L'Rain on Surprising Herself, Animal Collective, and Passing the Art World Torch

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: The utterly brilliant Taja Cheek of L'Rain enters the three-timers club today on the newsletter; I first had her on the newsletter in 2022 and again at the end of 2023 (alongside her collaborator Ben Chapoteau-Katz) to talk about her great third record I Killed Your Dog. Last month she released the fourth L'Rain record, fata morgana, and it just might be her best record to date—and I was very pleased to welcome her back to these pages for another enlightening conversation about the evolution of her artistry as well as her work in the art world. Check it out:

This new record's incredible. How have you felt now that it's out in the wild for a bit?
It feels really weird. You have this big secret for a while, and it's fun because you get to just have a secret. Who doesn't want a secret? And then everybody has it, and it's not yours anymore. Usually, that transition happens really quickly for me. But for whatever reason, this time I'm feeling the postpartum period really settle in—and it also feels good. It feels great that people can have this record now and access it however they want to. But I'm also feeling—it's not, like, grief, but I'm feeling like, "Whoa, I just pushed a thing into the world that feels big to me."

Sonically, you're pretty unpredictable at this point—but this record feels like it has more left turns from you than ever before. Talk to me about stretching your legs this time around.
I like to surprise people, and I tried to set that up pretty early in the L'Rain trajectory. People catch me wherever I go, which is a testament to music listeners being adventurous, open-minded people.

The most obvious [left turn] is Screechy Dan. I had a realization with my friends the other day that the secret sauce of L'Rain might be taking jokes way too far. We were in the studio, and someone was like, "I think we should have dancehall on this track." They were kind of joking, kind of not—and I was like, "Wait, no no no no no, that's true, we should have a dancehall vocalist." We were listening to the remix of Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot," and the beat flip was inspired by that.

"soulless cycle" is another moment that is maybe surprising to people, but heavy music has always been a part of my life and listening—and it's also a part of the live show. I wanted to bring some of that energy into the record. "birthday" is also another one that's maybe surprising for some people, and that also started out as a joke, because it's inspired by this audio clip of my friend making up a song. I was talking to [collaborator Ben Chapoteau-Katz] and we were like, "Wouldn't it be funny if we made this into an actual slow jam?" "blue" is surprising in a different way. I haven't really done anything that's so reliant on an audio clip like that before. It's all surprising to me.

You brought in quite a few people to collaborate with you on this record, even more so than in the past.
The records are collaborative, and they're also kind of not. I bring in a lot of people to do very specific things, and we really like to credit every single person. But in terms of the writing and production choices, I really only write alone. Ben wrote a couple of things on this record, which was a big deal for me because I don't let anyone touch the piece properly. In the studio, it's really me, [Andrew Lappin], and Ben—and I'm sometimes a little bit of a dictator. I'm kind of bossy, and I'm lucky enough to work with people who will tell me the truth if they don't think something is a good idea. It's up to me to decide if I agree or not—and sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But we brought in a lot of people to do very specific things, and I'm very grateful that those collaborators lent themselves to the project. But it's always funny when I have these conversations, because I'm like, "It's collaborative, but it's also really, totally not that collaborative."

I will say, though—I want to shout out Yuka Honda. That is a very meaningful collaboration that we always bring in at the end of the process, because you get tired of yourself at a certain point and need more energy. Yuka did an amazing job sequencing the record. We gave her an order and some general parameters and principles, and there were some things that she just ran with. There are a bunch of interludes that I didn't think I would use, and she repurposed them and made them really great. I made these things and threw them into a folder, and I was like, "This is probably not going to go anywhere"—and she gave them a new life and changed the record in a really meaningful way.

You've said before that this record is the final part of a quadrilogy. Talk to me about how it brings everything together.
I never really saw the future. I started this very humbly, and with my first record, I was just making something I wanted to make because I didn't have a band anymore. I followed one foot in front of the other. As the years were going by, I realized that there were throughlines and a sound world that I was building. I was interested in world building from the beginning, but then I actually built the world. The whole L'Rain project is really just about surprising myself first and foremost, and I've actually built a body of work to figure out what to do next—and I don't know what it is. It could be that the next record is just the fifth record. But it's a fun challenge to myself to just broadcast that this is the end, and that I'm going to do something new. I'm writing the next one and have been for the past couple months, and it's nice to have that as the backdrop of "Okay, What is a left turn for you?"

