Kelsey Lu Digs Deep

When Kelsey Lu spots me from across the street, they jog over to the cafe where we agreed to meet, greeting me with a big hug and a sheepish grin, apologizing for being later than planned. The afternoon sun makes the tiny diamond gems that adorn their smile sparkle. This energy, warm and intentional, is foundational to the artist’s work as a cellist, singer, composer, and performer: they move with an easy grace and charm, projecting the desire for freewheeling connection. 

From their 2016 debut EP Church to 2019’s hauntingly beautiful Blood and scores for award-winning films like Earth Mama and Daughters, Lu’s music surveys beauty and pain, often drawing from the personal complexities of their own growth. Their body of work acts as a cocoon of introspection, with rich and layered compositions, reflective of the kind of tactile and spiritual comfort that comes from embracing vulnerability. Their voice is soulful and throaty, a golden amber, deep with the kind of longing reserved for late night phone calls, embodying the sexy, sultry experimentalism of their style.

 Lu’s journey has been one of profound transformation.  After leaving a religious upbringing, they wrestled with feeling like an outsider. "I grew comfortable with that narrative of like, it's just me, I'm alone… I'm never gonna fit in."  In the years since, they’ve come to see solitude as a bridge to something collective rather than isolating.  The multi-disciplinary nature of their work includes musical collaborations that span from Solange to Skrillex to Sampha, visual partnerships with artists like Kahlil Joseph and Precious Okoyomon, and sound installations at the Guggenheim and Venice Biennale. There was also the time they convinced punk icon Debbie Harry to reprise her 1981 Sesame Street duet with Kermit the Frog for Performance Space’s annual fundraising gala in New York. Lu went all-in, donning full frog drag, prosthetics and all, for a performance of “Rainbow Connection.” They break out laughing when recalling the moment: “I was holding Debbie's hand with Kermit fingers, walking down the long dining hall, staring into Fran Lebowitz’s eyes… as Kermit.” 

Lu had met Harry through their friendship with the photographer Nan Goldin, who first shot Lu for a Bottega zine in 2021, and more recently, for this story. “I’m not a traditional model and her awareness of the fact that I’m an artist made it so that we both were able to just let loose and have fun in an honest way,” they recall. Recently, Lu was in upstate New York, an area they describe as being “surrounded by horse rehabilitation farms,” and happened to be texting Goldin. “Nan and I were having a conversation while I was in a really low place, emotionally and mentally,” they recall. “The desire to be around animals felt extremely visceral while navigating those emotions. Nan suggested we shoot with horses, and it felt potent. What I love about Nan’s work is that nothing is forced. It is what it is. Honest.”

As we sip iced masala tea, they speak about the ways their personal and artistic practices intertwine. Between scoring films, composing performance pieces, and writing other music, they’ve been plucking away at their first full-length album in seven years. It’s been slow work, as they’re devoted to making art that is both grounding and enlivening, even when the world feels dark. "Even when music is talking about heavy or traumatic shit, it's still helping us navigate what we're collectively and individually experiencing."

Over the next few hours, Lu told me about how they navigate creative relationships, personal growth, silence, and the nuances of desire. Their musical gravitas is tempered by a quick sense of humor and blunt self-awareness; the casual intimacy of our conversation reminds me of talking with an old friend. It mirrors much of what motivates their art, too: the want to create closeness between strangers, the possibility that connection can be sparked at any moment—and then tended to slowly, with care. 

You had asked, "How comfortable are you talking about your relationship or dating?” I could find myself coming up with reasons or excuses why I was late to meet you. But then being like, oh, right, this is why I wanted to stay at my house last night instead of his place, because I knew! I had a plan! I thought about this ahead of time. I knew I needed to be home. I'd wake up, I'd have my morning routine, I'd go to the gym, I'd do my thing, and then I’d be on time. And that didn't happen. I stayed at his house.

Really? 

Was it gonna be the first date?

That's great. That's been a sort of recent discovery for me—”work hours.” There are work hours and then there's “our hours,” where we’re not going to talk about work. Which is complicated, if you and your partner are both creative. We’ve been dating for two years, and with us getting closer the relationship has also been about what’s been going on creatively. Suddenly I realized things weren’t feeling sexy because all of a sudden everything was shared.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm doomed to be alone because I love my work. I love what I do so much. There's so many different things that I'm anticipating or so excited to do in my life. I know that relationship is gonna last forever—this relationship with creating, with expressing, with art. There's some level of responsibility, I think, to myself, but also to the greater whole. I think art is important for humanity. I'm not saying that I'm putting all the weight of the balance of life in my hands. [laughs] That’s not it. 

