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Jun 20, 2016 Bat For Lashes By Christopher Roberts

Bat For Lashes (aka Natasha Khan) is releasing a new album, The Bride, on July 1 via Parlophone/Warner Bros. Previously she had shared “I Do,” “Joe’s Dream,” “In God’s House” (as well as the video for “In God’s House”), and the video for “Sunday Love.” Now Khan has shared a professionally shot live video of her covering The Carpenters’ 1970 song “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Watch below via Lenny, who premiered it.

Khan had this to say about the cover in an interview with Lenny: “We do a cover [of] a Carpenters song, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ and there’s this running joke when we play live that we make the most depressing cover band ever because we take every song and make it deathly sad, but this one particularly is really close to my heart, because when I was little I had to stay with my ‘nan,’ who was a bit scary. I didn’t really like her but she lived in this house that hadn’t changed since the ‘60s, so it had shag rust-colored carpet and loads of those paintings with the girls with the big eyes and floral vinyl wallpaper. [When I was there] I would just go upstairs and listen to The Very Best of the Carpenters tape over and over again and sing it in front of the mirror. [Now] I play it on piano, and it’s a really dusty slow version with bowed guitar, and it’s been going down really well. I can’t top Karen Carpenter’s voice, but I love singing her words and her melodies.”

The Bride is a concept album driven by a narrative about a woman whose fiancé is killed in crash on the way to the church. As a press release describes, “The Bride flees the scene to take the honeymoon trip alone, resulting in a dark meditation on love, loss, grief, and celebration.” Khan wrote the album as a soundtrack to a feature film she has in mind and it was also inspired by a short film, also entitled, “I Do,” that she wrote and directed and is making its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York this April. Khan recorded the album in an old house in Woodstock, NY, where she built a studio and lived and recorded for two months. Simone Felice of Felice Bros co-produced the album with Khan.

The Bride is the follow-up to 2012’s The Haunted Man. Although last year Khan teamed up with producer Dan Carey and the psych-rock band TOY to form SEXWITCH, who released their self-titled debut album last September. SEXWITCH featured six covers of songs by artists from different countries, including two songs each from Iran and Morocco and one song each from Thailand and America. Khan and TOY first collaborated in 2013 for a cover of “The Bride” by Iranian musician Amir Rassaei.