Keep Your Courage

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The album closes with the tender “The Feast of Saint Valentine,” a song that urges us to follow the courage in our hearts in the midst of the chaos and division around us because, Merchant sings, “Love will set you free and love will be your bonds/Love will win.” It's amazing how you can play a song before lunch and have a complete attitude change after lunch. And it'll affect tempo, it'll affect everything. And sometimes you just need to know when's the right moment to abandon a song and come to it another time. I grew up with Natalie’s music, and her voice has a special place in my conception of how music works. Keep Your Courageshows her – as singer and songwriter – at her most intimate, evocative, and beautiful.’

Lanaham, Tom (April 13, 2023). "Q&A with Natalie Merchant: On Her Old Collections and Her New One, Keep Your Courage". Paste . Retrieved April 14, 2023. And I've combined them all into one person to kind of pay tribute to that generation and everything they mean to me. Through the first part of the song, it's in 3/4, and I'm talking about, you know, remembering all the aspects of her, even the color of her walls and her tinctures, her teas, her secret remedies and her voice like Buffy Sainte-Marie. And I keep saying she's gone away. But it isn't until the time signature changes - we go into 4/4. RASCOE: You were at a point where people could really hurt you when you love them, right? That's the deepest hurt, right? Manzoor, Safraz (April 18, 2023). " 'It made me wish I had made more records': Natalie Merchant on returning to music after losing her voice". The Guardian . Retrieved April 18, 2023.Keep Your Courageis transcendent… a brilliant and long-awaited return of Natalie’s unmistakable voice.” – Michael Stipe Merchant on her extended absence from performing, recording, and songwriting, leading up to Keep Your Courage and its subsequent tour [15] I loved working with Steve Davis. He's more of a jazz horn player. He's a trombone player. So he's really steeped in that jazz world. But I loved working with him because it wasn't all on paper. There was a lot of improvisation, and I could sing a line, and then it's so exciting when you sing a line and then the trumpet plays the line . . . [Laughs.] [sings trumpet line] That was a line that I kept singing to my guitar player. But when he played on the guitar with a slide or whatever, it didn't sound right, but when Steve took my guitar line and turned it into a horn section, that was what it was supposed to be. As regular readers of Subjective Sounds would note, I appreciate the human voice as an instrument in the mix rather than as a storytelling device and while the songs included on Keep Your Courage explore isolation, love, politics, and feminism, which will appeal to those who appreciate dissecting songs for their literal meanings, I remain in awe of Merchant’s vocal reach throughout as they are thoroughly pleasing to the senses. MERCHANT: I've had massive hits and sold lots of records, but I can walk into a store and hand someone my credit card and they can say, oh, you have the same name as a famous singer.

Yeah, and it was her senior year of high school, and she went off to college. Just around the time she went to college in September, and then I went into the studio in October. The timing for that was perfect. Colin Jacobson. I wanted to do some shows once the record was out with orchestra, and I've been looking at The Knights for several years. It's a younger, sort of hip orchestra, small chamber orchestra in Brooklyn. So I went to see them perform at this outdoor event, and it was the first time I'd seen music in two years, probably. I am not who I was then, thank god!” she says, laughing. “It’s a journey, and unfortunately a lot of my early journey as a writer is captured on discs and I cannot escape them. I wish I could put a disclaimer on them, like ‘These lyrics were written by an adolescent who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.’” Michael Stipe performs with Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs in 1993. Photograph: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG/ Getty ImagesCome On, Aphrodite (feat. Abena Koomson-Davis) is easily my favourite song from the album. The seamless transition from Big Girls is utterly perfect and Abena Koomson-Davis’ inclusion here is both complementary to Merchant as well as being a standout element. Without Koomson-Davis’ contribution, Come On, Aphrodite wouldn’t be as impressive as it is for the vocal elements are the strongest aspect of this song with regard to the ebb and flow of the tune. Elsewhere, love goes all the way up to population level. Merchant is well known for dealing with social issues in her writing, but on Keep Your Courage she’s less explicit about it. Still, there’s no mistaking that, beneath the funky horns and orchestral brass, “Tower of Babel” is a song about a world growing ever more divided. More subtle is “Song of Himself”, which she explains is “all about Walt Whitman and his kind of radical, expansive love of America.” a b Kennedy, Mark (April 11, 2023). "Natalie Merchant emerges from darkness with nothing but love". Associated Press . Retrieved April 12, 2023. Although she’s not entirely sure, given the pandemic’s weird way of compressing all of eternity, she thinks she started writing the songs for Keep Your Courage in September that year. Home from the hospital and confined with her piano, her journals, and decades’ worth of sketching, painting and unfinished songs, she got to work. The result, she says proudly, is an album about love in all its guises, “the journey of a courageous heart.” “It just seemed to make sense to me, after all that isolation,” she explains. “Whenever I’m in any kind of crisis, I play the piano. But I couldn’t even do that at the start of the pandemic because I couldn’t use my right hand for months. So when I say ‘keep your courage,’ I’m talking to myself as much as anyone.”

