Bat For Lashes unveils new single, "Letter To My Daughter"

The single is accompanied by its video, the second chapter of her album film, produced in collaboration with creative director and choreographer Alexandra Green and directed by Freddie Leyden.

“This title is pretty self-explanatory. If I was on my deathbed, it’s what I’d say to Delphi to give her some sense of being at home in the world, the galaxy, the universe we live in. Before Delphi was born I started writing her a book of letters, inspired by Maya Angelou’s book of the same name, Letter To My Daughter. It documents a very strange but magical year, full of special memories and historic worldly moments," Khan explains.

"This ride of life is always continuing and we’re all just energy moving from one form into another, always. She’s also just part of an echo, ancestral line or spiral in the cosmos, like the spiral that I saw in her soft hair when she was a baby. She is part of something much greater than any of us individually; she comes from the past and she comes from the future.”

Natasha became pregnant at the start of a new decade, a few months after her last album, 2019’s Lost Girls, was released. “I was writing letters to Delphi from the time she was the size of a tomato seed. About everything that was happening in the world, like the riots after George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, about the pandemic and COVID, about the world that she was going to be born into.”

Khan knew straight away that she wanted to call her daughter Delphi Josephine: her child’s first name is connected to a Greek female oracle, and her second is after Natasha’s mother. “I almost felt a strange sense of protection because I was harbouring a new life,” she says of that peculiar, frightening time. “It gave me hope that something good was going to come out of it. I also had this person to talk to.”