You gestured towards the notion of expectation, and with every successive record you've increasingly become a very critically acclaimed artist in the press. With increased visibility can come dealing with matters of perception as well. Talk about how you've managed that as an artist.
For better or for worse, I'm very strong-willed and uncompromising, which is good. And it goes in all directions, right? I don't really care about the praise and the criticisms. I just do what I feel like I need to do, and I know intuitively what that is. But there's another aspect of it—being perceived, being seen—that I guess I always underestimate. I'm just tweeting into a void and then someone will be like, "I saw on your Twitter you did this." And I'm like, "Oh shit, people do actually see this." People are paying attention. I'll have a fan that I didn't expect to have, or I'll be at work and someone is like, "I love your music." And I'm like, "What?" I'm just being a person, you know? So I forget that people are watching, because I really am not thinking about that at all. It feels like a huge shock to me, because I'm really just in my own world all the time.

I do feel like we spent a lot of this decade—and the previous one—witnessing a lot of independent artists being encouraged to be online as much as possible. It also seems like people are coming around to believe that it is actually a bad thing. Sometimes people prefer the mystique!
Yeah, I agree with that. I think the internet is pretty unequivocally bad. But also, honestly, with this album cycle, I've really been trying to connect with people more online. For me, that just means posting, and it's honestly been really amazing. I've connected with many more people, and it's been mostly positive, which I wasn't really expecting. I'm a naysayer of the internet.

Now I'm gonna do the thing that you literally just said you're taken aback by when people do it—I'm gonna reference one of your tweets. You tweeted about the Animal Collective Feels anniversary show yesterday. We've talked about what Animal Collective means to you before, but let's talk about Feels specifically. I think it was a point of greater accessibility for them when it comes to reaching a wder listener base, but it's still a very strange record, so to speak.
They're a very important band to me. I'd watch live videos of them wearing masks, not being afraid to be weird. That was a kind of permission I didn't even really knew I needed. I didn't realize it was happening, but I felt so seen—like, "That's what I want to do." I want to be as weird as I want to be and have people either deal with it or join in. That's the kind of artist I want to be.

The first music that I heard of theirs was on Feels—I think it was "Grass." I remember exactly where I was when I heard it. My best friend at the time, who I used to make music with, stopped me in the hallway before class and was like, "You have to listen to this"—and I was late for class because I had to listen to the whole song. The way that they approached lyrics—I really loved it. It's funny that you characterize Feels in that way. I guess I get that—but it's all catchy to me, even the earlier stuff. "Slippi" is a pop song to me. There's so many songs on those early records where I'm like, "These are pop songs"—like, they felt that way at the time.

That record was my introduction to the band, and then I went deeper and older and followed them on—and now they're friends, and that feels so weird to say. But I admire them so much and their music was so important to me. I think we have the distinction of being the first people to ask for the guest list. [Laughs]

I'm literally sending my email after this call.
I literally texted Brian and was like, first, first, first, first.

For a while, I was always kind of shocked by how their detractors would characterize Animal Collective. I was like, "I don't think anybody really understands this band at all if they're talking about them that way." With time, I think things have swung around where everyone's on the same page regarding the fact that they're very sincere and straightforward. They're just built this way when it comes to making music that sounds like this, which is kind of crazy to contemplate.
That also points to why I felt so drawn to them. When you're making that kind of music in a commercial setting, there's always a tension there—and that tension is actually really interesting and productive. It's always going to be like oil and water a little bit, but seeing the ways that they were able to navigate that while still feeling true to themselves and establishing a career that also felt like a way forward...I didn't think I would ever release a record back then. I didn't think I'd even be playing music at all. But they felt like a way forward, a model of some sort. It's a different time now, and I don't know if the sort of career that they were able to make for themselves is able to be replicated. Also, they're very unique. I don't know if anyone can replicate what they did—but it at least felt like a version of a thing that could happen.

You're currently the Artistic Director at Performance Space New York. Talk to me about how that's been going, as well as your experiences working in the art world in general.
Sometimes music can feel like a dead end, and when I was younger, the art world gave me a way forward in terms of making music in a context that felt generous and open, and allowed artists to be artists and not just musicians. That was the context that drew me to the art world. I knew I wanted to be a curator very young, and people told me not to do it—and then I ended up where I am anyway.

[Performance Space New York] is the most amazing place. In terms of unpacking years of art world trauma, it comes down to so many basic principles of mutual respect and trying as much as possible to dismantle and flatten hierarchies. I'm still a director, but I've been in places where, if you're not a curator, you're just not allowed to speak. You're barely allowed to look someone in the eye. I'm doing away with that bullshit.

The history is so incredible. People will come to the building, and they're older and showing their kids or their grandkids, "Look where I used to have a studio, look where I used to dance." A couple of years ago, Debbie Harry performed at our gala with Kelsey Lu, and Kelsey had this amazing prosthetic to look like Kermit the Frog. I was walking down the halls with Debbie and she was like, "Yeah, I remember this place." It just permeates so much of culture. and that's such a huge responsibility to carry the torch while also doing something new. But I love it. It's amazing.