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I mean, the sound that I found really profound was the first time I heard Delphi’s heartbeat,” Natasha Khan tells me. We’re in her kitchen in east London, seated on either side of a small wooden table. Delphi is her daughter.
Natasha is telling me about something that happened five years earlier, when she was early in her pregnancy and went to visit a midwife, Nancy, a “silver-haired, beautiful woman in her sixties who had helped to birth 1,500 babies”. She’d not expected to hear a heartbeat that day, but Nancy had the equipment and asked if she wanted to. “And then suddenly there was just, like, a magical sound.” I ask if it surprised her, what it sounded like. “It was much faster than I imagined. And because you see it all the time in movies and people talk about it so much, it’s supposed to be emotional. But I suppose until you actually hear it . . . It’s different when it’s your baby.”
Natasha is a musician, among other things. As Bat for Lashes, the alias under which she performs, Natasha has earned three Mercury Prize nominations, won two Ivor Novello awards and released top 10 albums. When we speak, she is working on a novel, has recently created a tarot deck and is weeks away from releasing her sixth album, The Dream of Delphi. This was why I was speaking to her. Natasha had published a mission statement when she announced the new album, and in it I found a kind of mirror to the year I’d been living. In the wake of having a child, she wrote, “I returned momentarily to the cycles and seasons, through naps and breastfeeds, writing this music in any spare moment I could, methodically mapping out the experience of having my mind slowly blown by something so seemingly common.”
Becoming a mother, Natasha’s statement continued, made her realise how damaged the human connection with nature was; how the increasingly urban, capitalist and digital nature of human existence had placed us “in the hands of something that’s very lifeless”. It speaks of mother archetypes – of crones and sages and witches and midwives – and how distant they feel; of a need to “heal our society” by “reconnect[ing] with our empathy, compassion, power and love, which to me is a very matriarchal energy”. The album, the statement continues, “is just my tiny way of trying to reconnect people... a small slice of music, about a very personal story, and I made it for Delphi so she can hear it when she’s grown and know how much her mum loved her.”
There are 10 tracks on The Dream of Delphi. It’s a record that feels both feather-light and plummeting at the same time, and it takes me a while to tune into it. After a few listens ahead of meeting Natasha, I stop; the stream runs out of access time and I neglect to renew it. I stay put in a life without music.
Natasha found out she was pregnant in the toilets backstage ahead of the penultimate show of her 2019 tour (“I was so out of my body; you have this special sort of twinkling secret”). Four months later the world started to lock down in response to Covid. She was living in Los Angeles and had already begun to navigate her pregnancy as a creative project on its own terms. “It was such an interesting moment, to have a baby in the middle of lockdown,” she explains. “Everything just went quiet, yet my body – tuning into internal sounds or feelings or vibrations, or just natural sounds – had the space to heighten, and was already heightening anyway because I was pregnant. The world stopped and got quieter and the animal side of me grew.” Natasha tells me that, in labour, she sounded “like a groaning cow”, a sound that “was coming from the depths of the earth, it felt like”.
Delphi was born at home, and when I ask Natasha about her sonic memories of her daughter’s arrival, it’s not the newborn noises she remembers, but the silence. She paints me a scene in the hours after birth: she’s in bed with tea and toast and tiny, newborn Delphi, looking out at glass doors that lead onto a porch. “I remember looking out and just seeing this weird twilight time. The midwives left, and [my partner] and Delphi fell asleep. I felt like it was this liminal space where everything was silent. It was this silent world between worlds: I wasn’t not a mother, and I wasn’t a mother yet.
“I was in this threshold moment and everyone else had gone and I felt this existential loneliness, like I was in a spotlight standing in the world. It was a moment that was unrepeatable; it was a moment, and I was just lying. I felt like I’d been in a war, but I was also so aware of this peace after so much motion and noise and movement. It was that silent it was almost like this huge tear in the fabric of reality; I was just completely washed clean of everything for a minute. I felt the mirage of existence had fallen away, and this real sense of connection to animals and plants: that every living thing goes through this process of death and rebirth and birth and growing and dying. I was just overwhelmed with the serenity of that feeling.” Natasha says she fell asleep afterwards and awoke to the sun rising, bringing with it a sense of “pure joy: it was over”.
These hours are represented by two songs on The Dream of Delphi: “The Midwives Have Left” and “Her First Morning”. The former is spare and spectral, wordless vocal chords folded atop gently building piano keys like origami. The latter is more euphoric; Natasha’s cooing vocals sound a little more sure, they’re tentatively growing into something, reaching out into a new kind of existence. “It was really interesting trying to make music around that experience,” says Natasha. “Initially I didn’t want to do any lyrics because I couldn’t really put words to the feelings I was having; the just a fraction of my small human ability to put music to the thing.”
Matrescence changed sound for Natasha, a person who has been engaged with making noise as a musician and a vocalist for most of her life. There was “something about pregnancy that made me continuously connected to something beyond myself”. Once Delphi was born Natasha noticed that her “ears just went insane. At the slightest shifting in her cot I would sit up. What I found interesting was I was totally overtaken by this instinct that was beyond my control. Any slightest hiccup or gurgle or breath. It’s not just your ears that are hearing it, it’s your whole body that senses their whole body; there’s an interchange between our vibrational expressions.” I’m reminded, I tell her, of the raw first days after I gave birth, when I would lie awake despite bone-shattering exhaustion and listen to the strange dialogue between my husband’s sleeping breath and the baby’s fluttering exhales.
Motherhood drags you down into a state that we would all be in if we were living in greater connection with nature and less artificial environments
Natasha Khan
“Motherhood drags you down into a state that we would all be in if we were living in greater connection with nature and less artificial environments,” she says. “I think that’s why it’s been such a profound spiritual awakening for me, because as a child I was so naturally connected. There’s been this never-ending longing and melancholy towards wanting to keep that thread alive.”
Having been astonished by where motherhood has taken her spiritually, Natasha believes society doesn’t offer people enough space to properly occupy it: “It’s a moment to be quiet and I think that women aren’t allowed that big space around having a baby; it should be, like, a year and a half, to really marinate in that experience. We’re sort of forced back out way too quickly.”
Hours pass. I leave the intimacy of Natasha’s home – kitten playing on the floor, Polaroids on the fridge, little shoes lined up by the door – and head back across London. It feels like a lot of what I’ve been thinking about – the tussle between artificial, digital noise and the sounds of the outside, organic world; the strange metamorphosis my senses have undergone during my matrescence and how the space I occupy has changed since – has been thrown up by our conversation. I feel seen, but I’ve also had my thinking challenged. I admire the way Natasha is able to inhabit, to embrace, her matrescence and her motherhood so fully. Perhaps in three years’ time, when my son is the same age that Delphi is now, I will too.
Right now, it still feels as if I am emerging from something and the outside world is not quite ready for it; that I am not quite ready for it, that I am still made of tissue-paper layers: who I was, who I am, who I will be. That in listening to myself I must also accept who I am, who I am becoming, who I have lost. It is still easier for me to tune into the sounds of what society expects mothers to be, rather than that more vivid and vital song of what kind of mother I am.
‘Hark: How Women Listen’ will be published by Canongate in the UK on 1 May 2025
English (US) ·