Cate Le Bon released a new album, Michelangelo Dying, back in September via Mexican Summer. Now, the Welsh singer-songwriter embarks on a tour of North America with a DC date at the Howard Theatre on Monday, Jan. 12.
The single “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” serves as the album’s centerpiece with Le Bon powerfully evoking the simultaneous universality and unknowability of love. Her admission, “I thought about your mother / I hope she knew I loved her,” catches devastatingly in the chest. The song’s accompanying video was directed by H. Hawkline.
Watch the official music video for “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” by Cate Le Bon on YouTube:
Michelangelo Dying’s creation was led by pure emotion, usurping the album Le Bon thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up — but which in doing so, picks at it too. It’s a record centered on the many states of existence within love and its aftermath as Le Bon found herself surrendering to the abstraction of intense feeling and the grieving of a fantasy.
While in recent years Le Bon has become a sought-after producer, working alongside Wilco, Horsegirl, Devendra Banhart, and St. Vincent, the production of Michelangelo Dying was shared with collaborator Samur Khouja. To a similar end, her longstanding collaboration with saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood is a main thread of her sonic landscape. He’s joined by similarly close friends: Paul Jones on piano; Dylan Hadley on drums; Valentina Magaletti on drums and percussion; and John Cale, who makes a poignant appearance on the mournful “Ride.”
An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. There are ultimately, Cate asserted, “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos.”
Cate Le Bon
W/ Frances Chang
Howard Theatre
Monday, Jan. 12
Doors @ 7pm
$41.90 GA/ $61.98 Seated
All ages
