The (New) Age of Lael Neale

In the intimacy of Doka’s basement in Amsterdam, an indulgent few people congregated as if to attend mass — or, to be even more astute, to pry on someone’s confessional. Lael Neale’s resonant, yet bubbly chants fill the room with the same kind of sacredness  – and blessed be those who heed them. Without meaning to be mawkish, the duo (composed of Lael herself and Guy Blakeslee) managed to quickly dissolve the crowd into tears and runny noses, thanks to the universally-translatable way they weave the spiritual into our shared, pragmatic urban reality. Their sumptuous, chime-heavy discography speaks from the fronts of alienation, love, solitude, and our weird, weird times, mustering a balance that’s difficult to keep when your topics of reference are both dreary and dreamy. “This is my re-interpretation of the Book of Genesis… and a nod to humanity’s subsequent rise and decay” Lael announces high-spiritedly, just before breaking into All Good Things Will Come to Pass – a rightful chronology evoking God’s order of keeping things simple, all the way into our sterile, machine-ruled zeitgeist. All things considered, their snarky narratives evade self-indulgence, while their satire and godliness beat any too-literal association to cultural (or clerical) institutions – leaving space for a fuzzy and healing performance. 
So far, their Virginia farm-homebase commute to Los Angeles has been fueling and fermenting the admiration-disdain spectrum that contours their music. As of recently, they settled for the former, in an attempt to seize a much needed communion with nature. Hopping on a European tour as a brief break from their now-still life, they gratified us with an insider glimpse into their way of making, with Lael and Guy taking us through transcendentalism, bodies of water, telekinesis podcasts, and utopia.

Hi guys! I’m very happy to talk to you both. How’s it going?
Lael: Doing well, a little bit tired maybe today. But I feel grounded and kind of calm.
Guy: I’m feeling great, too. We really like Amsterdam, and we got some nice coffee, so everything’s good. 

Where are you based now?
Lael: We just moved across the country from California to Virginia, which is where I’m from. My family has a farm there, but we’re always travelling.

Sweet. How did you guys meet? I’m very curious.
Lael: You can tell the story.
Guy: [laughs] I guess it happened through us both playing music in LA at the same time. I was a huge fan of her music. We were friends for a while, and then I asked her to record on my album. I was fanning out on her. I was following her to all these different shows.

Was there something you ultimately bonded over, or a defining point where you knew you were going to make music together?
Lael: We were having coffee dates a lot to talk about the philosophy behind recording or music. Guy was my mentor, helping me figure out how to record. Eventually I got so frustrated with all the people I was working with before that he volunteered to help. But in that way, he became a producer that was empowering, versus one that was trying to just assert their own mark…
Guy: Eventually I gave her my four tracks and left them in her house so she could record it all herself. And then I helped mix the songs and stuff, but left her in her own space to do it without someone standing over her shoulder.

Sweet. So you were both performing solo before; in relation to that, also given that it’s a pervasive theme in your lyrics, how do you relate to solitude?
Lael: Right before the making of my first album, I was working as a nanny. I was taking care of a little kid, and I was living with the family for around six years. So right before we were starting to record, I split with the family, and it was a little bit traumatic and hard to do. So I went off on my own and got my own place to live, and I was single, and I was just very often going out alone. And it felt really frightening at first, but then when I look back, that was a really special and magical time. That was right in the window when I wrote most of those songs. So that record’s very much about solitude and self-enquiry and digging deep into myself for my truest voice.

One of the first mentions in relation to your name is transcendentalism. Would you think it would still prevail today?
Lael: We talk about that a lot because we’re living in one of the most extremely materialistic paradigms. I guess maybe most people are oriented towards a world that is very science-based and very much like what you see is what you get. I know there are people who see worlds beyond this one or layers to this dimension. But I would say the majority does not. What do you think?
Guy: I feel like transcendentalism influenced our culture a lot, so it’s woven into it already – self-reliance, Emerson, “The American way” is also very much informed by the transcendentalists, in the way it’s about individuality and being your own person. It wasn’t super political, but on certain levels they were activists. They were progressive, and all for abolition of slavery and things, so they had a huge influence towards what eventually happened, although things are getting weird now, too. It was radical at the time, because instead of the church, it was suggested that you can access God or source or the universe in yourself instead of someone else telling you what to do, and through that we’d be probably in much better harmony. 

On the other hand, do you think it’s also confluent with, for example, American individualism?Guy: It’s interesting, because the transcendentalist version of individualism would be about following one’s own truth, but not in the sense that everyone else can go to hell. So it seems like it’s evolved to basically be kind of more like a materialist, individualist attitude, every man for himself, but I don’t think that’s what transcendentalism is. 

