CELESTE, LOVE IS BACK

BY: Jesse Aylen

Feel that sense of longing in the air? It’s not just your imagination. With one slinky, sultry, and smoky tone, the British singer Celeste Epiphany Waite opens her mouth, begins to sing, and declares what we all know to be essential and true, especially in these doldrum days of February: love is back.

As the New York Times put it recently, Celeste is “a young singer with an old soul” and one who’s deliberately set to make her mark on the contemporary soul scene. Just 26 years old, Celeste carries a voice and a stylistic delivery way beyond her relatively young age. With strands of Billie Holiday and Amy Winehouse at their most gleaming woven through her vocal DNA, Celeste brings to mind both the stirring soul singers of yore and today’s impassioned, soulful crooners on her album Not Your Muse, just released in January 2021. 

And keeping true to her faithful love of torchy ‘60’s style and themes, her lyrics ring deeply while touching on love’s tender and eternal magnetism. Take a few lines from her slyly insistent Love is Back, for one:

Oh, my God, I feel so bored

I’m startin’ to realize that all the boys that I find

Are all trouble, I told my mother

She said, “Girl, get your glass full”

So I did and I saw

You

I saw you gleamin’ across the scene, across the room

It’s all in you

I need the meanin’ when I see it all in you

Love is back

Love is back

Love is back

Love is back

For a moment, there it goes

Turn around, next thing you know

Love is back

Celeste sings about the tug and longing we all feel towards each other, perhaps now more than ever in these touch-starved pandemic times. Her lyrics are ever-tapping into something relatable, no matter if you’re experiencing your first flickers of puppy love or still dancing with the same sweetheart for the past 50 years. Yet even in those moments where love stirs you up into an all-consuming roar, her smouldering words speak to that, too, in Stop This Flame:

You’ll never stop this flame

I will never let you go 

Well who am I to say 

Maybe by now you should know

You got your somebody calling 

You think you’re somebody don’t you

I think you’re scared of keeping somebody close

You’ll never stop this flame

I will never let you go 

With her rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star debuting during Inspiration4’s dreamy, outer space-centered 2021 Super Bowl ad and Not Your Muse finally arrived on our more terrestrial ground, Celeste is soon to be inescapable — and we couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

Watch Celeste’s videos for Stop This Flame and Love is Back off of her 2021 album, Not Your Muse, from Both Sides and Polydor Records: