Across 2006’s Fur and Gold and 2009’s Two Suns, much of Khan’s mystic brand of pop involved a tension between open-hearted sympathy and something more rogue, her guileless voice keeping the flights of fancy just earthward enough. She wants the new album to sound like “an inventor living in a lighthouse” somewhere on the English coast. Twist your ear the right way and you can sort of hear it: that salt-washed, weathered, mechanical, isolated, magical, guiding feel, looking to a man whose purpose is to generate beams of light as well as light-bulb moments.

Khan wrote a song about a lighthouse keeper of sorts for The Haunted Man, though it didn’t make the final record. Hopefully she’ll release it one day, as the concept is bewitching: She imagined being the wife of Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen, best known as the creator of enormous, animal-like, moving structures dubbed Strandbeests. In the song, Khan has to compete with the beasts for their inventor’s love, racing with them every day in order to win his affection. It’s about what’s more important: your personal life, or the art that you make.

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In March 2010, Natasha Khan returned home from touring Two Suns and closed the door to her flat in Brighton, on England’s south coast. Alone. Her relationship with the Brooklyn musician who inspired that album had ended, and she felt a vast emptiness in her own home. “The loneliness and quiet starkness of that is overwhelming,” she says earlier in the summer, on an unbearably hot July day in a London pub garden. “I tried to rehabilitate myself, rebuilding some sense of who I am without the music.”

Khan shut herself away, attempting to cure the profound writer’s block she was experiencing in order to reconcile her sense of self. She had been writing songs since the age of 11, when she took up the piano— learning through her own improvisation, rather than lessons. “I was ready to give up music entirely,” she says. “I felt blocked in all sorts of areas. It was about being broody for either children or new creative ideas or an epiphany. I was just lying in a hot room with no- one coming, nothing happening, no ideas.” She rang Thom Yorke—Bat for Lashes opened for Radiohead in 2008—to ask, “What do you do when you feel like you’re going to die because you can’t write anything?” He told her to draw.

So Khan enrolled in a children’s illustration course and life-drawing classes, and filled reams of sketchbook paper with her imaginings. She also bought a kitten, became a dab hand at growing dahlias, sought creative succor from a former art professor, and started taking intensive dance lessons. The dancing, in particular, made an impact. Though Khan says her onstage confidence wasn’t always high, working with choreographers Jorge Crecis and Katie Lusby backed up her instincts with intention. Her body speaks of the conviction with which she approached the sessions; as we sit outside the church where Dahl is buried in Great Missenden, Khan grabs my hand and makes me squeeze her thigh. There is no squeeze. It’s rock solid.

Khan describes being led by Crecis—who is currently studying for a PhD in how to modify a performer’s state of mind through his or her actions—in a spinning frenzy, building up speed until the liquid in your ears starts whirling, and colors blur out. “It makes you consider your power,” says Khan. “You can’t just stop because you’d fall over and be sick—and not being able to stop something and having to put up with it is a really emotional experience.”

Eventually, the songs started to come, often arriving fully formed, within an hour. On Khan’s sequencer in her living room, they were primitive, but in her head, they were complete with instrumentation and production trills. One evening at home in Brighton, Khan was watching Ryan’s Daughter, a 1970 film about a young Irish woman who has become disenchanted with her marriage and subsequently has an affair with an English soldier.

“There’s a scene where the female character is going out at night to meet this soldier,” Khan recalls. “It’s dusk, there are all these lilies, and you can see how heady and fragrant the air is. All the pollen is blowing on her skirt, and she’s looking at this man—it’s so sensual and exciting. She’s been so deathly bored and trapped in her own existence. That’s exactly how I felt.”

“Don’t look, it’s got three pubes in it!” howls Khan when I bring up the “NSFW” fuss around the image when we talk in London. (“NSFW is my middle name,” is McGinley’s only comment on the issue.) Although the term is primarily used to prevent poor office workers from landing in trouble, it indicated a certain salaciousness that Khan found absurd. “I got really fed up with seeing women naked and feeling unempowered by it as opposed to empowered,” she says, “so I didn’t shave my legs, I didn’t dye my moustache, and I didn’t pluck my eyebrows.” Eschewing the cosmic-carpet-bag images that had surrounded Two Suns, she no longer wanted to perpetuate the “tokenized spirituality” that had followed her look—all feather headdresses and animal totems—and ended up on the shelves of Topshop. “I’m still all of those things,” she says of her previous incarnations, “but I don’t need to look like that to still be that—I’m quite safe and secure that I’m a spiritual being.”

Outside the church in Great Missenden, she says that growing up with a religious father was an important part of her development with regard to storytelling. Khan’s dad, Rehmat Khan, a former squash player and now coach, left the family when she was 11 years old. He was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, and, as a Muslim, would pray five times a day at home, the young Natasha sometimes joining in. But she didn’t keep up this practice when he left.

“I got really good input up until the age of 11, which is perfect,” she says. “That’s when adolescence starts, when I would have really wanted to rebel. Up until that point, though, it didn’t feel like doctrine, and it gave me a great moral structure.” After those early experiences, Khan knew that her “relationship with my higher consciousness or god wasn’t within a traditional religious structure, and that I didn’t need those rules to be able to contact that place.” Later, at the Roald Dahl Museum, she admires a photograph of the author reading his children stories and spinning two silver balls above their beds—a Norwegian folkloric device to keep the witches away.

