Celeste: ‘It can be exhausting, fighting for yourself to be heard’

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The Oscar-nominated musician is back with her superb second album, ‘Woman of Faces’, but getting here hasn’t been easy. She talks to Roisin O’Connor about feeling compelled to speak up, the demands of the music industry, and ‘coming back to exist as herself, again’

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As an artist with one of the most distinctive voices in British soul music, Celeste is still struggling to make herself heard. The release of her second album, the tremendous Woman of Faces, should be cause for celebration. Yet in the weeks ahead of its release – and before this interview took place – the Mercury Prize-shortlisted singer accused her record label of showing “very little support” for the new project. She wrote in posts shared to social media that she felt she was being met with “a set of consequences for essentially not doing as I was told”.

“There was definitely a point where I was like, ‘I have to talk about what’s happened,’” the 31-year-old tells me. “Especially when you’re a singer, there’s something really important about the throat chakra being opened.” She cites Dr Gabor Maté, who has explored the connection between chronic stress symptoms among women – who account for 80 per cent of autoimmune disease cases – and a culture that tells them to be agreeable, compliant and, most crucially, quiet. “When I went into certain situations in the studio, I felt like I wasn’t really able to assert my own voice and my own vision,” Celeste says. She saw a video recently of another female artist expressing herself freely in the studio: “And I was thinking, I didn’t really get that moment.”

Even without listening to her excellent 2021 debut, Not Your Muse, many will have heard her smoky vibrato on songs such as her 2019 breakthrough “Strange”, which helped her land the Brit Rising Star Award. The following year, her song “A Little Love” featured in the John Lewis Christmas advert, while her soaring anthem “Stop This Flame” was used relentlessly by Sky Sports for its Premier League coverage. “Hear My Voice”, from the soundtrack of Aaron Sorkin’s film The Trial of the Chicago 7, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Her spine-tingling track “This Is Who I Am”, meanwhile, was the scene-setter for Eddie Redmayne’s 2024 hitman series The Day of the Jackal, based on the Frederick Forsyth novel of the same name.

In spite of all these achievements and accolades, she was nervous about releasing Woman of Faces – in part because of the behind-the-scenes tumult, but also because the majority of the songs were written three years ago. “It’s existed for quite a long time, and sometimes you lose a sense of if it’s good [or not],” she says. We’re speaking over video call; Celeste is fighting jet lag from her kitchen at home in London, but is still warm and engaging. I admire the satin striped sofa behind her as she fidgets with the sleeves of her shirt. When I ask her a question, she gives lengthy, considered answers, as though there’s so much she’s wanted to get off her chest and she’s only now finding an opportunity to do so.

“I suppose what I said is just truthful of what my experience has been in the last year,” she says. Feeling pressured to post more content online, something she mentioned in her Instagram posts, was “kind of the final straw”, while she also felt unhappy at a perceived imbalance between the support she received for her debut and this record. Following those posts, she says, she’s now spoken with people at her label, Polydor, and a “gradual process of figuring things out” is underway. A representative for the label says: “We’ve adored working with Celeste over the last few years and are really excited about her new record. Like all our artists, we want Celeste to succeed and have a great partnership with us. We’re thinking about how to make sure we’re the right partner for her going forward, so she can continue to share her incredible music with her fans.”

“I’m not having a breakdown right now – I actually feel really good about it all,” Celeste says, offering a small smile. “[But] if I’d left it longer... it takes the life out of you. There’s a sort of emotional warfare that goes on... [It can be] exhausting having to fight for yourself to be heard.” She’s found herself questioning why she sees other female artists – we talk at length about Rosalía’s feted and ambitious record, Lux – seemingly free to create art that is challenging and adventurous. Woman of Faces is unquestionably a superb album, too – her best, in fact – and one on which the themes of identity and self-worth burn bright.

Opener “On with the Show” was written during a low point, evident from the way she sings in a weary, defeated murmur: “And so/ Got a feeling I should go/ Got a little bit of sense left/ Know you took most of that.” Waltzing piano notes spin her around a grim carousel, as military-style drums signal the death knell for a relationship. There’s an old Hollywood grandeur to songs such as “Keep Smiling”, which I tell her reminds me of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang” – that same silky danger lingering in swooning strings and slowly picked guitars. “I remember hearing that when I was 15 and thinking, ‘I like the way she holds it,’” Celeste says. “It’s mysterious, and it’s sexy and a bit deranged, but there’s still a sense of, like, a strong person.”

Celeste is, clearly, a strong person. A proud self-taught musician, she was born Celeste Waite to a Jamaican father and a Dagenham-raised mother in LA, then moved to the UK aged three, after her parents split. Growing up in her grandmother’s house in artsy, middle-class Brighton, she was exposed to a predominantly white music scene that shaped her early influences. Perhaps in response to this, she created worlds within her own music that offered escapism, Alice-in-Wonderland style. Woman of Faces, though, is more about finding the strength to “come back to exist as yourself again, finding this integrity in what you do”. She seems struck by an observation I make about recent albums by female artists, Rosalía’s among them, that explore how women are often forced to “choose” between their career and their romantic life – I sense the same with her latest work.

‘Woman of Faces’ is about coming back to exist as yourself again, finding this integrity in what you do

“Woman of Faces absolutely speaks about that moment where you feel like you’ve lost your footing in the industry because of other things that are going on in your life,” she says. “It’s a really difficult situation to navigate, because ultimately, I think, when you’re in this position where you are determined [about] the degree of success you want... it demands all of you, and you don’t really have much of a choice not to give all of yourself to your music and to your performance.”

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She recalls a speech Demi Moore gave at Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards about women feeling like they’re in competition with one another. “I think we really need to fight against the systems that cancel one of us out when a new one comes along,” says Celeste. “To give each other space, to be able to have that moment of respite when you really badly need it, [and to] know that people are going to be there to give you a hand.” This could be anything from an invitation to have her support a fellow artist on tour, or collaborate... “Even just to say in public, ‘I like her. I like what she does. I like her music.’” She smiles again, wistfully. “It feels like that can be rare, sometimes.”

‘Woman of Faces’, the new album by Celeste, is out now

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