Pitchfork for Lashes

Here's a great article and interview in Pitchfork with Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes. I can't stop listening to The Haunted Man!

http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/bat-for-lashes/

~N.

p.s. The above image is similar to the album cover, but is actually for one of the singles, "All Your Gold," which can be viewed here:

http://www.batforlashes.com/post/34569918890/bat-for-lashes-all-your-gold

Not Sure What to Name This Post.

Last week I was walking down the sidewalk and saw a crow hobbling across the street. He was missing most of his left wing, with a piece of bone jutting out. He hopped up onto the curb, looking for crumbs. This morning on my drive to work I saw a chipmunk with a smashed left back leg and tail dragging himself across the street. He pulled himself up onto the curb as I continued on my way. These types of moments cripple me a bit; something sad crumples me inside. It's like the sadnesses of the whole world get wrapped up in witnessing these tragedies. Maybe it's because I can hold these moments in my hands, actually give shape and definition and finiteness to them.

I have to remember the flipside of these moments too: the crow and the squirrel carrying on, making the most of what they've got, finding that food and finding that safety up on the curb. They are persevering. They are living.

Passage of the Day

"It is hard to remember what you first fall in love with. Usually it is an expression in the eyes, an exchange, or a gesture or the sound of a voice, a word spoken. Those things can get blended with the atmosphere around you at the time -- a fragrance in the air, a play of light, even music -- so that they become almost one with each other and when you see or smell or hear the memories of a place you feel the love again, but as a pang of loss. Sometimes the feelings get connected so deeply to your body that even your own skin, your own eyes in the mirror remind you of what you no longer have. Sometimes it only takes a few things for someone to attach the way I did -- enough hunger, enough loneliness, enough loss, someone who will feed you and touch you and listen. Sometimes attachment -- call it love -- is more complex than that. When you are in the state I was in, love can be tied up with other things, like excitement and danger and the desire to know what really happened, what actually took place."

- from The Elementals by Francesca Lia Block, read while listening to Bat for Lashes' new album, The Haunted Man, a witchy, tribal concoction of alt-pop darkness & hope (*and my favorite record of the year*)