It’s an exciting era for music — lesbian musicians are not just being accepted but shooting to the top of the charts for queer and straight audiences alike. This makes the presence of fresh, queer faces like Minke even more exciting.

The artistic vehicle of London-based songwriter Leah Mason, Minke is a refreshing splash of cool queer melody, infused with multi-genre inspiration and a raw, electric voice. She popped onto the music scene with her 2017 single “Gold Angel” (which, as of this article, has 20 million streams on Spotify), and released her first album The Tearoom in 2019. Now five years later, she has returned with the orchestral piano track “Happier Than Me” and the thick-bassed, synth-laced “Favorite Part.” I had the pleasure of sitting down with her over FaceTime to discuss these songs, her past spent discovering herself as a musician, and where she hopes to grow in the future.

Gabbie: First off, congratulations. You recently released your single “Favorite Part” – a song Prelude Press referred to as “capturing the feeling of mustering up strength in the face of circumstances outside of your control.” Can you speak to the impact and significance of the track? Were there any challenges when you were making this song that influenced the way it came out?

Minke: It’s funny, everything has been relatively calm in the last couple years when I was writing that song. But it originated from the idea of when I first started grappling with coming out, and having crushes on women who were friends, and the broad idea of how terrifying, beautiful, and exciting that all is. It’s relevant still to my life now, though – I had a learning experience when me and my current partner became public. Learning how to deal with those elements of this beautiful thing happening but having that noise surrounding it – that was quite overwhelming for me. And it feels like that when you’re younger too, when you’re seeing this stuff online telling you how to feel, telling you if you’re gay and whether it’s wrong or it’s amazing. It’s easier to handle now, but I used to get lots of hate online, and the lyric “everybody’s screaming at me inside my car” felt like that at times.

Gabbie: As you just said, you publicly came out with your relationship with Cara Delevingne recently – how do you feel dating such a high-profile celebrity has impacted you and your work?

Minke: It was definitely discombobulating at the time, but generally falling in love will have an influence on your life, your music, how you grow as a person. This has been an amazing growth spurt in all those ways – as a partner she makes me feel so incredibly supported and loved, which inevitably has influence on the music. Quite quickly I learned people have a lot of thoughts about this, but now I live a very normal life and I focus on my music, and she goes off to do a million things, and we’re very happy. The other stuff’s just noise.

Gabbie: In a similar vein to that: a lot of queer musicians historically and contemporarily have to face that choice of being public with their sexuality or to keep it private, to make it a pillar of their work or to not. But right now there’s also this “lesbian renaissance” of music, pop specifically – with people like Chappell Roan and Renee Rapp getting to be openly lesbian and still sell out venues. It’s cool and great, but also kind of strange.

Minke: Right! Really wild. When I was coming up that was a faraway dream. The idea that I could be so…I was gonna say accepted, and it probably feels more accepted in the world that I choose to surround myself with, but it does feel more accepted by the mainstream. At the same time though I see the array of the comments online, and we have a long way to go to keep fighting. But it is a different landscape from when I was growing up, and it’s so exciting.

I’m typically quite a private person, and toeing that line between the music and expressing things publicly, I always struggle with that balance. I was definitely struggling with internalized homophobia early on in my music. I didn’t want to be known for being “the queer artist,” I wanted to be known as just an artist. But then when I became comfortable in my sexuality, I realized I really don’t mind that! I think it’s the coolest thing! I am a queer artist, and I’m owning that, and I’m proud of that. So it was a flip in my head, wanting to come out with this new music this year that’s more open.

Photo by Diana Mantis

Gabbie: On the topic of struggling with figuring out one’s identity, I know you also started out as a blues singer, and have made comments that performing blues made you feel like you were “pretending” to be someone else. Which I found an interesting choice of language considering that is often a feeling people attribute to the closeted queer experience. Can you talk more about your history with blues, and what made you make that move toward and then away from it?

Minke: 100%. It was my awakening of life. I was a lucky but sheltered kid. I felt awkward at school. So I locked myself away in my bedroom for years learning guitar, which was therapy for me because it was something I was good at. And by learning guitar, you kind of learn blues music first, from Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Django Reinhardt, all sorts of older musicians who have a run of blues through them. My love of blues came from the guitar first, and that’s what got me noticed very young by my label.

