In The Spotlight: L’Rain

Taja Cheek’s energy is woven into the fabric of New York’s creative scene. There are few DIY performance spaces or experimental events, especially those promoting the voices of marginalised groups, that do not seem to bear her contribution or influence, including several bands. Having once opened her own Brooklyn basement to local artists, Cheek now curates with MoMA PS1, while simultaneously producing her solo musical project, L’Rain. As an interviewer, this ubiquity makes researching her work quite easy, if a little overwhelming, because I can tug at any thread from the city’s thriving cultural scene with the certainty of finding Cheek’s name, or an esoteric pseudonym, somewhere ravelled.

Despite this presence, Cheek continues to describe herself as shy, even referring to herself as meek. This was made apparent with her debut, self-titled release, featuring an album cover design that only exposed a portion of Cheek’s arm. It was a creative decision made to tackle the issues that arise from being a female musician. With Fatigue, however, Cheek reveals herself more entirely. The artwork’s portrait, coupled with the album’s success, intensify the spotlight of celebrity. When I ask how that’s going, she laughs.

“It’s diifficult. It’s something I’m negotiating. But I tend to put myself in situations where I have to work things out very quickly or have to work things out in public. So, that’s kind of what’s happening. It’s a process of getting over myself a little bit. It’s exposure therapy, or something like that.”

This fluidity and willingness to leave one’s own comfort is a common adventure in Cheek’s music. Fatigue focuses considerably on the theme of change, or resistance to it. Songs are preoccupied with transformation, with lyrics that are often extensively repeated or warped, as if they were mantras, from Quinton Brock’s opening question: What have you done to change? to Cheek’s vulnerable final lines:

Lately I’ve been dreaming with eyes open waiting for something

I am not prepared for what is going to happen to me

Fatigue further clarifies Cheek’s musical aesthetic by expanding upon the tender mosaic of her debut. An affection for fragments is carried over, with tracks hastily phasing from similarly soulful rhapsodies to ethereal soundscapes, all carefully knitted with low-fidelity feedback and vocal recordings. Except there’s now a greater depth here, a more detailed spectrum of mental states being explored, from the slumberous melodies of ‘Blame Me’ to the motivated melody of ‘Two Face’. Reflective respites are tied to skittish breaks, melancholy to humour. In only thirty minutes, Fatigue savours every second.

Cheek’s multifarious vibes are often referred to as “genre-defying”, a term which she has been vocal about criticising. It is one of the music industry’s many tropes, including the abundance of terms like ‘emerging artist’ and ‘world music’ that Cheek considers also problematic, maintaining a wariness of genres in general. “I don’t know how useful the classifications we have are and I don’t really know if I am the person that’s equipped to even figure out what that looks like but what I do know is that it’s messy and complicated, and a lot of the times genre distinctions do a disservice to the people that are being lumped into them against their own will.”

“It can also be empowering for some people too, but I feel like it just is messier,” Cheek adds, before excitedly mentioning Summer of Soul, Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s recently released documentary celebrating the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.

“I feel like I’ve been talking about Summer of Soul in, like, every interview I’ve done but it really was incredible. One of the biggest takeaways for me was hearing how those artists were talking about their own music at that time and it’s just so interesting seeing the disconnect between how they’re talking about their music and how other people look back on them as being the most classic or definitely R’n’B or definitely soul. Then the artists say ‘actually, we’re influenced by so many things and we don’t think we really fit into those.’”

“It was affirming in some ways, that some of the things I’m thinking about now, so many different artists are thinking about and have already experienced in the 60s. But also, it sucks that there isn’t a better mechanism for describing what is happening.” I ask about a potential remedy.

“It requires a lot of writers, interviewers, and historians, to create another mechanism. But I believe in all of those professions and people that are in those roles. They’re so deeply important.”

A standout feature of Fatigue, for me, was how closely sutured together each track is, making them inseparable. It’s a format I personally find refreshing for a modern release, feeling that many albums seem to be founded more often upon the strength of singles. “There are very few albums that I feel I sit and listen to as an album,” Cheek says. “That’s partly because of the structure of my life and being very busy and partly because not all albums demand that from a listener necessarily, but some definitely do and I’m very interested in that: the need to pause, the sort of resistance against a single. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s also very cool. But because that’s pretty pervasive and it’s tied up in capital, I’m interested in not doing that and seeing what happens.”

“I’m also not interested in having a really long album that someone has to sit and listen to for twenty hours, you know?” Cheek asks, laughing again. “I hope [Fatigue] is something that can just be listened to quickly and then you move on with your day.”

Unlike L’Rain’s debut, Fatigue is distinctly more collaborative and, while Cheek has always revelled in embellishing her work with the voices of those around her, often recording them surreptitiously on her personal devices, Fatigue sees a greater number of individual, active contributors. “L’Rain is a collaborative project in a number of ways, like, I am kind of a dictator of the project,” Cheek notes, teasingly, “but it is deeply collaborative and I can’t do it without the people that I perform with, in particular the live setting, which is the most collaborative part for me.”

Much of the ability to comfortably guide a project like L’Rain comes from Cheek’s own background playing in groups, such as Throw Vision and Reign State. “I feel like a lot of what is happening now is a result of me trying to learn from my experiences playing in bands.”

“The band I was playing in split up and I had to do things on my own. And I think it was important for me to go through that, to understand my own voice as an artist, which I really didn’t understand that I needed, but I really did need.” It’s a personal education that Cheek has clearly taken very seriously, forming a distinct part of her creative vision from on-stage performances, which becomes extremely clear when attending a L’Rain live show. Cheek is motivated to challenge the audience, guiding them to sit down or consider their bodies, wanting them to be more present within the current space.

“The way that we listen, at least in New York, there’s a lot of distracted listening. And that’s very cool and very valid, but, because it’s so pervasive, I like to try and create a new kind of space where the audience and the artist are one hundred per cent committed to each other for the time that the performance is happening and just creating a sense of, like, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I feel a little uneasy, and Is she going to call me out? That can be an interesting energy.”

“It’s also partially an artist’s job to figure out how to create that environment for an audience. It’s not all on the audience to do something or behave a certain way. The artist has to make that possible.”

Cheek smiles, thinking once again of Summer of Soul, recalling Nina Simone’s presence. “She’s so good at leading an audience through a performance and the way that she sees it happening. It’s very special and there’s a lot to learn from that. 

Any discussion regarding live performances is especially pertinent as, only now, has New York reopened its venues and welcomed the public back to gigs after over a year of closure. “It’s all still changing. I am still trying to get a handle on who’s still here and where they’re at,” Cheek muses. “There’s a lot of excitement and earnest to be with people, which is really beautiful, but there’s this backdrop of fear and anxiety and uncertainty that’s looming.”

The pandemic is also just one major challenge, sitting alongside other continuously pervasive socio-cultural issues experienced by a significant number of Americans, issues that Cheek has dedicated much of her career to challenging. Years ago, when faced with feelings of being invisible or tokenised, she would cancel gigs. Now that Cheek is returning to the stage, I ask if this is still the case.

“I don’t feel super invisible right now, I’ll say that, for better or for worse. I’m trying to understand what it means to be so visible, and what parts of me are made visible. I feel like I’m very skeptical of the media and how stories are told. I’ve been very lucky to have such thoughtful writers and thinkers review my music, because you really just never know and it’s not just a given.”

As the conversation once again leads back to representation and the responsibility music journalists have to appropriately manage conversations with artists, I feel curious to know if there is anything that readers can do to identify and support the right forms of journalism. “The only way I can think of right now, as someone that is really on the outside, is for people to support good music journalism and to demand it.” I take a moment to make a note, realising how heavy our discussions have been. It then became even more apparent that Fatigue truly is a product of Cheek being extremely tired: bored of having the same conversations, encountering the same conflicts, seeing the same gratuitous wealth being spent upon space travel instead of developing communities even now as it was in 1969.

“Sorry,” I say, “I did have some light-hearted questions too.” Cheek laughs, “It’s okay. I brought it on myself."