Across 2006’s Fur and Gold and 2009’s Two Suns, much of Khan’s mystic brand of pop involved a tension between open-hearted sympathy and something more rogue, her guileless voice keeping the flights of fancy just earthward enough. She wants the new album to sound like “an inventor living in a lighthouse” somewhere on the English coast. Twist your ear the right way and you can sort of hear it: that salt-washed, weathered, mechanical, isolated, magical, guiding feel, looking to a man whose purpose is to generate beams of light as well as light-bulb moments.

Khan wrote a song about a lighthouse keeper of sorts for The Haunted Man, though it didn’t make the final record. Hopefully she’ll release it one day, as the concept is bewitching: She imagined being the wife of Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen, best known as the creator of enormous, animal-like, moving structures dubbed Strandbeests. In the song, Khan has to compete with the beasts for their inventor’s love, racing with them every day in order to win his affection. It’s about what’s more important: your personal life, or the art that you make.

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In March 2010, Natasha Khan returned home from touring Two Suns and closed the door to her flat in Brighton, on England’s south coast. Alone. Her relationship with the Brooklyn musician who inspired that album had ended, and she felt a vast emptiness in her own home. “The loneliness and quiet starkness of that is overwhelming,” she says earlier in the summer, on an unbearably hot July day in a London pub garden. “I tried to rehabilitate myself, rebuilding some sense of who I am without the music.”

Khan shut herself away, attempting to cure the profound writer’s block she was experiencing in order to reconcile her sense of self. She had been writing songs since the age of 11, when she took up the piano— learning through her own improvisation, rather than lessons. “I was ready to give up music entirely,” she says. “I felt blocked in all sorts of areas. It was about being broody for either children or new creative ideas or an epiphany. I was just lying in a hot room with no- one coming, nothing happening, no ideas.” She rang Thom Yorke—Bat for Lashes opened for Radiohead in 2008—to ask, “What do you do when you feel like you’re going to die because you can’t write anything?” He told her to draw.

So Khan enrolled in a children’s illustration course and life-drawing classes, and filled reams of sketchbook paper with her imaginings. She also bought a kitten, became a dab hand at growing dahlias, sought creative succor from a former art professor, and started taking intensive dance lessons. The dancing, in particular, made an impact. Though Khan says her onstage confidence wasn’t always high, working with choreographers Jorge Crecis and Katie Lusby backed up her instincts with intention. Her body speaks of the conviction with which she approached the sessions; as we sit outside the church where Dahl is buried in Great Missenden, Khan grabs my hand and makes me squeeze her thigh. There is no squeeze. It’s rock solid.

Khan describes being led by Crecis—who is currently studying for a PhD in how to modify a performer’s state of mind through his or her actions—in a spinning frenzy, building up speed until the liquid in your ears starts whirling, and colors blur out. “It makes you consider your power,” says Khan. “You can’t just stop because you’d fall over and be sick—and not being able to stop something and having to put up with it is a really emotional experience.”

Eventually, the songs started to come, often arriving fully formed, within an hour. On Khan’s sequencer in her living room, they were primitive, but in her head, they were complete with instrumentation and production trills. One evening at home in Brighton, Khan was watching Ryan’s Daughter, a 1970 film about a young Irish woman who has become disenchanted with her marriage and subsequently has an affair with an English soldier.

“There’s a scene where the female character is going out at night to meet this soldier,” Khan recalls. “It’s dusk, there are all these lilies, and you can see how heady and fragrant the air is. All the pollen is blowing on her skirt, and she’s looking at this man—it’s so sensual and exciting. She’s been so deathly bored and trapped in her own existence. That’s exactly how I felt.”