‘The cello feels like an extension of my body’

From Jehovah’s Witness to pop pioneer, cellist Kelsey Lu is every bit as remarkable as she looks, finds Al Horner

It’s a bright spring afternoon in Manhattan, and cellist Kelsey Lu is laughing as she recalls some of her more outlandish recent dreams. In one, she saved One Direction’s Harry Styles from alligators. In others, she’d grown phantom limbs and shared surreal encounters with action movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. “A good icebreaker if we ever meet,” she jokes.

For several years, Californiabased Lu has been quietly making a name for herself as one of pop music’s most sought-after collaborators, performing both live and on record with such megastars as Lady Gaga, Florence Welch and Solange. Now, she’s stepping out of their collective shadow.

Yesterday, Lu released her debut solo album, Blood. A genre-hopping mix of sumptuous strings, spine-tingling vocals, experimental production and poetic lyrics about trauma and joy, its dreamy sound unites fans of both R&B and classical music. Ever wondered what Björk would have sounded like if she’d been born in North Carolina rather than the chilly climes of Iceland? Blood might just be the answer.

The release comes hard on the heels of one of the highestprofile live performances of Lu’s career so far. Earlier this month, she accepted an invitation from

12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen to perform at New York’s swanky new arts venue

The Shed – a cornerstone of the city’s controversial £19billion Hudson Yards development – for a night celebrating the history of black music in the United States.

Introducing her to the crowd at the event, keyboard player

Greg Phillinganes, who for many years served as Michael Jackson’s musical director, said: “I remember the first time man walked on the moon. I remember the birth of my first child. And I remember the first time I heard Kelsey Lu.”

After the show, producer Quincy Jones, the most Grammynominated artist in history, told Lu that she was “the future”.

Lu, 28, is certainly one of a kind. Blood finds her flitting from symphonic folk (Rebel) and disco (Pure Fake) to ethereal spins on soft rock classics (a whispery cover of 10cc’s I’m Not in Love). Her wardrobe is similarly idiosyncratic: her fans have compared her bold aesthetic to Frida Kahlo’s. It was perhaps inevitable that Lu would become a darling of the fashion world, championed by Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue, among others. But she’s also a mouthpiece for stifled voices, confronting the status quo in her performances and her lyrics.

At The Shed, Lu stepped out in a neon-pink gown accompanied by an all-black cello ensemble to perform Strange Fruit, the

1939 protest song made famous by Billie Holiday, about black lynchings in America’s Deep

South. She also gave a tense rendition of a minimalist work by the gay, black composer Julius Eastman, who died in 1990.

Both pieces felt like personal and pointedly subversive choices blasting from across Hudson

Yards, a “billionaire’s playground” of indecently expensive apartments and shops. (One barbershop in the complex offers an $800 haircut.) It’s the kind of one-per-center paradise from which people of colour in America have historically been excluded.

The following day, Lu meets me in an upmarket hotel bar, wearing an oversized T-shirt and Matrix sunglasses, her eyebrows dyed purple. Over wine and snacks, she explains why making a stand for Eastman the previous night meant so much to her.

“He died homeless on the streets, having been shut out of the classical music world for his race and his sexuality,” says Lu, in a near-whisper, her delivery making up in vehemence what it lacks in volume. “Which isn’t an unfamiliar story in classical music.”

‘The racism has never gone away. We’ve got better at distracting ourselves from it’