CELESTE. HER NEW EP. NO GIMMICKS—JUST SOUL.
Celeste flew into Toronto from Texas where she performed for the first time at the SXSW festival, and she seemed to have brought the warm weather with her. When I first heard her sing live, I knew her voice would be impactful. She sounded even better live than she did on record. I also couldn’t help notice how different she is than most artists coming up in her generation. There is no gimmick to temporarily get a lot of attention, no crazy social media image that could not hold up in reality. Celeste is her voice and her words. Her presence on stage is still shy, but when she starts to sing you feel like she has lived forever.
YOU JUST DID SXSW HOW WAS THAT?
It was really good, it was a really good reaction from the people who came to see the show. It was such a huge surprise for me. I know it’s such a huge festival and there are so many different people playing. It was quite interesting because as the week went on I felt kind of hype that people were starting to recognize me. They would be like “I saw your show, I’m definitely coming to see the next one.” Those were people who haven’t heard my music before so it really helped. I’ve noticed that there is an influx of new people hitting me up on instagram that came to the shows which is really cool. It felt like a real organic thing performing in front of strangers and it’s like if they like it they come again and if they don’t like it then they won’t come back.
HOW DID YOU BEGIN YOUR MUSIC CAREER?
I’d say when I was seventeen I started taking music a bit more seriously at that point and I just started writing at home and I would start recording stuff and putting it on SoundCloud, and at that point one of my first managers who still works with me till this day basically just heard it through people were sharing it. He wanted to meet up with me and he started putting me in sessions around London. He worked at a publishing company so he just put me with which ever writers he felt would work well. Then I just started going to London everyday really during the weekdays and work on the weekends in Brighton (this place where I grew up). I wasn’t doing too many shows at that point because I wanted to concentrate on writing, so they were just aware of me for a few years—then it got to the point where I was a bit older, then I brought in a new manager and I put out some more music. I had written Both Sides of the Moon and Lately which is going to be on my EP.
Luckily I had the help of the label to put it out. It wasn’t something that I was expecting to do but it seemed like the right thing. I write a lot with my friends now—when I was younger if I liked someone’s music I would just message them and be like “do you want to make music together?” This girl called Harve—she’s from London and fairly new as well. I just followed her on Instagram and then she followed me back, and then we spoke and I told her this idea that I have. It was weird because I basically imagined her voice in my head when I was writing the lyrics. Then a day later, she sent one back to me where she made the piano cords to the melody and changed the melody a bit. I was like okay cool let's go to the studio together. That is basically my process of making music.
HAVE YOU WRITTEN FOR OTHER ARTISTS?
Not as yet, one of the artists I work with quite a bit is Gotts Street Park—they are like a jazz band or four piece jazz collective. Inside that, they all do their own thing. Two of them are producers and some of them play for other musicians. The stuff that we have done together has ended up on my project and some of it will end up on theirs too. I definitely hope to write for other people at some point.
HAVE YOU EVER WRITTEN MUSIC WITH ANOTHER ARTIST IN MIND?
Sometimes yes. I’ll imagine other people’s voices in my head. I’d like to write for BADBADNOTGOOD, they are really cool. I love their sound. There is definitely some North American artist that I really like as well. Also, UK artist Terz, she doesn’t need me to write for her but I’d like to do something like that.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE MOVING FROM LOS ANGELES TO THE UK AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE?
Well I was two years old, so my first memory was when I was in England. My mom had lived in LA for a few years and then had me there, but she wasn’t allowed to work there. So it’s actually quiet crazy, she found out she was pregnant with me but she didn’t have a Visa; so she went back to England pregnant and then came back and had me in the United States. So then she stayed for a couple of years, but then she told my dad that she needed to be independent and work herself. So the first thing we did when she moved back to the UK was move back to where she was originally from. Brighton is really safe, and she felt is was a great place to raise me compared to London. As soon at I got to Brighton I really loved it. I made friends that I am still friends with now.
