Natasha Khan: In the Mood for Love

Natasha Khan has set out on an exploration of affection, and her fourth album as Bat for Lashes is the compass. 

- Fiona Duncan

Instead of a wedding band, Natasha Khan wears a bridal locket. It’s a gold, heart-shaped showpiece inscribed with “The Bride” that she had “very badly made in Los Angeles’ Mexican jewelry district downtown,” she says. We’re a short drive from there, holed up in a tiny hotel room in Koreatown. Khan is curled comfortably on a queen-size bed, facing away from a stupendous view. The Hollywood sign looks like it resides on her right shoulder, Griffith Observatory is near her left ear. She’s wearing the locket and her new signature blue eye shadow, both of which also appear on the cover of her new album, The Bride. It’s Khan’s fourth release as Bat for Lashes, a moniker she’s been recording under since 2006, but not since 2012’s The Haunted Man. In the interim four years, Khan made an album of six psychedelic covers with the band Toy (they called the project Sexwitch), developed a Transcendental Meditation practice, and traveled between her “classic trilogy” of cities: New York, L.A., and London. The show Khan played just a few days ago, at Coachella, was her first public performance in three years. “It was nerve-racking,” she confesses. Tomorrow she’ll play again, in a church this time, at Immanuel Presbyterian on Wilshire Boulevard, a few blocks from our present perch. Bat for Lashes has six more shows scheduled in churches across America and the U.K., all of which will raise funds for the David Lynch Foundation, which aims to bring Transcendental Meditation to people in need, “like soldiers with PTSD,” she says.