The world is hard enough already. With her song ‘It’s Not Just Me, It’sEverybody’, Weyes Blood makes a warm case for more compassion and attentionfor others. Rising from a period of overwhelming developments, we have becomestrangers to each other, she sings. “People are hurting, it’s not just me.”
A tearjerker? Only if you also consider the complete works of Carole King andThe Carpenters as tearjerkers. Weyes Blood’s new album And In The Darkness,Hearts Aglow is of a timeless beauty.
Weyes Blood, stage name of Natalie Mering (34), sounds like Karen Carpenter’sartistic heir, soothing and yet so urgent. She grew up in California in amusical family. Father Sumner Mering released an album of pointy power pop in1980, produced by legendary Phil Spector sidekick Jack Nitszche.
Natalie studied music for a year after high school at the University ofPortland, Oregon. Her first band was called Satanized, far removed from thePentecostal ideas she received in her youth. In 2008 she briefly played basswith the Portland noise group Jackie-O Motherfucker.
The heavy punk noise of the past seems difficult to reconcile with themelodic, carefully arranged music she makes now. But at the age of fifteen sherecognized her life path in the novel Wise Blood from 1952 by FlanneryO’Connor and wrote songs under the names Wise Blood and Weyes Bluhd andreleased them independently. In O’Connor’s book, a war veteran returns to hisfamily home to find it abandoned, only to disown his pious background byfounding an anti-religious cult. The “wise blood” in the book title refers tothe idea that everyone should seek wisdom within himself and does not needspiritual guidance.
If Titanic Rising was the first, dystopian part of a trilogy, the hopeful> third comes next.”
Old soul
Noise was the future, thought Natalie Mering when she toured the world withJackie-O Motherfucker at the age of twenty. “I believed in the power ofexperimental music and improvisation. The performances were great, but themusic could not be sold as a desirable product for the radio or the recordstore. The public asked for more manageable music.”
As a soloist, Natalie Mering immersed herself in her love for the classic popof the 1940s and 1950s, when the Tin Pan Alley song factory was still animportant factor. “Through those influences I ended up with Harry Nilsson andJoni Mitchell, celebrities from the seventies who were also inspired by thatolder music. I only got to know The Carpenters when people pointed out thesimilarities between my voice and Karen Carpenter’s. What we have in common isthat we both sing quite low. I absorbed all that music, including from thelesser-known singer Judee Sill.”
She’s an old soul, she thinks. “I like to sing, not to shout. In California Ihad learned about the surf culture and the music of the Beach Boys. I was alifeguard for a while.
“Hollywood entered my life through old black-and-white films with stars likeJudy Garland. The safe choice, my mother thought, because there were no nudescenes and swear words. The orchestral music from those films made a bigimpression; you can hear that in my music. To The Simpsons or a horrormovie, I crawled out the window to watch TV at a friend’s house. That’forbidden’ horror gave me a lifelong obsession with the dark sides of life.”
Fear and loneliness
On her penultimate album Titanic Rising (2019) Natalie Mering predicted thedoom of the world. On her new album, she finds herself in the middle of thedoom-laden predictions she made back then. Fear and loneliness reign supremein her lyrics. The pandemic, the lockdown and being unable to perform gave hertime to think. “Many of the problems we face now, racism, the politicalmalaise in the US and global warming, have a long history. The pandemic was analarm bell. My lyrics became more realistic, as I felt the effects of thelimitations we all had to live with. if Titanic Rising was the first,dystopian part of a trilogy, I am now marking time. The hopeful third partcomes next.”
Prominent contributors to the new album include Jonathan Rado of Foxygen,brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario of The Lemon Twigs, and minimal producerOneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) with whom she wrote the song “God TurnMe Into A Flower.” With Lana Del Ray she sang the Joni Mitchell cover ‘ForFree’ on Del Ray’s album Chemtrails Over The Country Club. “I have tocherish that collaboration. Everyone leads such a busy life that we rarelyhave time for that. It’s a lonely profession, pop musician. My ideal is tomake music without ego. I channel the information that comes to me to distillbeauty from it.”
She likes contrasts, says Mering. “Orchestral music with an electronic twist,or a beautiful melody that is disturbed by a thunderstorm. The trick is tomake those seemingly irreconcilable forces point in the same direction. Therecording studio is the laboratory, but the job isn’t done until I can playthe songs live. The lockdown has been a terribly frustrating time. That themusic couldn’t breathe kept gnawing at me. The real challenge, if there is anaudience, will only come now.”
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And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow appears November 18 at Sub Pop. WeyesBlood plays February 6 in Paradiso, Amsterdam. Inc: weyesblood.com