What is your utopian structure of living?
Lael: That’s a cool question. I do that kind of visualisation often, and for me, a lot of it has to do with being in a state of communion with the natural world. And it has to do with being in tune with the cycles of the planet. But then I feel like the utopian vision also has a lot to do with community and connection with other people. I don’t know how I would create my own utopia, because in Los Angeles, we have our community that’s amazing, and we connect with everyone so deeply and feel supported. And then in Virginia, we have the nature aspect where we can grow things and follow the seasons. So my utopia is kind of split.
Guy: I guess my version of what she said is getting to live in the middle of nowhere, but getting to come and do things like what we’re doing now is a pretty good balance. We can retreat there, but we’re still part of the world because of what we’re doing now.

How does living in the U.S. in our current year shape your sound? Do you feel like you’re creating something out of a need to oppose a specific system?
Lael: I feel like Star Eaters Delight was the beginning of making more commentary about authoritarianism. And also politics in general, because that was written during the pandemic time, when there were different opinions on how to navigate it, and it was splitting people up in a really severe way. Politicians latched onto that and… Took the divisions further. That paved the way for what’s happening now, because it’s creating divides where there don’t need to be divides. And it seems… It seems like it’s a conspiracy. Yeah. It seems like it’s all simulated. It’s so extreme, and it’s so far from what I think the people’s hearts are. People are able to go down their rabbit holes in their algorithmically curated feeds, and become so attached to one reality that they can’t see another one, and each side seems insane to the other one.
Guy: When I started making music in the 90s, it didn’t really matter who was the president. It was definitely anti-war, anti-establishment, punk rock music, and so that’s how I learned what I learned about music in the first place. Nirvana was a big thing when I was 12, and they were activists in just the right way, standing up for people and stuff, so that’s always been an aspect of how I engage with music and culture and art. Now it’s just kind of ridiculous. This time I feel more as if we need to be caring and kind. It suddenly got real, and I feel it’s important to be understanding even towards people that we disagree with, there’s no more resolution in yelling. I would like to play more in America because I feel like people need something to help them connect with each other. 

That’s a good way to reconcile. You mentioned this constant oscillation between the two environments, nature versus city and alienation versus communion. I was wondering where you currently position yourself in relation to ambivalence in general – is it a reason for anxiety, or a driving force?
Lael: It helps me to be present more, because I only know moment to moment what it is that I want. We’ve been moving back and forth between these two completely different places, we basically moved to the city, made this whole album, made a movie for the album, and then we moved away again the day that it got released, basically. It’s a part of our process to kind of bounce back and forth. But it seems like we’ve moved to the countryside more permanently this time, almost to be more free. Because when you live in a big city and pay a lot of rent, it’s hard to go anywhere. It was inspiring to be there for this period of time, but also it can be more inspiring for us to have more time and space to not have to hustle.

In that connection to that, do you think reconnecting with the simple life is even more fruitful once you experience the other side of things?
Lael: I feel so grateful for very simple things. Even just walking into the sun in the morning with no sirens or trash everywhere, or people yelling, or cars. I need much less than I do in the city somehow. You can just flow through the day without feeling like you need to distract yourself, as when you’re in the city.

I consume a lot of media, but the first time I heard any of your songs (I think it was I Am The River), it touched me in a very specific way and stuck with me for weeks on end. I was wondering what is your connection to poetry and writing in general, outside of your lyrics writing?
Lael: In seventh grade, I had this amazing teacher who awakened something inside of me. Also just reading things that kind of opened my mind. But that cracked open my interest in creative writing. And then I kind of wanted to go into environmental science in college, and as I got in there, I realised I have to take chemistry, biology and physics. And I was like… I can’t even count.

“Guys, please, I just like flowers.” 

Lael: Exactly… I was like, Oh, I just want to talk about the beauty of the world. I didn’t really actually want to study about one specific species of grass that grows. But then I had some really amazing teachers in university, and I majored in English. So I swerved and did Literature. I guess as far as writing, I have just spent my whole life doing it every morning, if I can. As I am right-handed, sometimes I write left-handed poetry, because it opens a whole new scape. Music-wise though, I don’t write songs before the music. I usually make the music and the words come at the same time. 

I also need to get onto that… Going back to your music – your album is freshly out. I wanted to ask you to dive more into how it relates to previous themes of alienation or other things you explore; what new elements are added?
Lael: Well, we moved back to Los Angeles. And almost immediately I started writing because I had a hard time entering back into it. My nervous system was all crazy. But it generated so much material almost immediately. I wrote for a few months and wrote a lot of songs. Guy would go to the coffee shop in the morning and then I would be able to write at home. So we accumulated a lot of songs in that little window. The writing helps me process what’s happening in my life. Yeah, I was just observing the city with kind of new eyes.
Guy: This is the third record that we made together. She writes all the songs but the sound of it and the kind of presentation of it has become more of a collaboration each time. I feel like it’s important for there to be songs that are just her as well, because it’s her name and it’s her songs, but at the same time it’s like the palette of different sounds will expand over time and get more like a band.

If you didn’t live in this era, what era would you live in?
Lael: I’m very drawn to different periods of time, mostly to the clothing, because otherwise life must have been really hard. I’m pretty drawn to the Victorian era. They were obsessed with death. There was tuberculosis and other weird diseases, and babies were dying all the time. Death was around them all the time, but they had all these cool rituals or ways of honouring the dead. On the other hand, the architecture was really beautiful. It’s just close enough to the modern times where it wasn’t like medieval times; the clothes were kind of cool then too.
Guy: I spent many years only listening to music from the 20s, like early blues recordings. I taught myself to play that kind of music and write my own songs in that style kind of based on an obsession with that.. Now I’m really into the 60s too and the 90s too, which was actually in my lifetime. There’s something about the early days of recording. I feel like there was kind of a renaissance in the 20s, consciousness-wise. Paris or Berlin in the 20s were amazing. I’m really into the early surrealist art of Dada and stuff too. They keep saying our 20s will be a new awakening. I mean, some new age mumbo-jumbo, but I keep hoping.

Maybe there’s just this intense moment before there’s like a cracking open. It’s like we have to move forward. I’m also fascinated by the 20s. Now that you mention, do you have a specific relation to death?
Lael: Growing up on a farm, I was introduced to it just through animals mostly. But I had a very, very strong connection to my pets. And they often died early, too soon or whatever. And I would do little rituals and burials for them. But yeah, I think about death a lot. I don’t know if other people do. Do you think about it?
Guy: I have a record that I made before we started making music together. It’s called Prayer of Death. It’s a concept album about approaching death without fear. So that’s been a theme that I’ve been interested in. I think there’s a song in that first record called How Far Is It to the Grave? I feel like that’s often why I think about death a lot, it helps you with perspective on your life. it’s all too short to be so concerned about small things. Which doesn’t really help me be less neurotic. I need to constantly remind myself that I’m going to die. So I just need to be more loving and more open and less afraid.

There’s definitely hints of this in your current music, too. Do you have any favourite media recommendations, maybe dealing with similar topics?
Guy: In connection to what we were previously talking, that’s another thing I would say that we both are very interested in. Life after death, reincarnation and near-death. I was hit by a car five years ago. I don’t remember it, but I definitely almost died. We’ve been really interested in this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. That’s about non-speaking autistic children. And how they can read minds and communicate without words. And the podcast goes into a lot of different metaphysical aspects that are supposedly impossible, but people are experiencing them. Like telepathy and precognition and remembering past lives. That’s how we believe in all that kind of stuff.
Lael: It’s very life-affirming. It’s very hopeful too. Because these children are basically giving messages that there’s a new era coming. That’s kind of the takeaway. You can cling to it. We could all be more telepathic if we just learn how to do it. There’s also a woman named Veda Austin who is doing really amazing work with water and water consciousness. And books… Oh, “The Seth Material”. It started in the 70s with this woman, Jane Roberts, and her husband. And this character called Seth would speak as him. So she would go into a trance and say all this amazing wisdom that she didn’t necessarily possess herself. Her husband wrote down everything that Seth ever said. The larger body of work is called “The Seth Material”. But “Seth Speaks” is the main one…

Thanks for not gatekeeping. What’s your favourite natural element?
Lael: I think fire. I like to be warm.
Guy: I would say water.
Lael: Well, that makes sense because you’ve got water in your chart. Every time we’re on tour, we try to take a little pilgrimage to sacred water places. So for me, water is also high up. Earth is good too. I mean… I love all of the elements. Conclusion is all.

If you could change your form into something else, what would you be?
Lael: I always wanted to be a horse. Maybe I would be a waterfall, or a body of water.
Guy: I’ve always felt really connected to frogs, but I feel like I would rather know what it’s like to be invisible or to fly. Just changing my form. 

Love both!! What’s one person you would love to meet – alive or dead or mythical?
Lael: John Lennon? Apparently. I don’t know, that’s just the first thing I think of. You’ll probably have a better answer.
Guy: Alive, I would like to meet Bob Dylan. Most of my favourite musicians, I don’t even want to meet them, I just want them to leave them alone. But I feel like it would be cool to actually look them in the eye.

What are your dreams and fears for your future?
Guy: Dreams and fears? I feel like what I’ve been doing is my dream, and just to keep going with it. Even though I try not to be fearful of this, I understand that a lot of people are upset now, because basically it’s seeming like everything was getting better, and in reality it’s not. I would just prefer everything to get more open. It’s not just the political stuff. It’s the energy. In the future, it could be great and open up, or it could be all closed and weird.
Lael: My dream is the death of the materialist paradigm. Bring it down. I think it’s partially responsible for why we don’t respect each other, for why we don’t respect the earth, and because, well, we’re here, we die, that’s it. There’s no meaning to it. And I think it’s an excuse to just be greedy and pillage the earth and other people’s energies and to try to accumulate as much as you can. And that’s probably also my fear – this paradigm prevailing.