Laetitia Sadier refuses to be pigeonholed. While most famous as the voice of Stereolab (and thus, the 1990's in general), she's spent twenty-odd years exploring the full spectrum of collaborative (with Deerhunter's Bradford Cox, Common, and Tyler, The Creator) and individual (albums from 2010's The Trip onwards) creative dynamics, leaving behind a broad body of work united by a single constant: her unmistakable voice.

She says that her latest, Find Me Finding You, is the closest that she's come to the ultimate creative outcome: bringing the sound in your head into the real world. We met in a hotel lobby, simultaneously occupied by a legion of cheerleading competition participants, during this past March's Big Ears Festival. Over the course of 45 or so minutes, she half-spoke, half-lullabyed to me about 1960's France, letting things go, and why politics must remain personal.

Across your time in Stereolab, the bands that you’ve formed around yourself, and as a strictly solo artist, what have you found particularly liberating or exciting about shifting towards more personal projects?

I can hear myself. I can occupy my space, I can define my space, and that’s quite exciting. To find my own limits within that, and my own openings. That’s been exciting, but at the same time my desire is to work with people, to work with others – it’s not just about me, it’s the interactions with other people and what that creates that is rewarding.

Last night I played solo, and that’s very liberating but at the same time very exposing. I’m quite naked, and you have to go further when you play solo – go and reach out to the limits of what you can offer. It’s more challenging, definitely, to be standing on one’s own. But I think we need both – it’s good to know that I can stand on both my feet and find my own strength, and then it’s good to give that in service of others when in a band. To try and find that one-ness within a band. That’s when being in a band is great, finding that unity and how you can be one body. In life as well, finding your own self, knowing yourself and how that can best accommodate others. It’s a quite natural give-and-take, really.

I’ve read in previous interviews that part of your frustration within Stereolab was that you wanted to contribute more than just lyrics and vocals. Did you find that once you began experiencing broad commercial success that it was hard to escape a certain role or way of doing things?

With Stereolab, Tim was always the headmaster, and we had very fixed roles that I found quite limiting. And you know things played out how they had to play out, because I went and did my solo thing, or solo with others. I’m quite happy, I don’t have any complaints about how things unfurled. But I never felt any sort of pressure in Stereolab, that we had to modify our thoughts or creativity in order to better suit some kind of commercial format. If it had been presented to us, we’d have said no, that we’re doing what we want. I think we were actually quite respected for that, for never compromising in order to fit a certain market. Our label understood that – we had it contracted that they could not interfere with our creativity. So we were very lucky, but we insisted on that, that it was our creativity or nothing. We were never extremely popular, but popular enough and respected enough that it was a long-lasting effect. That’s the only way to go: if you have a vision, to serve it as best as you can and not shape it for the market economy or whatever.

How do you make political concerns a recurring theme of your music without those themes growing stale? That is, how do you establish and communicate an ideology without it becoming repetitious?

It’s ongoing. Somehow, it’s always fresh because wherever there is life politics are involved. And I don’t mean politics like the trashy thing that has been sold to us by professional politicians – politics is all of us, it’s our responsibility to be political actors. I think that side of politics has been undermined, and that’s why we have Trump, Brexit, and things like that. It’s a total refusal to take responsibility for ourselves and just turning it over to the wilderness – letting people rule with impunity. It’s very dangerous to society – we have to have rules, we have to have contracts, we have to consult one another on decisions. At the same time that we’re moving away from that, people are realizing the importance of it now that it’s gone.

Would you say that an artist or someone else with a platform has an obligation to use it to speak out against something they think is wrong?

I think at the moment, yes. I’m not saying that everyone has to, but it’s a natural occurrence at the moment that artists are opening their eyes and making a stand. I think taking a stance is better, even though you may not win an instant victory. Whatever you do now may not work immediately, but it may inspire others to also act, or have ripple effects. You can’t fear failure – any action causes a reaction. It’s important to remember that it’s not about direct impact. Nothing is. You work and you carry on, and carry on, and carry on, and that’s how something happens in the end.