It all happened so quickly: a label picked me up right out of school, but I still felt like that sheltered kid. I still hadn’t figured out who I was or what I wanted, and suddenly I moved into the city and realized it was a big world out there. I started questioning everything: my sexuality, my music, what I really wanted to write about. It feels weird saying it wasn’t great – I mean, I was sent to Nashville as a kid, which was so amazing! But I just felt out of place. I was working with a lot of older men who had a strong idea of what my music should sound like, and I was a kid who didn’t know what I wanted. But then moving to London, I met people, and ran around town and to raves, which helped me hone in on what I wanted to do, which led me to the project of Minke. I’m still that curious person, with love for all different types of music and I like to think there’s a throughline with the lyrical themes, the content, the production, but it definitely takes from a wide range of genres.

Gabbie: You say you grew up in a musical family?

Minke: Not professionally, we just really loved music.

Gabbie: I’d love to hear more about what it was like growing up in a home like that.

Minke: I owe it to my parents for introducing me to amazing music really young. My mum used to work as a secretary for a music video company, so she was kind of in the industry, and my dad just played drums for fun. The top floor of our house was an open plan, just space, and there was a piano and drum kit. My dad would come home from work and play music, and I would just dance around to it. I had this big teddy bear that I would dance with for hours, which must’ve driven my mum and brother wild!

And every car journey, that was my mum’s territory, playing Bon Jovi or Aretha Franklin, while my dad was more Tom Petty and “dude rock.” I absorbed this array of music, and basically it’s all their fault.

Gabbie: You say you moved to London, but you didn’t grow up there?

Minke: I was born in London, but then we moved to the suburbs where I lived until I was 17. And then I came out of school, immediately had my record deal handed to me which is the greatest luck, and so I moved to London as a baby musician. I didn’t know how to cook or do any adult things.

Gabbie: Maybe this is just me, but I’m curious how where an artist grows up or spends their time influences their music and who they are as a person. Do you feel growing up near London or living in London has affected your work, or does it feel inconsequential?

Minke: We grew up in the countryside, so that had something to do with it. Because the countryside can be quite isolating – if you want to visit a friend, you have to drive a long way to see them. So I had a lot of alone time, and that fed into the boredom of a kid, so you want to keep them busy however you can. Being 18 in London, and then growing into an adult person, that had an effect because it made me realize I didn’t want to sing about Nashville and “being at the crossroads,” it felt wrong. So if it wasn’t for London I probably wouldn’t have made that switch.

Gabbie: Yeah, and Nashville is quite a different cultural and musical landscape.

Minke: It was a huge culture shock. I mean, I loved it, but it was wild. Looking back, I think “wow, that was an interesting choice.” To be an English girl, late teens, just sent to Nashville.

Gabbie: You say growing up in the countryside made you feel lonely and bored, which is a great segue into a curiosity I had. Listening to your work, the one emotion or pillar I find myself returning to as I listen is loneliness. It feels like a strong tether – from romantic loneliness to social loneliness.

Minke: Yeah, I always feel like an outsider, and that feeling follows you around. Maybe being a queer person, an English person in America, even just a human. All my friends growing up went to university, and all had similar experiences, and they’re still my friends but I was always the odd one out.

Gabbie: I was wondering the intentionality of that loneliness, if you wanted to speak more to it. Being a queer person, being an artist, those experiences can be inherently isolating, unfortunately. I’m curious if you could talk more about how being on the outside looking in permeates your work, and if it feels more subconscious than conscious.

Minke: As a musician, you’re constantly observing, for inspiration, for writing. I’m constantly on the lookout for interesting things to write about. At a party, I’m observing, noticing things that surprise me or that I don’t understand or that I wouldn’t do. It’s intentional in the exact situation I’m writing about – the song “Elsewhere” was about me turning up to a party that a friend told me to go to, and they never turned up, so I was just at a house party alone. Dealing with that flakiness of Los Angeles friends that can happen.

I think you’ve actually cracked something open here! It’s not conscious, it’s just there, that I’m feeling alone a lot of the time, I – is this a therapy session?

Gabbie: It’s an intervention.

Minke: Cool, cool.

Gabbie: Loneliness can be a very insightful topic for art, especially for queer women, who experience a very specific kind of loneliness.

Minke: Yeah, I think it’s more subconscious bleeding through – which is why I love music. I’ll be listening to songs I wrote a year ago, and find them surprisingly so relevant to my life now. They’ll teach me things that I didn’t see at the time. When you’re writing something as pure and honest as you can, it’s magical. It teaches you about yourself.

