Natalie Merchant on her ‘weird brain virus’ battle and new album ‘Keep Your Courage’

NATALIE Merchant sings softly with unshakeable resolve, “Keep your courage, keep your faith.”

Against a backdrop of understated piano and strings, she’s four minutes into The Feast Of Saint Valentine, which she calls her “hymn for the broken-hearted”.

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Cue the line that gave her the title of her eighth studio album, Keep Your Courage.

While beseeching her listeners to stay strong through the travails of love, Merchant has needed courage and faith of a different kind to get her career back on track.

During the pandemic, she contracted “some weird brain virus” which, at the outset, she believed to be Covid.

In fact, it was life-threatening anaplasmosis, commonly transmitted by ticks. While in hospital, an infectious disease specialist told her: “We almost lost you.”

As if that wasn’t enough, a few months earlier and just before the first lockdown, she had emergency surgery on her collapsing spine after suffering an alarming combination of numbness and severe pain.

I’m meeting Merchant in the refined surroundings of London Langham Hotel, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, during her whistlestop promo tour.

I find her restored to good health, in excellent spirits, with her passion for music and life clearly rekindled.

But she’s feeling the effects of her long haul flight from America’s East Coast.

“Jet lag is mysterious,” she says. “You go to bed at the appropriate time, then lie there for three hours and wonder why you can’t fall asleep.

“Of course, it’s because your body cries out, ‘No, it’s not the right time!’ ”

Merchant returns to her “lush and layered” first collection of all new compositions since her self-titled 2014 album — and it’s a story of triumph of adversity.

It begins on the operating table in March, 2020, a week before the Covid lockdowns upended all our lives.

For six gruelling hours, surgeons “removed bones” and “inserted screws and hinges” in her spine, drastically compromising her ability to sing.

“I found myself double locked down, stuck in a chair and in a neck brace,” reports the 59-year-old who left alt-rock darlings 10,000 Maniacs three decades ago to go solo.

“I’ve had a long crawl back to full physical capacity. I didn’t have my full voice for nine months and couldn’t use my right hand to play the piano very well.”

While getting back on her feet, another calamity befell the dedicated “country person” from upstate New York who loves donning her wellies and communing with nature.

Merchant continues: “Within a month of surgery, I was building trails in the forest — and falling over. Luckily, I didn’t have access to my surgeon because he would probably have had me committed.

“But I just couldn’t stay in the house any longer. It was spring and I wasn’t in pain any more — I was healing.

“The first time I went out for a walk by myself after taking off the neck brace, I slipped on a log and fell onto the side of my face.

“I lay there sobbing, thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Fortunately, despite much soreness, “the hinges and screws all held together” and she gingerly picked herself up.

During her recuperation, Merchant began forming ideas for Keep Your Courage, a powerful conflation of richly textured music and poetic lyrics filled with profound expression.

Key to getting her creative juices flowing was Scottish poet Robin Robertson, best known for his enthralling narrative poem The Long Take, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize.

“He sent me his extraordinary book in lockdown and I was so inspired by it,” says Merchant.

‘A big abyss opened’

“Then we had great correspondence going for months about language and writing.

“Robin kept encouraging me so I started writing again. I hadn’t really composed a song in five or six years. I was so busy doing other things.”

A tireless campaigner on a range of issues including domestic violence, fracking, getting the vote out and racism, Merchant likes to fill her life with purpose.

She says: “Just because I didn’t write an album of original material in nearly a decade, I don’t want people to have the false impression that this is my big comeback.

“I actually made three records in that time and built a music curriculum at a free preschool for poor children.

“I bought and renovated a house. I got my daughter through school and off to a good college.

“I was engaged in an anti-fracking campaign and, in the end, we got a New York State ban, which was phenomenal.

“Because of that, I started thinking of writing poetry and playing piano as a waste of time. I considered it self-indulgent.”

She was also determined to be a hands-on mother to her daughter Lucia whose time at home with her was extended by the pandemic.

“But I don’t have her with me any more and that opened a big abyss called empty nest,” she admits.

Her attitude towards making music again completely changed when she found herself alone again.

“My daughter went back to college in September (2021) and, by the first week of October, I was in the studio. I didn’t even have all of the songs finished but I’d already booked it out.”

As for the result of her labours, Merchant proclaims: “Love looms large — it looms large in all our lives, right? We all crave connection.”

The album’s tone is set by two horn-fuelled anthems, Big Girls and Come On, Aphrodite, which pairs Merchant’s singular vocals with the glorious tones of gospel singer Abena Koomson-Davis from the Resistance Revival Chorus.

They first sang together at New York’s fabled Radio City Music Hall during a socially distanced concert to thank frontline healthcare workers for their heroic efforts during the pandemic.

Merchant recalls: “That was very moving and our voices suited each other’s so I said to Abena, ‘Will you record with me?’ She replied, ‘Name the date’.

“I wrote both of those songs with her in mind. They established our sisterhood in a very strong way.”

Big Girls acknowledges suffering and loss, particularly because of Covid, but Merchant also wanted the song “to encourage people to believe they have the strength to carry on”.

‘In a pool of tears’

“There’s all this imagery of disaster, of waters rising, of thunder and lightning, and the arrangement with strings and brass builds to a pinnacle.

“Then Abena sings, ‘Hold on, hold on!’ even though she swore she couldn’t sing that high.

“We made a great video for it, just the two of us singing directly to camera, and everyone I’ve shown it to has ended up in a pool of tears.”

Come On, Aphrodite is the product of Merchant reading a lot of Greek Myths. “I wanted it be an invocation to love,” she says.

“Often, when we think we’re in love, we’re just in love with love because we want that whole dizzying feeling.

“If Aphrodite turned her attention on you, it was considered an ambush and a form of madness. Passion makes you lose your senses.”

As the song draws to a close, Merchant reels off a string of familiar phrases to winning effect.

“Make me head over heels, make me drunk, make me blind/Over the moon, half out of my mind/Oh, make me weak in the knees, tremble inside.”

The eight-minute Sister Tilly is her heartfelt tribute to a certain type of woman from her parents’ generation.

It includes a shout-out to Joan Didion, the fearless American writer who died during the week Merchant was recording her vocals.

“That’s why I dedicated the entire album to her,” she says. “But Sister Tilly represents several women I’ve known. Some are gone but not all and they were like surrogate mothers to me.

“Many of them led bold, adventuresome lives and would tell me stories — ‘I lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the late Sixties’ or ‘Oh, I was hitchhiking in India in 1970’ or ‘I have a house in Oaxaca [city in Mexico] and spend winters there’.”

In the song, Merchant describes Sister Tilly’s bright yellow walls and pashmina shawls, how she has a voice like folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and listens to Led Zeppelin “so loud and proud”.

On Keep Your Courage as a whole, Merchant explores a variety of styles, typical of her eclectic approach to music.

Tower Of Babel has a silky soul vibe while Eye Of The Storm (featuring sublime Uilleann pipes) and the album’s only cover, Hunting The Wren by Irish band Lankum, are rooted in the folk tradition.

Merchant says Song Of Himself, her paean to 19th Century poet Walt Whitman, needed to be “bombastic” and “expansive” in keeping with the cultural colossus.

“Every time we tried fiddle and banjo, it sounded too Americana,” she says. “Whitman was more elegant. I couldn’t see him hanging out where banjos were being played.” Next we go back to where we started, The Feast Of Saint Valentine, which dwells on the contradictions of love.

Merchant recites the resounding payoff to me: “Love will be the curse and be the charm, love will be the bruising and the balm, love will set you free and love will be your bonds. Love will win. Love will conquer all.”

To her, it completes the album’s mission to create “a song cycle that maps the journey of a courageous heart”.

This helps explain why the cover is adorned with a striking statue of Joan Of Arc.

“To me, she represents courage and I would rather have her image than my face, which just means Natalie Merchant.”

Bearing in mind her health battles and though she won’t admit it herself, Keep Your Courage is one of the bravest albums you’re likely to hear.

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NATALIE MERCHANT

Keep Your Courage

★★★★☆