At the beginning of Bat for Lashes’s visual for “At Your Feet,” we only see the musician Natasha Khan’s hands—one balled into a fist, pressing and twisting into the palm of the other like a mortar and pestle. As the camera pulls out to reveal her standing in front of a vintage microphone, bathed in blue light against a Lynchian red curtain, she twists her arm upward, swirling it through the air as if catching and releasing an invisible plume of smoke. These movements may seem improvised, but they were created with a fierce intent. It is, as Khan puts it, a “language of movement,” one meticulously crafted from the gestures that make up her daily life as a mother, “like cooking food and picking up the baby and breastfeeding,” transformed into what Khan describes as “sort of devotional moving mantras.”
It’s a small detail within the dazzlingly realized world Khan has built around her upcoming sixth album, The Dream of Delphi, but it’s one that neatly connects the themes that course through the record: motherhood, ancestry, spirituality, the lightly mystical. The record is named after Khan’s daughter, Delphi, who was born at the height of the pandemic; the intensity of their bond as a result of that isolation also feeds into the album’s 10 songs, both in the profoundly intimate nature of Khan’s lyrics and the soft, moody glow of the album’s synthesizers and organs, which seem to place Delphi outside of space and time.
It’s a spirit that also runs through the video for “At Your Feet,” released today. “It’s really about connecting with the old me—a solitary performer, in the belly of these woods,” Khan explains. “Forests have all of those mystical qualities that I love and are places of transformation.” As she sings of drying eyes in the night, of attending to the feet of a child, the hypnotic combination of sound and visuals comes together to form a hallucinatory whole, nodding to Khan’s sleepless nights caring for her baby. It’s Khan’s ability to transform the day-to-day and domestic into something sweeping and epic across The Dream of Delphi—which arrives alongside a full-length film (or “visual score,” as Khan describes it), a surrealist novella, and a hand-illustrated tarot deck centered on the Motherwitch, a kind of mythical female archetype based on Khan’s own experiences of motherhood—that makes it one of Khan’s boldest and most fully realized musical projects yet.
Here, Khan tells Vogue about the origins of the album in the depths of lockdown, how she used retro synthesizers to create its timeless sound, and how the surreal style of her Motherwitch alter ego came to be.
Vogue: How are you feeling at this point in the lead-up to releasing the album, now that it’s a few weeks away?
Natasha Khan: I’m quite excited! I just did a final shoot day—I think it was a 13-hour shoot—and we’ve got all this amazing footage now. We’re making a 30-minute visual score that we’re going to release in the cinema on the album release day, so that’s really exciting. I’ve been collating voice notes of me and Delphi singing when she’s a little baby and reading letters that I’ve written to her, so it will be quite collaged together and surreal. It’s like an album film, really.
Do you think your experience writing and directing films now feeds into your songwriting process in any way or vice versa?
I do feel confident in that space. Even when I studied music with visual art, my final degree show was films, so I think it’s always been running alongside what I do. But it’s nice to actually make an album film. I’m not sure why I haven’t done it before—maybe it was a budget thing, maybe it was just too hard to bring it all together. But it’s lovely to get that opportunity at last.
And tell me a little more about the Motherwitch oracle deck you made. How did that guide the process of putting the album together?
It was all happening simultaneously and growing at the same time. I’ve also written a surrealist novella and created the Motherwitch deck, so all three bodies of work were feeding into each other. They’re all informed by motherhood, and when Delphi was a baby especially, they kind of all jumped out of me in these different forms, but they are all different faces of one coin. The Motherwitch deck is more of an overarching archetypal character to use these lessons I’ve learned or the transformations I’ve experienced and the wisdom and knowledge I’ve gained—through becoming a mom and also through my 18-year career as an artist. I’ve developed so many different rituals and methods and ways of working through blocks and nurturing your inner child and creativity. The Motherwitch is something more generous, like you’re attending the Motherwitch school and I’m the headmistress. [Laughs.] It’s really a kind of tool. And then the album is much more personal and intimate, with just Delphi. And then there’s the novella, which I hope to turn into a play after this album. It’s sort of a fairy tale about healing, matriarchy, and ancestral lineage and how the evolution of generation after generation hopefully heals and refines our trajectory—the patterns we repeat and don’t repeat. It covers quite a wide spectrum of that experience across three different art forms.
It’s a whole world to dive into. I was reading that you recorded a lot of the album during lockdown, when it really was just you and your daughter. How do you think that relatively solitary process of making the record translated to its final form?