Photo by Diana Mantis

Gabbie: Now that you’re moving into this next chapter, era, album cycle, however you’d refer to it – is there anything you feel you’ve learned about yourself? Reflecting on the work you’ve already put out, what expectations do you feel you’re setting for yourself?

Minke: For me this work feels so much more accurate to where my life is now and how I’m actually feeling. It’s more representative of what I’m capable of and of what’s influencing me. I listen to these old songs and I cringe sometimes because I can hear the girl figuring things out. That poor lost baby! But these feel a lot more confident, as a woman in my early 30s, it feels like where I should be. One thing in particular is that I’m coming back to guitar in a full-circle moment of falling back in love after putting it to the side for awhile.

Gabbie: I feel you, that sometimes you have to leave something in the past while you figure yourself out, so you can come back to it for the reasons you love it and not for reasons other people expect of you.

Minke: Absolutely.

Gabbie: You talked about how you seek a wide scope of inspiration for your work. I’ve seen you across the Internet refer to artists like Fleetwood Mac, the Spice Girls, and Charli xcx, which is quite a spectrum. How has this melting pot approach to inspiration affected the kind of musician you are, and the kind of musician you want to become?

Minke: I think it all boils down to when I go to the studio, so many things go into my process: What mood am I in? What am I listening to right now? Since the explosion of Spotify, we have access to all the music from all parts of our lives. When I was a kid it was my parents’ music, as a teen it was emo and rock, in my 20s it was dance music and jazz. So we have all this music at our fingertips, and I just want to write something as pure and honest as I’m feeling that day. I don’t want to be so structured about it. I don’t want to create something just for the sake of generating “a sound.” The idea of a sound as an artist can limit you, in my opinion – like, this is the guitar tone that you always use, it’s usually around this BPM, and I don’t want to do that. I want to create music based on myself that day, which is probably where all of those influences come from, because I’m pulling from whatever I’m feeling and listening to that day. It could be Fleetwood Mac, it could be my friend playing me this cool thing they’re working on – not copying, but subconscious, it seeps in.

I was reading an interview with Pete Townshend where he said he doesn’t listen to any music while he’s working on his own stuff, so it can be “pure.” But, music is my life! You don’t turn that off. And I love listening to music, so why would I stop doing that? Just to penetrate this mysterious wall of authenticity? I don’t abide by that.

Gabbie: It’s such an exciting thing to hear you say that. There’s a lot of artists nowadays with a very concrete sound, style of production – and if that’s what they want, go for it! But as a listener it’s exciting to hear this approach, where you’re less concerned with curating a project, even a product, and more curating the songs as they come and worrying about how they slot in together later.

Can you talk more about what to expect moving forward? You’ve released “Favorite Part,” so we’ve got a sense of where you’re at, but moving forward what can you tell us to expect? If you even know what to tell people!

Minke: I’m going to be releasing a single roughly every six weeks for the rest of the year, so I know those songs that are already coming. I’ve tied them into the feelings of the songs and the ideal time, in my head, to listen to them.

The next one is a summery bop with biting lyrics – falling for a straight girl and that off-and-on worry about if they’re closeted or not. The one after that has hip-hop influences, the closest I’ve ever come to having a beat on a song, with really cool guitar which I love. The one after that will be out around Halloween, and the one around Christmas has a choral, wholesome, uplifting, hopeful edge. Very personal song. So I know what’s coming, which is exciting. And I’m working on the next chapter now – it’s not fully nailed down yet, but it’s a lot more guitar. Watch this space, it’s a work-in-progress.

Gabbie: Is there any particular song coming out soon that you’re excited to share?

Minke: I’m most excited about the next one because I think it’s the most playful, queer-specific song I’ve written so far. It feels like a first in my repertoire. But the song at the end of the year is very heartfelt, it’s a ballad. I think every song shows another side of me, and what I’m capable of, so I’m very excited.

Gabbie: I love this approach, of your honesty that you’re figuring it out as you go along.

Minke: Is that the queerness in me? That I refuse this very structured box? Maybe that’s why I haven’t had a lot of success with labels, because I just want to be free. I want to maintain that excitement, love, and passion for my music. I don’t want to be limited in any way.

Photo by Diana Mantis

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