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After the creative breakthrough that came with writing “Lilies”, Khan had a new adversary: Her record label, EMI/Parlophone, didn’t hear any singles in the demos she played them early on and refused to let her go into the studio until she wrote some. “It was a real struggle,” Khan says, visibly agitated. “They weren’t into it for ages.”

But EMI’s resistance only steeled her resolve. While Khan has been plagued by rote comparisons to label mate Kate Bush since the start, they finally seem pertinent when Khan describes how she dug into her own pocket to do everything that the label wouldn’t let her—a trick Bush knew well. “I worked in a studio with David Kosten, paid for that myself,” she says tartly, referring to the producer who had worked on her previous two albums, and with whom she has a close relationship. (Remembering their work on Two Suns single “Daniel”, Kosten wrote in an email: “We’ve only had a couple of decent arguments in our seven years working together, but she bit me so hard on my arm when we were working on that song, I had a welt for a month—I’d been nagging her about making it more of a pop song, and she finally cracked!”)

Khan paid to go to Italy with Kosten, PJ Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis, and a choirmaster. For The Haunted Man’s title track, they achieved Khan’s desired sound of chanting soldiers marching over a hill by recording the men singing three-part harmonies from the edge of a canyon, their voices ricocheting back off of the opposite cliff face. Then, having previously worked with Beck over email on “Let’s Get Lost”, their contribution to the Twilight: Eclipse soundtrack, Khan flew to Malibu to stay a while at the singer’s beach- side house, recording with a crowd of musicians that Beck had invited over, and hanging out with his kids, wife, and their chickens.

Still unconvinced that she had the right sound for the record, in August 2010, Khan traveled to New York to stay with TV on the Radio’s David Sitek. Although the producer says they mostly spent time cooking and running around like Goonies—and only a few beats from their time together remain on the album—working with Sitek built Khan’s confidence sufficiently to go back to her label and insist they get the ball rolling. “He absolutely flipped out,” Khan says. “I was like, thank you. I had felt so alone with it, that [the label] thought it was shit.”

“When I say I played it criminally uncool, I mean it,” Sitek wrote in an email. “Natasha is certainly her own animal—she circles high above the song, spots the smallest treasure, then swoops down and plucks it from the meadows. Did I just call her an eagle? Maybe an owl.”

Going into the homes of people like Beck and Sitek played a big part for Khan, who had recorded her first two albums in residential situations. “It gave me the absolute perfect balance that I love, of having kids and families around, having mealtimes together, watching films at night, working on music all day,” she beams. “You don’t have to be this dysfunctional musician.”

Finally, Khan finished the record with Dan Carey, who has previously worked with M.I.A., Hot Chip, and Santigold, among others. When I visit him at his south London studio, the taciturn producer becomes animated when talking about the highlights of his time working with Khan. “She’s incredible—I think she can see the songs,” he says. In order to recreate a rainy sound effect for “Winter Fields”, Carey “stood on a chair and poured water over the roof of a car while Natasha was inside recording with the windscreen wipers on—but in the end, it sounded like someone was pissing on the car.” More successfully, for “All Your Gold”, the producer connected drum machines to his huge collection of vintage amps, which he set up around the edge of the studio, the beats bursting from every corner of the room like synchronized firecrackers.

The one track they couldn’t dress up was “Laura”, a piano ballad Khan wrote with Justin Parker, who also co-wrote “Video Games” with Lana Del Rey. (It was Khan’s first ever co-write—at her request, not her label’s.) The fact that Khan and Parker completed the song in just two hours is even more remarkable considering what went on the night prior to their session. “My housemate and I had an extremely debauched house party, like nothing I’d ever experienced before—it was so bad!” Khan hoots through her laughter. “It ended up with seven people in the shower, Black Sabbath, dancing on the table. The next day, I had the biggest hangover ever, and I had to go and write this song.” “Laura” was so strong that it resisted any further arrangement or production that Carey tried to foist on it; the final version is simply the demo, along with gentle horns recorded at Abbey Road.

Khan admits that, ultimately, her label’s pushing her had a great influence on the record. It’s taught her a lot, too; she originally paid for the “Lilies” video herself, knowing EMI would be freaked out by how long the manual effects-heavy video would take to make. But now the label has seen enough—and been sufficiently impressed—to agree to pay for it. “It’s a different way of doing things, but sometimes you have to initiate your own creative projects,” she says, with a pleased grin.

Ambling about Great Missenden’s narrow roads, we pass a group of schoolchildren being shown a building that helped inspire Dahl’s book The BFG—a tale of the world’s only big friendly giant who blows nice dreams in through a young girl’s window at night. Khan recalls the work she produced whilst taking the course in children’s book illustration at the start of her Haunted Man odyssey: After finding a story on the back of a postcard about a little boy who thinks there are two moons in the sky—one at his house and one at his grandmother’s—Khan devised a concertina with a pulling-paper mechanism inside as a device to tell the tale. As you stretch and unfold it, a moon travels through a series of holes to appear as different lunar phases. “When it reaches the end,” she says, “You realize it was the same moon all along.”

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