Celeste: Promoting new album Woman Of Faces at Leeds Brudenell Social Club tomorrow. Picture: Erika Kamano
CELESTE will showcase her second album, Woman Of Faces, at Leeds Brudenell Social Club tomorrow (18/11/2024) as part of her eight-date outstore promotional tour.
Released on Polydor Records on November 14, the album was produced by multi-Grammy award winner Jeff Bhasker and Beach Noise and features the singles On With The Show, This Is Who I Am and the orchestral title track, whose original demo was accompanied by a French version entitled A Femme aux Mille Visages.
The full track listing is: On With The Show; Keep Smiling; Woman Of Faces; Happening Again; Time Will Tell; People Always Change; Sometimes; Could Be Machine and This Is Who I Am.
Stemming from the slow unravelling of a romantic relationship, and her determination to emerge from the other side triumphant, Woman Of Faces is a body of work born out of pain, but also the steadfast resilience to keep moving forward, even when everything else felt like it was falling apart for the Brighton-raised singer-songwriter.
From the orchestral highs to the gut-wrenching lows, this unflinching, unfiltered chronicle of heartbreak, recovery and reclaiming control is the sound of an artist learning to trust herself.
The artwork for Celeste’s Woman Of Faces
On the title song, Celeste burrows into her own complexities as she learns to accept the unknowable sides of herself. The production could be plucked from an old Hollywood score, with sweeping string arrangements contrasting against a modern meditation on multifaceted womanhood.
“Initially, the song was about realising I have shades of complexity within my mind and not being able to pinpoint what or why they were there,” says Celeste, 31. “It gave me a sort of diagnosis. Like, yes, I find it hard to navigate, but at least I can begin to adapt.”
She hopes other women will see themselves in the song, particularly the unsung heroes of daily life, who are always there to lean on and expect nothing in return. “I want it to speak for people who don’t feel seen,” she says. “There are some women who are like constant caregivers that just go unnoticed, they’re always waiting in the wings. People don’t thank them, but they’re always there. I want that song to be for those people.”
Earlier single On With The Show is an expansive, cinematic ballad that reckons with the battle to put on a brave face and push through anguish. Written with frequent collaborator Matt Maltese in 2022, it was the first song Celeste made specifically for the album.
“I was very much in the moment of experiencing feelings of loss and needing to carry on, almost like an exaggerated hero’s journey,” she says. “This feeling of needing to trudge on through heavier feelings, knowing you have another purpose that’s attached to something bigger than yourself, so you willingly go towards it and sacrifice your sense of wellbeing.”
“This Is Who I Am is an important song for me that identified the world in which I wanted to inhabit sonically and thematically,” says Celeste
This Is Who I Am wraps Celeste’s old-world voice wraps around melancholic piano chords and cinematic strings. “The song aligns with all of my being. It allows me to channel all of my influences, things that I’ve taken in over the years, since being a child,” she says, referencing a range of creative touchstones that span Édith Piaf, Oscar Lavant, Eartha Kitt and, from her contemporaries, the song-writing of Anohni.
Produced by Kendrick collaborators Beach Noise and written during the final stages of putting Not Your Muse together in 2020, Celeste has held the song close for almost four years. “This Is Who I Am is an important song for me, which I wrote in collaboration, that identified the world In which I wanted to inhabit sonically and thematically,” she says.
That song leads the soundtrack for Sky’s television series The Day Of The Jackal, selected for the opening credits by lead actor Eddie Redmayne and co-star Lashana Lynch.
Celeste has been been undertaking her outstore itinerary since November 3 after summer appearances at London’s KOKO and LIDO Festival, Glastonbury (on the Pyramid stage), Werchter Boutique, Belgium, Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland, and North Sea Jazz Festival, Netherlands.
Celeste’s spell-binding performance of her breakout song Strange at the 2020 BRIT Awards placed her firmly in the global spotlight. The English-Jamaican singer landed the double win of the BRITs Rising Star Award and BBC Music’s Sound of 2020 and that year her song A Little Love featured in the John Lewis Christmas advertisement, written expressly by Celeste for the advert.
Celeste’s artwork for This Is Who I Am
In 2021, she topped the UK charts with her debut album Not Your Muse, a year when she received Mercury Prize, Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Hear My Voice, her lead single from Aaron Sorkin’s 2020’s film The Trial Of The Chicago 7, for which she wrote three songs.
Since then, Celeste has taken a step back from the glare of mainstage spotlights to recalibrate and reconnect with herself, figuring out how to stay true to her vision and sense of authenticity in her work. “I felt like I had to start making decisions really carefully [in terms of] what to be associated with and what pieces of music I would put out, just trying to regain some agency over maintaining authenticity in my work,” she says.
This mentality led Celeste to collaborate with the Tate Modern for the launch of her 2022 single To Love A Man. “What has been most important to me in the last couple of years has been navigating [the industry] gently, bit by bit.”
She made a striking return in November 2024, releasing This Is Who I Am, followed by Everyday’s release on vinylfor Record Store Day 2024, when she performed at Rough Trade in London.
That year too she made her acting debut in Steve McQueen’s Second World War film Blitz, playing the jazz singer who performed at the Café de Paris in London just before it was bombed. McQueen’s re-enactment of the performance is not exactly true to life: in reality, swing band leader Ken “Snakehips” Johnson sang for the last time that night.
Celeste’s artwork for On With The Show
Celeste’s rendition of Oh Johnny, Johnson’s signature song that closed his last performance, is a poignant tribute, one that contrasts the hedonism of high society during the raids with the stark, brutal reality of war. “Meeting Steve McQueen was one of the most inspiring and significant moments of my life in the last two years,” she says.
Witnessing the director’s uncompromising attention to detail on set, she explains, helped reaffirm Celeste’s belief in artistic intuition, aligning with the core statement of This Is Who I Am and her subsequent approach to writing music; a conviction that comes from within, unaffected by external voices.
“When I saw someone [like McQueen] working in that way, it reinstalled that confidence and sense of navigation within myself. It was like, yeah, don’t let that thing slip, don’t let that core alignment get interfered with.”
An Evening With Celeste, Album Launch Show, Leeds Brudenell Social Club, November 18; presented in tandem with Crash Records, Leeds. Doors open at 7pm. SOLD OUT.
Did you know?
CELESTE Epiphany Waite was born in Culver City, California, on May 5 1994 to a Jamaican father and English mother. She moved to the United Kingdom with her mother at the age three, after her parents separated, settling initially in Dagenham, then moving to Saltdean, Brighton, at five.
Celeste’s poster for her Woman Of Faces album shows