It was really interesting to be pregnant during lockdown. A lot of people felt very isolated and frightened and lonely, and of course I experienced that, but having a baby and having my body growing this other person meant I wasn’t lonely in the same way I had been at other points in my life. It felt like there was this bubble of protection. And that was a really amazing antidote to the state of the world and how I felt because I could enjoy how quiet everything was. My partner wasn’t able to work, so we were just going out in nature a lot. And it was the perfect excuse to really go inward. It was almost like I had woken up from a kind of amnesia, and it broke me open in a way I wasn’t expecting. I felt this overwhelming spiritual awakening, where I wasn’t just connected to Delphi, but by being inside of me and by birthing her, she was like a conduit to this sacred place. And then following that, the devotional practice of loving another being that much made me realize we’re all capable of that, and it gave me hope in human nature. And also a sadness of how far away from that we get sometimes.
Did that sense of spiritual awakening inform your songwriting?
I don’t know if it informed it; it was just a thing that was present. When I was going in and writing, I was just very, very open and felt like this kind of softened version of myself. I think the greatest moments for any writer or musician or creative person are those moments where you’re almost not even in the room, it’s just flowing through. So it was very improvised, and in the moment I felt so present, I felt so clear, and I didn’t really have an agenda. As the creative energy was pouring through me into my fingers and onto the keyboards or through my voice, I was just following it in the present moment. It was almost like dictation. I find it interesting that my daughter’s name is Delphi because she’s the oracle, and I felt in this sort of altered state. It was a little similar to giving birth, really—you don’t really have any power during it. It just happens, and you have to surrender to it. And if you fight that in any way, it’s very painful. So it’s a really good metaphor for me for being creative. The more you fight it or try to control it, it becomes really painful. And the more you sort of surrender to knowing that you’re just like a little cog in the chain of something and that something’s been born through you, then you can make something more authentic and pure.
It’s interesting you brought up the ancient roots of Delphi’s name because there is something very timeless in the sound of the album. The melodies feel like incantations that could have been written yesterday or in the 1980s or thousands of years ago.
I mean, with the instrumentation, I had to use what was available at the studio. And they do have a lot of old, beat-up synths and funny effects pedals and weird ’70s bits and pieces. On every album I’ve always combined very old instruments—Marxophones and autoharps and quite archaic-sounding religious instruments—with more modern sounds and beats. I’ve always loved to combine those different worlds. But on this one, it got to a point where they were melded in a way that made an entirely new thing. It does transcend a specific decade of music in that way. I like what you’re saying about incantations, too, because I feel like the voice is really the glue that holds all these different eras of instruments together and gives that overall impression of it existing in a sort of timeless space. I think COVID was a strange, timeless place for everybody, and having a baby is a liminal experience in some ways. So I think this album is about liminal spaces: portals or gateways or thresholds, those places where you’re going from one thing to another. While you’re in it, time almost ceases to exist. So that’s maybe why I was trying to capture that mysterious, between-worlds kind of sound.
At what point in the process of making the album do you start to see the visual world that’s going to surround it?
I remember doing a sketch of the Motherwitch costume, which was crocheted with a womb embroidered on the front and milk drips coming from the breasts, with these baby-bottle teats in the train and milk teeth around the chest. It was this sort of beautiful, mythical creature—a heightened version of the mother archetype in all her femininity, but with those grisly details of the leaky boobs and the teeth falling out. It’s all very animal. Then with Alexandra Green, who is the choreographer and art director with me, we started developing this language of movement, which all started with me improvising these domestic daily movements, like cooking food, picking up the baby, breastfeeding—these repetitive, mundane movements, from which we created these sort of devotional moving mantras. We talked a lot about birth rituals and midwives because they were such a big part of the history of women birthing and then they got pushed aside when birth became very medicalized. But before that, there was this ancient myth of the midwife’s wisdom. I had Delphi at home, and I had my midwife with me throughout the whole pregnancy and had so much knowledge and wisdom, and I wanted that represented in the visuals too. And then obviously in all the videos, there’s a big element of nature and being in the grass or under the trees or in the mud. That was important to me because I think that’s our connection back to the original mother source.
The fashion and the costumes you’ve created for The Dream of Delphi are pretty incredible, too, from those flowing, priestess-like robes to the pleather puff sleeves in the “At Your Feet” video.
It was a combination of things, really. This designers Agro Studio and Maddy Rara and I started talking about the Motherwitch drawing, and we started making this crochet bodysuit with all the caps and the chiffon and everything. And then for the “Letter to My Daughter” video, my stylist Lucy James and I talked a lot about these Mongolian and mountain folk outfits. My dad’s from northern Pakistan, and there were references to that in the layering of things. Then there’s also the leather and the belts and the more warrior-like aspects. With the dress in the “At Your Feet” video, the white pleather dress is from this brand called Serpenti that I just ordered for myself because I loved it. It’s almost got a Western, cowgirl, Dolly Parton cut at the front of it, but then, with these puff sleeves, a sort of Georgian or Edwardian feel. It felt both modern and ancient at the same time, which is how I wanted all of the costumes to feel: touching on lots of ancient, cultural, religious aspects but bringing it all into the present day.
The Dream of Delphi is out on May 31.
