BALANCING ACT: CELESTE

BALANCING ACT

SINCE HER FIRST RELEASE AS A TEENAGER, CELESTE HAS HAD HER EYES ON THE HORIZON—CAREFULLY WALKING THE LINE BETWEEN ART AND INDUSTRY.

By Hanna Hanra

Celeste Waite was born within shouting distance of the absurd, 45-foot-tall beacon that insists Hollywood is both destination and destiny. She was fated for show business. The Oscar, Mercury Prize, and BRIT Award-nominated singer has cut through the noise with her sultry tones since she released her first single “Sirens” at the age of 16. Her father had just died, and writing the song was a form of catharsis. She uploaded it to YouTube, catching the eye of her now manager, who arranged some studio sessions, launching her career.

Celeste’s family relocated when she was a kid, from the sun-bleached sprawl of Los Angeles to Saltdean, a sliver of the English coast where the sea glimmers like tinfoil and the wind feels personally aggrieved. Her mother, a former makeup artist, introduced her to the high-gloss fantasyland of fashion with copies of Vogue and Elle left lying around their home. The soundtrack to those years? Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday—soul legends whose influence can still be heard in Celeste’s music to this day.

Before she became the mononym we know and love, Celeste self-released “Born Again” on SoundCloud, and later an EP titled The Milk & The Honey. She toured with electronic duo Real Lies and featured on late Swedish producer Avicii’s EDM banger “Touch Me.” The cogs of the music industry turned in tiny increments, and the scene was set for her debut LP.

Lily Allen’s Bank Holiday Records put out “Daydreaming” in 2016, which made its way to mainstream radio. A month-long residency at London’s favorite dive-bar-cum-celebrity-haunt Laylow captured the attention of Idris Elba and Spike Lee—and they weren’t alone. Celeste left Bank Holiday and signed to Polydor for her five-track EP, Lately, recording with Gotts Street Park, a jazzy production collective known for fusing soul and hip-hop. “Strange,” Lately’s lead single, became the soundtrack to a mass of TikToks, and the heartbreaking soliloquy has since racked up 214 million streams on Spotify. When a song like “Strange” seeps into public consciousness, it pushes an artist from one stratum to the next, and soon Celeste was playing Glastonbury, collaborating with Mulberry, and singing on Later… with Jools Holland. Then came the critical accolades: winning the BBC Sound of 2020 poll and being named the most hotly tipped singer of 2020 by GQ. This was the same year she recorded three songs for Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of The Chicago 7—one of which, “Hear My Voice,” earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song.

Success arrived—but so had the pandemic. Celeste’s first full-length album, Not Your Muse was released by Polydor at the start of 2021 while the world struggled with face masks, hand sanitizer, and travel restrictions. Promoting an album requires press junkets, TV spots, radio play, showcase gigs—all of which hopefully lead to a sold-out tour. While the pandemic put a pin in all of that, Celeste’s album still topped the charts in the UK and earned her a gold disc. Then, she went quiet.

Four years down the line, the now 30-year-old singer is revving up for a still-untitled album release, which she’ll tour around the world. “I feel like it’s a part of my life that I need to live,” she tells me from her home in London. “With my first album, I had all of these shows booked that I couldn’t do because of lockdown.”

Usually, labels want artists to produce their second albums faster than the first, especially if the first was a hit. But Celeste took her time. “I’m working with a producer I met in America in 2022,” she explains. “He’s quite high profile, and I had to wait until he was done with his other projects. It became clear it would take a long time to decide what we would do. It’s been difficult, although I feel like I’ve found my own voice in it.”

Though she once made music in near isolation, the singer has lately found herself amongst men: “male producers, co-writers, the label—all telling me how I should do things.” Although women seem to be at the forefront of the music industry, the reality behind the scenes is different. “I’ve never worked with a female producer. Trying to navigate that has been a long process,” she says. “I’ve felt anxious at times, but I think I’m coming around to being more me.”

Although the music industry is at the whim of social media metrics, Celeste doesn’t dabble too much with social media apart from Instagram, which she uses as a moodboard to work on her personal style. It is surprisingly flamboyant, I mention. She laughs, before grilling me: “Maybe there is an entrenched idea of showbiz in me. I had to ask myself a few years ago where that came from. I’d go home and take off the wig and the costume, and the sense of validation and self-worth that had accumulated would come off with it. Was it guarding a part of myself, or was it making me more outgoing?” The costumes—which she often sketches herself—offer her another avenue for self-discovery, while preserving a private version of herself off stage.

With her live show, she wants to make something “robust and unexpected.” Says Celeste, “I have the ambition for a great spectacle. I’m not sure when it will happen, but that’s my end goal.” When she put her first band together five years ago, jazz was moving toward the mainstream. “I had a group of people who’d been playing jazz for 10 years,” she says. “In rehearsals, I’d play a song once and tell them to play what they wanted, in the way they wanted to play it.” This time around, however, the live experience will take a different shape, with different equipment. “But I want it to be a secret,” she conspires.

Being a musician is not just about the creative process; it’s also about having the grit to overcome obstacles while celebrating small wins. Celeste notes with pride that she has a following in Brazil, despite never having played there. “It’s a surprise. I would have no idea my music was relevant there if I wasn’t on Instagram. But if I played a gig there, it would be to, like, 300 people, and they would be my 300 top fans.”

There is a science—verse, chorus, verse, with certain chord progressions and a certain length—that can make a song a hit with the algorithm. Is Celeste ever tempted to write with such a formula in mind? “The best people aren’t afraid of the challenge of competing in the modern arena,” she says. “I have my own process, but things go into your subconscious, and it comes out somewhere down the line. The cleverest people find a way of doing it their own way. You can enmesh the power of TikTok with what you have to say, and have your message spread globally.”

Her plan now is simply to finish the album. Its first single, “Everyday,” is already out, featuring a haunting sample from Death in Vegas’s ’90s hit “Dirge” that underpins her punchy vocals. It builds slowly to form a dynamic coda, filled with distinctly un-jazzy drum sounds. She’ll pick up where she left off—a promo cycle, a tour, world domination. “Music can open up your life to different worlds and different cultures. Sometimes, our plan just isn’t in our hands, and you have to go with what comes to you. Sometimes it takes longer than you think.”

Celeste is once again on the precipice of something. She remains focused on the music —an act of creation, of catharsis, of resistance.