DID YOU GOT BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN BRIGHTON AND LOS ANGELES?
No, that’s the thing. I only came to LA when I was sixteen a few times to visit my dad. The last time I went after that was last year to write and make music, which actually changed my whole outlook on it. Now I really like LA.
SO I KNOW YOU GREW UP LISTENING TO OLD SCHOOL MUSIC. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE MUSIC ERA?
It changes because in the last few years there's been much new music, which I think is actually amazing. But before that, a lot of the music I was listening to was spanning from the fifties to the seventies. A lot of Soul and Jazz. But I also found all of the new music I listen to that was made in the last ten to twenty years was more like hip hop. Because Jazz and Soul naturally filtered into that music more than the pop music that was easily accessible. As a teenager that was the two things that I listened to. I also found lyrically there was a lot more story telling and perspective in rap music. Hip hop has a huge influence on how I want things to sound. Drums are so important and listening to how beat is constructed. It’s not always drum sounds that you expect to be made into a beat. That is something that I want to work on with my music this year.
"How my sound can evolve from live drums in a Jazz style to how a producer would program something for Kendrick Lamar and using more unusual off kilter sounds along side live drum sounds. I know thats off on a tangent but that’s something I have been thinking about loads in the last week."
There are still a lot of new artists that I like, like Moses Sumney—and I really like SZA. I listen to her a lot. I listened to 20 Something this morning. I really like the new Solange album. I listened to her when she had T.O.N.Y., and I decided because it had this Motown sort of bits and then I was like waiting for what was going to come. And then obviously Losing You came out. And then again, way after came the A Seat at the Table album. So there were these huge gaps between projects. I understood that when you are trying to make that, you feel like every moment is so precious, and you are very proud of each moment—sometimes that is just the natural time it takes for people to complete that sort of thing. Especially if you want like every lyric and every sound to feel like so right together. You can’t always rush those things.
DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN THE FUTURE HAVING MORE TIME IN BETWEEN YOUR PROJECTS?
Yes, at the moment we are at a time where you have to constantly be seen and heard, so people don’t forget you exist. Baring that in mind and the way that I write, I definitely want to take my time to some degree—but also, I’m aware that it’s not something I can do right now. But I’m hopeful that if I have a successful album, I can take my time on my second project.
WHAT ARTISTS HAVE INSPIRED YOU GROWING UP?
As young as three years old, my first memories were listening to Aretha Franklin. The second thing I remember hearing was The Clash, the UK sort of Punk-Ska thing. And that kind of sums up how my background played it’s part in influencing my sound. My dad is Jamaican, so I was always used to him telling me to listen to old reggae that he found in a record shop in the 70s—and then my mom growing up in London listening to a very UK sound. The Specials even had that cross between Reggae and Punk. And then my Grandad that I grew up with is a white working class guy, also listening to Rock-and-Roll, and Soul. All of that came into my periphery at a young age, and it was only when I was thirteen that I had access to YouTube. Then I had this freedom I never had before to discover things for myself that I wouldn’t have heard from a friend or a parent. At that point I started exploring all of this new music, and I would sit there for hours and just be in awe. Especially when I would see live performances. I really like the Rolling Stones.
LISTENING TO OLDER MUSIC OR DIFFERENT GENRES, DID YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF DIFFERENT FROM OTHER KIDS YOUR AGE?
I remember my friends at parties used to play a lot of old music when we were teenagers. And then there was a phase when I heard kids play Indie music at parties. But I guess I turned a blind eye to it. I like Jamie T because of his accent. I feel like in Brighton everyone had the freedom to be themselves. Which maybe wasn’t the same for people I am friends with now that grew up in other places. There wasn’t this thing were you had to like what everybody else liked. You would bring something to your friends and be like “this is what I am into”. And they would be quite accepting of that. Which probably would make me an odd ball now.
HOW HAS YOUR FAMILY INSPIRED YOUR MUSIC?
