Taja Cheek has spent her career making music that resists easy explanation. The singer-songwriter known as L’Rain builds songs from fragments of R&B, rock, electronic music, folk and ambient, allowing sounds to bleed into one another until their original borders become difficult to locate. It’s the type of creative risk-taking that rewards some artists and strands others in the dreaded we-don’t-know-where-to-put-you music industry wilderness.
Cheek said that after releasing three critically acclaimed albums in nine years, to an audience that has steadily expanded, she found herself in the latter territory.
“I was just noticing how people were treating my music with white gloves,” she said in an interview last month in Brooklyn. Cheek, who is also the artistic director of Performance Space in New York City and curated the performance program of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, perceived the limits the market puts on her music career. “I’m sort of in a pop world in some way, or in a commercial music world in some way. I’m thinking about wanting more for myself and just sort of looking up and being like, ‘Is this a glass ceiling or not? Will I be able to evolve? Will I be able to grow? And what is stopping that? Is it me or is it other people?’”
That thought is not the thesis of her latest LP, “Fata Morgana,” but it is one of its tensions: the realization that she can be grateful for what she has accomplished while still questioning why the accomplishments have not opened certain doors.
“I used to feel a lot of resentment for that,” Cheek said. “But now I think I’m just asking questions.”
Those questions, and her attempts to answer them, are at the heart of “Fata Morgana.” The title refers to an optical illusion, a distortion of the shape and position of faraway objects. For Cheek, the idea of that mirage became a way of thinking about self-image: how she sees herself, how an industry sees her and how those perceptions can become distorted when race, gender and genre lead to assumptions about an artist before the music is even heard. How far is she allowed to go? And whose approval is she really seeking?
Cheek’s desire to break out of the experimental bubble is especially audible on “Soulless Cycle,” the album’s first single and its most direct rock song. The track was built from a simple three-chord idea Cheek had written years earlier and forgotten. When she rediscovered it, she imagined it as a punk song, meant to capture the physical intensity of L’Rain’s live set, which can escalate from folk to free jazz at a moment’s notice.
Kyp Malone, a multi-instrumentalist and member of the group TV on the Radio, first met Cheek when she was working as a collaborator with the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time in the early 2010s. She was performing in a band, moving around the stage playing different instruments, and realized she didn’t need to do that.
“I talked to her afterwards and told her, ‘You don’t need to be in a democracy, you need to be doing your own thing,’” Malone recalled during a phone interview. He described Cheek as an idiosyncratic world-builder who creates accessible landscapes with pop sensibilities. Though he said that some Black female musicians with experimental perspectives have made inroads to widespread recognition, the ground is still shaky.
“The door could still shut for these folks,” he said. “There’s some progress, but if this music were made by someone else, the door would stay open.”
Throughout “Fata Morgana,” Cheek layers the experimental and the familiar, and the result can feel both intimate and expansive. The album is structured around images of the desert and the deep sea, two environments that seem opposite but share a sense of extremity. Reflecting that conceptual landscape, the music moves from meditative passages to moments of abrasion, often within the same song.
“There’s these very craggy, almost rocky volcanic textures,” said Andrew Lappin, a longtime collaborator who co-produced, engineered and mixed “Fata Morgana.” He pointed to songs like “Church of No One” and “Blue,” which he said also carried “seemingly kind of aquatic feelings” inside them.
That approach can be heard on “Elmyra,” a song about loving too intensely, inspired in part by Elmyra Duff from “Tiny Toon Adventures,” the ’90s cartoon character who adores animals so aggressively that it becomes destructive. Cheek sees something of herself in that paradox. “What does it mean to love too much or too hard?” Cheek asked rhetorically. “There are ways to apply that to all the other things I’ve been talking about, in terms of self-doubt and how an industry might see me. That’s where the teeth come in. The teeth can be a smile or the teeth can be ripping something apart, like tearing a piece of meat or something. You show your teeth when you’re scared and when you’re upset and when you’re smiling.”
“July 5th,” which incorporates dance hall and a contribution from the reggae luminary Screechy Dan, considers the state of the country — policing, food systems and other forms of institutional dysfunction — while also reaching backward toward Black musical histories that have often been separated from the stories told about American roots music.
For Cheek, the collaboration was personal. Screechy Dan had been part of the musical environment around Crown Heights, where she grew up. His presence on the song allowed childhood memory, contemporary politics and Caribbean music to occupy the same space.
“There’s a whole lineage of Black artists who have been doing the same thing actually, it’s maybe not that weird,” she said, before adding: “I’m really just thinking about me and what I can do in my tiny little sphere. I just don’t want to be put in a box. I feel limitless, and I want to remain that way and bring people with me into that feeling.”
Cheek hears minimalist composers in the work of hip-hop producers, and the history of Black sampling practices in techniques that critics sometimes describe as “experimental” when they appear in her music. “I do make experimental music,” she said, “but I also eye-roll when I say that.” Because while the term can describe what she does, it can also make her music seem more alien than it is.
“I want my music to reach as far as it can,” she said. “When I die, I want it to be said that I made the most inventive, interesting music that I could to try to push culture forward.”
Lappin said that when beginning a new L’Rain album, he often asks Cheek whether she wants to “remodel a few bathrooms and maybe put in some skylights” or undertake “a gut renovation of the house.”
This time around, Cheek responded that she had been thinking about how the new record could be the last part of a continuum. “She made it pretty clear she wanted this to be a summation, an encapsulation of what had come before,” he said.
L’Rain’s 2017 debut emerged from the experience of Cheek’s mother’s death near the end of that album’s creation. “Fatigue,” released in 2021, confronted exhaustion and upheaval while arriving at the mantra “make a way out of no way.” Her third album, “I Killed Your Dog,” turned the scrutiny inward, examining what happens when the narrator is not merely responding to damage but recognizes her own capacity to cause it. “Fata Morgana” gathers those concerns without repeating them.
The album retains many of the subjects that have followed her from record to record — grief over her mother’s death, romantic uncertainty, exhaustion and the difficulties of being a person trying to make something meaningful in a hostile or indifferent world. But this time, Cheek is looking directly at the person who has been carrying all of it. She is asking where she should change and where she should remain stubbornly herself.
“I’m kind of looking at my career so far from a meta lens,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Where am I at? Who am I? What’s going on?’”
Cheek and Lappin said their discussions about sea life ultimately gave them a blueprint. They drew inspiration from the rose of Jericho, a plant that can appear dead and then spring back to life when exposed to water. They also considered deep-sea organisms that generate their own light in darkness.
“I try to let myself be guided by a sense of wonder and an affinity for the unknown,” Cheek said. “If I’m surprising myself, I’m on the right path.”
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