![]() It felt like a hidden secret that not many people knew about.”Īs well as pursuing her more otherworldly interests, Neale spent the next few years nannying, working in coffee shops and, pointedly, not releasing music. “To just stumble into a library that’s packed with every single book you could possibly dream of – and there are some locked away that are from the 1600s – is really incredible. skip past newsletter promotionįounded in the 1934 by a Canadian mystic called Manly P Hall, it boasts one of the world’s biggest collections of esoteric literature. After the release of her first, more conventional folk music album, 2015’s I’ll Be Your Man, she discovered the Philosophical Research Society, and started putting on gigs at its tucked-away complex in the Los Feliz neighbourhood. Neale, who moved back to Los Angeles this January, has long been attracted to the stranger side of the city, embedding its eerie edges and her more magical experiences into her unearthly sound. ![]() “We Palo Santo-ed the room to clear the energy – not to be too Californian – and then a couple of weeks into our stay there we found out that the last guy there nodded out in the window and fell and died.” “It was actually the hotel that the Black Dahlia lived in.” Would we be right to suggest that such a historical Hollywood landmark was possibly haunted? “Definitely,” confirms Neale. “It was a really unique place, just a couple of blocks away from the Walk of Fame, and it was incredibly cheap full of musicians and artists and strange older people who’d been there for ever,” says Neale. Some of the footage came from when Neale and her boyfriend were living in a past-its-prime 1920s hotel turned apartment building. “There’s this amazing alchemy that happens when music goes perfectly with film – it’s the same with Harold and Maude and that Cat Stevens soundtrack.” That introduced me to Radiohead,” she remembers. “I saw it when I was in my early teens, and I was just listening to things like the Beatles at that time. In Verona’s self-directed video was in part inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s take on the story, 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, a pivotal part of Neale’s sonic and visual education. “So I left, but then I felt bad because we were gonna do this nice mother-daughter thing, and I was like: ‘I’m out of here!’ Then I started writing the song.” Despite its relentless banality, it somehow still sparked Neale’s creativity. “I watched about 15 minutes of it and I could feel my brain atrophy – it was so terrible,” remembers Neale of seeing it with her mother during lockdown. Half of it comes on like cult 70s folk artist Karen Dalton hanging out with the Velvet Underground and Suicide, while the rest offers somewhat more modern balladry, placing her more in the world of Angel Olsen and Cat Power.Īlthough its lyrics circle round death, holy water, purity and prayer, the fuzzy, hypnotic, eight-minute In Verona was written after Neale saw the critically unacclaimed 2010 film Letters to Juliet, a Romeo and Juliet-inspired romcom starring Amanda Seyfried. It’s a unique, boldly weird proposition, and one that proudly carries the faint hint of tractor grease. Moving back to Virginia during the pandemic, Neale helped out with the chickens and recorded her third album, Star Eaters Delight. It’s also where he works on his tractors and there’s a lot of tools around, so it has this greasy tractor smell. ![]() “It’s where dad would get stoned with his friends and play,” says Neale. “It’s made to be a place where you go and have this experience, which is so Hollywood.” As well as housing the crypt of Elizabeth Taylor, it has a Scottish-themed wedding chapel and a five-metre-tall replica of Michelangelo’s David. “It’s the Disneyland of cemeteries,” she explains. Neale also enjoys a stroll around the sprawling Forest Lawn memorial park. “I love going to the graveyard – I feel like that’s the Harold and Maude in me,” she says, referencing her favourite movie, Hal Ashby’s cult 1971 film about a death-obsessed teenager. Neale likes to pop in every now and then. As ritzy as any red carpet premiere, Hollywood Forever is where stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney share a final resting place with the author Eve Babitz, director Cecil B DeMille and rock stars Chris Cornell and Mark Lanegan. Alongside grainy footage of the Walk of Fame, we find her drifting through the mausoleums of Hollywood Forever, a celebrity cemetery on the same block as Paramount studios, as she hypnotically chants about “perfect death”, prayer and purity. I n the video for Lael Neale’s recent single, In Verona, she takes us on a woozy walk through the streets of Hollywood.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |