Cate Le Bon – Are You With Me Now?
2013 · Directed by Casey and Ewan
5.6K Likes
Best comments
1.“This is the strangest pottery-making tutorial I have ever seen.”
More comments
- 2.“Are the cups for sale?”
- 3.“Patrick Swayze is there!”
The story
Mug Museum got its name from a roommate's joke about the teacups piling up in Cate Le Bon's bedroom. She later turned the phrase into something bigger: an imaginary place where you go to look back at your relationships. She wrote the album partly after her grandmother died, though she said it's less about grief than about what a family's matriarch leaves behind, and how everyone shifts once she's gone.
So of course the video is about pottery. Le Bon's friends Casey and Ewan directed it. A woman in a boiler suit (Le Bon, or someone who looks a lot like her) throws mugs on a wheel by day and chain-smokes over the clay. At night she heads into the woods, watches bonfires with a gang of small kids and later teaches them to make ceramics. A pair of ghostly hands pitches in at the wheel, and the finished mugs come alive and fizz on the shelves.
Le Bon was born Cate Timothy in Penboyr, Carmarthenshire, and raised in a Welsh farmhouse (the stage name is a nod to Simon Le Bon). She recorded Mug Museum in Los Angeles right after moving there from Wales, and the video landed the day before the album came out in November 2013. Clay, smoke and a ghost giving pottery lessons. Not a bad way to honor a grandmother.
