Altogether Stranger: Lael Neale’s Hazy Farewell to Los Angeles

On Altogether Stranger, the Virginia-born musician documents the disorienting beauty and psychic toll of life in LA, crafting a quietly radical album about escape, nature, and the strange comforts of disconnection.

It is late-afternoon on a clear April day in Los Angeles. Lael Neale is sat in her home, where the walls are white and bare, recalling the moment her childhood self set the family pet cockatoo free into the world “It was so depressing to me, having this caged bird” she says “One day I set it free and it never came back”.

Lael Neale is an American musician who overlays her sparse, lo-fi arrangements with a diaphanous tremble. Sometimes Neale’s songs drip with ennui, other times they fizz with the sound of 60s rock ‘n’ roll. The sense of escape is never far away. We are discussing Neale’s latest album Altogether Stranger, a meditation on Los Angeles, the city that has been her off and on again home for over a decade. But as she prepares for the album’s release, she is set to leave the city and return to Virginia, the state she grew up in. It is a move in part instigated by the strangeness she felt upon returning to Los Angeles after spending the Covid-19 lockdown in rural Virginia. “I have a very complicated relationship with L.A. I truly love it. It feels like a second home. But it is becoming more and more unsustainable to live here - practically, psychologically and emotionally”.

The single and album stand-out ‘Tell Me How To Be Here’ is perhaps the crystallization of the idea that Neale could leave Los Angeles. It is a trance like Spacemen 3 indebted song that finds Neale poking at the scenes that are a regular occurance for those in the city with a soft, detached curiosity; helicopters that cast shadows from the sky, suits stepping in and out of motels and jazz that bleeds in through her bedroom window. “I didn’t even know that I wanted to get out of L. A. so much until I wrote that song” she says. 

Growing up in rural Virginia instilled in Neale a deep appreciation of nature and the environment. “I was never raised with any religion or church. My dad’s a farmer and he taught us that nature is our religion” she says. Her plan was not to become a musician, but to become an environmental scientist. “I was just so switched off by the environmentalist movement” she confesses and instead prefers the way musicians can “slide things in, make commentary and it’s funny. You’re calling it to light, but you’re not shaming or blaming people”. 

The commentary Neale offers on her latest album was sparked by that same feeling of strangeness that saw her decide to leave Los Angeles. Written and recorded during the final 18 months Neale and producer Guy Blakeslee lived in the city, the album finds her in a hazed state, partly perplexed by what she's seeing, partly pulling it apart like a documentary maker. Los Angeles is the case study, but the world is the subject.

On ‘All Good Things Come to Pass’ and ‘Sleep Through the Long Night’ Neale laments consumerism and the impact it has had on our environment with droll disaffection. “Our society is set up in a way that basically prevents you from living in tune with nature” she says “I still have tons of plastic no matter how hard I try not to use it”. 

Those familiar with Neale’s previous two albums, Acquainted With The Night and Star Eaters, will recognise the drones and drum machines on Altogether Stranger. It is a sound that Neale struck upon after another out of place feeling, then in traditional recording environments. “It was very perfectionist.” Neale says of previous forays into recording studios. It was not until Blakeslee introduced her to an omnichord did her by now signature sound come into focus “Guy was like why don’t you take this four-track and record the songs yourself. Now I never want to do it any other way”. 

The instrument captures the strangeness that Neale conveys. In ‘There from Here’, ‘All is Never Lost’ and ‘Sleep Through the Long Night’ there are intimate, lonely sounding songs, ‘White Waters’ and ‘Down on the Freeway’ buzz along with an anxious, jittery pulse. But the album is at its best and finds its stride on the strutting numbers ‘Come On’, New Ages’ and ‘All Good Things Come to Pass’ - the latter sure to be a favourite when Neale and Blakeslee tour the album. 

Hitting the road in the EU and UK from May before continuing into the year, Neale’s decision to leave Los Angeles is not one that signals a retreat. “It's really like we’re launching into the world even more now” she says with a smile.