What effect would you like to see your music have upon people?

I don’t want to be presumptuous about what people get from my music and lyrics – I really can’t control that. However, I find the media climate to be so negative, and so doomed, but life’s not like that. A lot of it is down to us – what we do with our reality, and how we transform it. It’s a desire to empower people, including myself. The French can be very negative, very depressed. That’s why I left, because I didn’t want to play into that and activate that negativity within me. I wanted to de-activate it, to look positively at what life has to offer and how we can interact with that. We could live much freer lives, and much more empowered lives if not for obedience to the system. You look at the architecture around here and it’s all incredibly corporate, designed to turn the human into a little soldier. I find that very sad, because humans have so much more to them – the spiritual realm, the creative realm – natural things that are stripped out of us. Everything around us is built to square the mind, but the mind isn’t square. It’s a pack of marbles, it’s moving and shifting. That’s what I would like to offer through my music.

Do you subscribe to the idea that you’re constantly improving as an artist? Are you always most satisfied with your most recent work?

I must say that this new album, Find Me Finding You, which came out yesterday, is my first album outside of the Stereolab albums where I feel like I’ve finally gotten where I wanted to be. I’ve reached a plateau, and it’s quite satisfying in a way where I feel like the end product is what I wanted to make. I’ve built up enough maturity and trust, I’ve let myself be guided, which brings about effects that are deeper and more meaningful that if you try to control everything. Over the past four albums, I’ve learned to relinquish control – the more you relinquish control, the more in control you actually are. Accepting outside forces allows you to better guide them. It’s about attracting the right people, the right situations, and feeding that into the work with the trust that the right thing will come out. I learned a lot from singing, that there are lots of muscles in the throat that want to take control, but it’s about disengaging those muscles and letting the work and the voice come from a deeper place – one which is more truthful, more powerful.

Having achieved that, how do you re-frame your goals going forward? Is this a new creative status quo, or do you move on to another refinement or ambition?

At the moment, I’m really enjoying the now [laughs]. It’s all very fresh, so I feel like I have to take care of this baby, go on tour, and project into the world everything that is going on in this album. People ask, you know, did you write all this before Brexit? And I did, of course. The environment that created this is nothing new, but people have handed their political role over to another entity or simply suppressed it. I’ve always wanted to reach out to the political dimension and bring it to the fore as an important human element – we mustn’t try to run away from that responsibility.

Do you find that your work dealing with less specific topics can be over-politicized by association?

To me, it’s all daily life. That’s my point – there is no higher political realm. It’s down here, it’s right now, it’s not to be relegated to higher authorities. We are our own higher authority.

Growing up, what were your first experiences with creating art?

I was born in May 1968, a time in which French politics are very physically anchored. It was a time when people were taking to the streets to reclaim their freedom and really change the course of society. I think it didn’t work out as people expected, because there were very strong conservative forces keeping things as they were. Ultimately, I think capitalism was reinforced, but peoples’ mentalities did open up quite a bit and force society forwards a little bit – not separating girls and boys in school, allowing people to experiment more with their lives and not necessarily obeying what their parents had planned for them to do.

My family was not particularly artistic – the expectation was that you would get a real job, and being a musician certainly wasn’t that. For me, though, music was always something very magical and transcendental. It was something that wasn’t for me to make, it was reserved for the gods. In terms of being a child and my own creativity, I wasn’t really allowed to think in those terms. But I was certainly a rebel. I met Tim when I was 19, and he asked me to come over and live with him. I made him wait a year, did some temping jobs to save up some money and prepare, and when I was 20 I moved to London. I joined Tim’s band, McCarthy, right away and then shortly after that we formed Stereolab. I’d said fuck you to my parents, my mother in particular. She’d wanted me to be some kind of secretary, bilingual assistant, or work in marketing. I had a lucky escape.

Have they come around to your music after the fact?

Yeah, they have. I think my dad’s quite proud of me. My mother passed away 26 years ago actually, so she never really expressed, to me anyway, how happy she was for me. She had actually wanted to be an opera singer, but her parents said no.