I guess it's instinctual. Right now, I'm thinking… should I say the thing that I don’t want to share? [laughs] I've been able to balance what I share, my vulnerabilities, naturally, without overthinking it or trying to curate my vulnerability. On the nine year anniversary of Church, I was going through my photo album from around that time. I was just outputting so much online, on social media, in a way that never felt forced. Nobody was telling me to do it. I was sharing my life because I was so happy about everything that was going on at the time. 

The way that I feel about it now is so different. [Social media is] so extractive, everything's so forced. It's actually become the third in a lot of relationships. Now an artist is expected to have this relationship with the phone so that people feel like they're in their lives. It's funny, if you think about it. It’s like you're dating the world.

I like to watch it before talking to the director. At least that's how it was with both of those films. I feel really lucky, but it's not just luck. It’s a part of my practice that I've been working on for so long. 

That also comes from living a life full of deep observation. It’s also my own life, and my own story—my own relationship with my parents, with mother wounds and father wounds. When both of these films came to me, I felt prepared. The timing was also so in sync with what I was healing in my life. With Earth Mama, I was doing a lot of womb healing, and mom stuff was in my ether. [The director] Savannah [Leaf] had first asked me about doing an original closing credit song. At the time, I was working on a nine-hour composition for an installation for a festival in Sydney, it was meant to be music that inspires lucid dreaming. I was like, I would love to, but I'm at max capacity and would be interested in scoring in the future. And then Savannah came back to my agent and was like, actually, can she score the whole film? I think Savannah's vulnerability in trusting me helped me to go from zero to 100. My response was… well, actually, suddenly I've got time. 

The word that keeps swirling around my head is... silence. You know, I haven't been performing as much lately, so when I have performed in the past couple of years, I'm learning what I need again or what I need now. I learned that I need at least five minutes alone, ideally 10 minutes. Meditation is a big part of my practice, and I have a really overactive brain. The exchange between everything, everyone in the room and myself... I want to be open to it. I don't want to feel closed off. I think boundaries are really important, but that exchange is really sacred. I have to prepare for it, and silence is really important for that. I get in touch with myself, with the earth, and the universe connecting heaven, to the earth, to the core myself, my being. Then I don't feel so overwhelmed or like I’m freaking out. I remember when I did my This Is A Test opera at the Shed...

I'm always seeking that. I'm hoping that people feel it in the music. I just think we need modes to cope [with] what we all are bombarded with on a daily basis, how much we're exposed to, how much we're aware of and how quickly we've been made aware of it all. History and what's happening on a global scale, the way that this Earth is being destroyed—it’s happening at such a quick pace. But we all could pause, take a moment of silence. How can I make room to think? I feel like the quickest way into fascism is to feel overwhelmed, and then just have somebody to tell you how to live and how to think. 

I did a workshop over the winter at this place called the Garrison Institute with Meredith Monk and Ellen Fisher. Meredith had us do an exercise where she split people into four different groups and we all had to come up with a movement and voice piece. Two of the groups had to do one that represented “fascism” and the other two represented “peace”... 

I was in “peace.” Meredith was like, “I feel bad for whoever's at peace, because that's challenging. Fascism is easy. You know, you just fall in line.” I'll never forget that. It was actually so funny how quickly microaggressions and the urge for some [people] to be the leader came up. 15 minutes to make a movement and noise piece with a group of strangers. 

It was very, very meta. Even the idea of this workshop existing. She's been doing it for years. I think that not everybody is comfortable with silence. Not everyone wants to be internal. That’s what I'm excited about, with the music I've been making: finding a way for it all to exist. Just because you’re internal doesn't mean that has to be sad or depressing.

That’s growth!

Honestly, I've been revisiting Lord of the Rings. I've also revisited Viggo Mortensen's interviews during the press tour when Bush was invading Iraq, and how he and other cast members were wearing antiwar badges and were openly talking about how much they were against it. I guess the inspiration is there could be more of this in [the] culture right now. Everyone's so fucking afraid of speaking out against anything. People will say “I'm not political.” There's a difference between being a politician and being politically minded. And there was something really refreshing about seeing that from that cast. Also the lasting impact that those films have had as far as, you know, defeating evil, defeating empire, and putting our hope in things that otherwise people wouldn't think to put their hopes and trust in. It's pretty inspiring. 

It’s so horny.

 The first time I heard the song was when I was driving out to the desert in California for the first time, and I was like, whoa. Whoa. I immediately thought about this person that I had a very tumultuous, toxic, sexy, unsexy, sexual relationship with over the course of years, on again off again. It was my first relationship with a Scorpio. And I'm a Taurus. It was my first intense sexual chemistry relationship with that sign. There was deep heartbreak when things weren't good, when things weren't going the way that I thought that they were gonna go. But I was also really trying to act like I didn’t care.

For years, it was this thing that I was entering and going away from. There was so much desire in that relationship, and also so much fantasy. It was even more about the fantasy than the actual thing. 

Yeah. I was on a Texas tour with King Krule, and I was going through the Texas desert listening to it again. I had rented a Chevy Silverado red pickup truck to drive across Texas. I was like, I have to do a cover of this song because it really encapsulates everything about that relationship. 

I was also going through my queer awakening in ways, and I was like, ugh, he's so not queer. That's it's own thing. I don't know, there's a lot of resentment there, but it was also so inspiring. I think that is why I kept it around and around, because what came out of [that relationship] inspired so many things. I wanted to flip it because I loved this song, but I didn’t like [the] male perspective. I wanted to flip it.

Yeah. I was on a Texas tour with King Krule, and I was going through the Texas desert listening to it again. I had rented a Chevy Silverado red pickup truck to drive across Texas. I was like, I have to do a cover of this song because it really encapsulates everything about that relationship. 

I was also going through my queer awakening in ways, and I was like, ugh, he's so not queer. That's it's own thing. I don't know, there's a lot of resentment there, but it was also so inspiring. I think that is why I kept it around and around, because what came out of [that relationship] inspired so many things. I wanted to flip it because I loved this song, but I didn’t like [the] male perspective. I wanted to flip it. 

I hаve to think about that. Because the desire changes. Back then, I thought desire was this tumultuous thing, or this person that felt unattainable. I guess desire, then, was being able to attain something that seemed unattainable.

No. No, no, no. Now, desire feels like mutual harmony. Harmony, balance. Desire is honesty, room for change. 

I feel like right now I'm in a really beautiful and perfect relationship. To aspire to be in a perfect relationship is really damning… but it's queer, and it doesn't feel defined in any very specific way other than being really honest and really vulnerable and flexible. Desire is also flexibility. At least that’s how I feel about it now. 

I think now, desire feels like respect. Space. Desire is space.

That's real… the space to be yourself, and the space to long for something. And you're currently working on new music. It’s been six or seven years since the last album. What motivated you to start this one?

I've been taking my time. I felt so rocked by things that took me away from my joy of making music and putting it out. I wanted to get back into the spirit, without being fixated on the past or the idea that things have to be the way they were before. Learning that, and learning to let go. 'Cause it never will be.

I think both, but I needed to learn the art of letting go across these different spheres. Musically, I mean, you know, when I’m reminiscing on times when I would be like, “I feel excited about this song. I'm just going to throw it up on my Bandcamp,” I guess that kind of ties into the [way I was] nine years ago, like, posting a story and not thinking about people… being less precious, in terms of caring what other people think. 

I'm less precious, but it's taken time to get there. I felt disconnected from that part of me. I felt disconnected from music, actually. And relationships, I had some like toxic relationships; dating relationships but then also managerial relationships. It's interesting how having a manager is, like, dating.

And there is a lot of wondering, like, what do you keep sacred? What do you keep to yourself or, like, how much do you share? There's a lot of longing in music that I've been making. I love longing.

A perfect day is when things just align in the right way. I'm talking about New York. You get to where you're going in enough time, you get a great parking space. You love your outfit. Or when I can meditate in the morning. I can do my routine in the morning. I feel grounded, make my tea, go for a long walk, read, make some music, cook for myself, cook for other people. I think that that's where I'm at right now.

On another day, it'll be something totally different. I had therapy and my therapist was like, “How is it going with friendships? With social things? Are you feeling internal? External?” It ebbs and flows. Sometimes I need to just be internal, and I can't have a lot of social time. Sometimes, the perfect day is when I'm able to see my friends and have a night out dancing, or go to Tarpit or Gush.

Yeah, completely. My closest friends are on the other side of the ocean, on the other side of the planet. It's taken years to foster the relationships that are, in a way, like my closest family, because there's been a mutual understanding of needing the time that we need within ourselves and our own lives, where it's not dependent on talking every single day in a million group chats and being each other's therapists. It's those relationships that I cherish the most because we don't have time to be in this sandbox with each other every moment of every day. But knowing whenever we see each other, it's like we just saw each other yesterday.

Photography: Nan Goldin

1st Photo Assistant: Max Cramer

2nd Photo Assistant: Brandon English

Styling: Edda Gudmundsdottir

Styling Assistant: Lennon Gabriel

Hair: Evanie Frausto

Hair Assistant: Marin Mullen

Makeup: Mical Klip

Production: Wei-Li Wang with Hudson Hill Production

Production Assistants: Diego Faucher and Jack Eddy