MERCHANT: (Singing) Always thought the game came easy. You never thought about it twice. You never thought about it twice. The record’s lead single “Big Girls” is out now, joining the previously released “Tower of Babel” and “Come On, Aphrodite” featuring Abena Koomson-Davis (Resistance Revival Chorus). Dunne, Tom (April 13, 2023). "Tom Dunne: My six favourite albums of the year so far". The Irish Examiner . Retrieved April 13, 2023.Released in 2023, Natalie Merchant’s eighth studio album, Keep Your Courage, once again focuses on introspective lyrics, folk-inspired melodies, and her distinct vocal style. Merchant’s longevity in the industry is a testament to her prowess as a vocalist and performer, but never has she released such a poignant and sonically pleasing album for I dare say that Keep Your Courage is the greatest creative work of her illustrious career. This album is infused with an existential and effusive desire to create unity in a world that can be so alienating. Dunne, Tom (April 21, 2023). "Tom Dunne: Learning at the feet of the great Ms Natalie Merchant". The Irish Examiner . Retrieved April 21, 2023. But even as there's a thematic throughline on the record, each song is different orchestrally and musically. "They're all little intrinsic worlds unto themselves," Merchant says. MERCHANT: But my mother was a massive fan of classical music, and she was a single mom with four kids, so no money. And we lived near Chautauqua Institution, which had orchestra concerts in the summer every Tuesday and Saturday night. And we would sneak in a hole in the fence and go to the symphony. So from the time I was really young, I really have a great appreciation for symphonic music. And to be standing in front of an orchestra, it's such a privilege.

Superb…An absolutely stunning collection, it is vintage Merchant in displaying heart, intelligence and integrity wrapped in indelible hooks and gorgeous melodies.’ The Feast Of Saint Valentine is simply gorgeous. What an incredible closing tune! Initially sparse in its chosen musical style and mix, when the music begins to build, every element becomes crystal clear thereby ensuring that The Feast Of Saint Valentine is a memorable closer that will compel you to play the album again. That is, of course, provided you don’t choose to put this magnificent song on repeat for it’s one of the best tunes from the album and one of the best songs Merchant has ever recorded. These songs are alchemy in the highest form possible.We all need to be reminded that such beauty exists.’ But what their new owner probably doesn’t know is that the shades were also briefly worn by Natalie Merchant – another American treasure – just the day before. Visiting the auction house in Hudson, New York, about a half-hour drive from where she lives, Merchant viewed the whole collection with a friend who just happens to be an English professor who’d had Didion as a student. MERCHANT: Abena Koomson-Davis is the musical director of the Resistance Revival Chorus, and I met her through doing a Get Out the Vote event in the Hudson Valley. We actually staged the largest political event in the history of our area. And I just fell in love with her voice and her energy and told her that I would love to collaborate someday. And once I had these songs written, we went in the studio and put them together.a b Shahen, Jim (April 12, 2023). "Natalie Merchant Lays Out a Feast on 'Keep Your Courage' ". No Depression . Retrieved April 12, 2023. MERCHANT: And it's not just a song about loss in love. It's loss in life and just difficulties in life. Natalie Merchant has announced that her ninth studio album, Keep Your Courage, will be released by Nonesuch on April 14. It’s her first album of new material since 2014’s self-titled record. When you started writing songs again, was there any ramping up period? How did you find yourself writing differently this time around?