation. The first is when I bring up her recently rescued dog, Mila, who has brought scruffy joy and a grounding element into her life. The second is when I ask about John Cale. 

“I can talk about John Cale for days! What do you want to know?!” she says brightly, her otherwise steadfast lilt rising a pitch for the first time since we started chatting. 

Cale’s name isn’t one that needs an introduction to even casual music listeners. From his early days with the Velvet Underground, producing Patti Smith’s Horses and Nico’s The Marble Index, to his brilliant solo compositions, collaborations with Brian Eno and Terry Riley, and arthouse film scores, he has carved out a vast body of work, doing more to expand and deconstruct sound than perhaps any other living musician.

Over the years, Cale has chosen his cohorts with a knowing, curating hand, and his unostentatious yet magnetic appearance on Michelangelo Dying’s penultimate track is a huge feather in Le Bon’s proverbial hat, as it would be for basically any artist. For all the dense, unabashed beauty she puts on display on her album, there are some gauzily glam, erotically paranoid aspects of Michelangelo Dying that channel one of Cale’s most underrated records, 1975’s Slow Dazzle.

“He has a vision and that’s what he is loyal to, and because of that, he exists in a space that his own,” Le Bon says with a tender reverence, humbly neglecting to mention her own ascension  into a growing body of production work that has brought artists like Deerhunter and St. Vincent into her orbit. 

So there we have Cate Le Bon, now nearing her second decade of recording albums that palpitate with graceful independence and a focused vision. With a keen and convergent hand, Le Bon has assembled yet another collection of songs that are as adept at teasing the brain as they are at rattling the heart. And much like the painstaking work that goes into writing something like Michelangelo, listening to it is no casual moment, but rather a ritual. For Le Bon, at any rate, her art has seemingly long since become a backbone of life itself.

“That’s the beauty of getting older and continuing to create,” she says. “You learn to untether yourself from things that don’t matter. You become more authentic. I don’t want to compromise that. I love music and I want to take care of my relationship with it.”