Until I was ten to thirteen years old, I would hear music with my family. Nobody in my family is a musician, but I grew up around a lot of music lovers with strong opinions. I remember my mom’s boyfriend, he would play something and let the base line come in and kind of quiz me on it. He did it with many different genres. He was actually the first person to introduce me to Nirvana. Then my friends and I really got into Nirvana when were around sixteen. And now, when I listen to Kanye and Cudi’s Kids See Ghosts—there is this song called Cudi Montage, and it had a Kurt Cobain guitar loop. I love Kurt’s guitar playing. That is something that I reference, that very off-kilter and sort of off tune. Sometimes I gravitate more towards something that sounds less finished and a bit more rough. My boy recently sent me a piano loop and it was so out of tune and sort of cluttered but I thought it was so inspiring.
THE STORY BEHIND FATHERS SON?
I always find that there are a few different answers, because there were so many things swirling around my head while I was writing it. The main point of it was that my dad passed away when I was sixteen. And I hadn’t spent loads of time with him in my childhood. But it was also not a bad relationship—it was just that I didn’t get to see him physically all the time. I used to speak with him on the phone every other day or he would leave me a voice mail. When I would speak to other family members they would tell me how much we were alike.
We are both very tall and have similar faces, even our voices are quite similar even though he grew up in Jamaica. Then when he was ill I spent quite a bit of time with him. At that moment I realized how similar we were in so many ways. Watching his behaviour and seeing him interact with our family, I realized that I do the same things. It was like I saw an alternate self in my father. And then it was something that I wish I got to experience more and get to know more to understand parts of myself. I didn’t get to do that.
"I felt like I lost that along with losing a parent. Father’s Son is about missing that presence, trying to understand a part of yourself that you can’t understand from another parent. Maybe it’s as simple as asking them what they would do in a situation, but my mom would handle it differently than my dad would. That’s something that I missed and it naturally fell into the song."
After a few years when I got over the immediate sadness, it became much easier to think about how I would put that into a song. It took me along time to figure out how to write about it but when it came together I was quite happy. Within that I felt relief. When I sing it I feel happy that I am singing something at reminds me of him.
SO YOU ARE RELEASING YOUR NEW EP LATELY, WHAT SHOULD FANS EXPECT?
Most of Lately has already been released. It will have Lately, Father’s Son and Both Sides of the Moon, so it has two new songs on it. One is called Ugly Thoughts, and the other is called Summer. Ugly Thoughts happened a week before the deadline of my EP. I was in the studio with this boy named Wilmer Archer who also goes by the name Slime, and he played me an instrumental that he made for an outro for his own album. And begged him to let me sing over it—he was a bit reluctant because he knew that if I sung over it "you are going to want it for your project." But then I did it and he was like "I really like what you’ve done with it."
It’s actually a funny story because he used to be in this band called Vandal Park, and when I was eighteen I wrote with the lead singer and was supposed to meet Wilmer because he was the base player in the band. For some reason at that time we never met—one of us kept rescheduling. Then four years later I ended up walking into a studio and I was like OMG I was supposed to meet you a million years ago. So it’s cool that from that we have a song together because we met at the perfect time. Summer is a song featuring my friend Jeshi, we met over a year ago at a Christmas party at Studio. We became really good friends from that moment and I started hanging out quite a lot in London.
We probably knew each other for nearly a year before we went into the studio together. We both knew each other made music, but we waited until a day where it felt natural. I was in the studio and it was a boiling hot summer day. It was so hot I think I took my t-shirt off and I didn’t care because he was my friend. We ended up writing Summer about a night out we’d had that summer with our friends. We were in this tower block which 60 floors. The building was so high that we could see all of London. It was seven in the morning and we could see the sun rising while sitting on this balcony. We felt a bit nauseous because we hadn’t gotten any sleep. The opening line to the song is that feeling of knowing you should go home but not wanting to go home because you don’t want to be by yourself. Then the long cab ride home and connecting that with summer and not wanting it to end.
Celeste’s EP Lately is now available on all streaming services. Check it.
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