Keep Your Courage

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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. Rascoe, Ayesha (April 9, 2023). "Natalie Merchant on album 'Keep Your Courage' ". Weekend Edition. NPR . Retrieved April 12, 2023.

There’s a compelling earnestness to Natalie Merchant‘s voice. With her low baritone and careful annunciation, she always sounds knowledgeable and understanding. The former frontwoman of 10,000 Maniacs comes off as sincere and serious even when crooning about love in a lighthearted vein. The protagonists and narrators of her songs are aware that everything can come crashing down. Deception can come from oneself as well as the others in one’s life. La di da. Rather than living in a state of wistful longing for love, Merchant feels complete with what she has. "It’s almost like your beloved is in you all the time and you just project your beloved onto a passing stranger. You can basically fall in love with anybody, especially if you want to be blind to their faults. You know, every time I’ve been in love, my first impression of the person was the most honest. But then it’s like you fall under a spell: I can change this person! My love can fix them!” The album is dedicated to the American writer Joan Didion, who in December 2021 died in the same week that Merchant recorded the vocals for Sister Tilly. The album’s most charming, least adorned song, it is a gorgeous rumination on the older women in Merchant’s life who influenced, inspired and politicised her, and who are now steadily dying. “Your feminist raves in your Didion shades, and your Zeppelin so loud and so proud,” sings Merchant. “Here’s to your days at the barricades, here’s to the girls in the fray, oh, how I wish you could stay.” The dedication is also, she says, “to all of Didion’s sisters”, the older women who “tend to be shoved aside. I don’t know how it is in Ireland, but in the US the feeling is along the lines of ‘Do us a favour and become invisible once you reach a certain age’. But these women I write about are vivid characters; they’re wise, intelligent, have an incredible amount of experience, and I turn to them for advice. It’s really heartbreaking they’re leaving us.”

RASCOE: Let's dive into that tune, "Sister Tilly." You're singing about a character who wears Joan Didion sunglasses. Eye Of The Storm isn’t quite the song Guardian Angel is, but its beauty is complementary and it’s songs such as Eye Of The Storm that make Keep Your Courage one of the best albums released in 2023 and one that will remain a landmark recording for Merchant. 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. Keep Your Courage is her first of all-new material in nine years,” says Mojo in its four-star review. “It’s also her most beautiful in decades.” 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.”

Merchant left 10,000 Maniacs in 1993 having felt that she had outgrown the band and went on release a series of solo records starting with Tigerlily, which sold 5m copies in the US. She hasn’t matched that level of popularity since, but “there is a certain loyal base of people who will be open-minded about whatever it is I am doing,” she says. “Whether I am doing klezmer music or early jazz or so many different styles of music that I have explored since I went solo – people will go with me on the journey.” RASCOE: 'Cause you started out in your early years with 10,000 Maniacs and other - is there anything you wish you knew then that you know now?

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I was raising my daughter, and I’m a single mom... My days are so full that it never occurred to me that I should sit down and write a song. I was just focused on so many other things. It’s an indulgence to sit down with the piano and sing. It got to the point where I forgot that I was a songwriter, or that I could write songs.” When Merchant first let slip that she was finishing up a new record, on the Sheroes podcast last summer, she said the impetus was her daughter leaving home for college. “It was either have a nervous breakdown or make a new record,” she joked, but that’s only half the story. Since late 2019, Merchant has had two serious health crises – one that might have ended her career and the other her life. MERCHANT: (Singing) Come on, Aphrodite, you goddess of love. Come on, Aphrodite, from that mountain above. Also my production style is very maternal. I'm also making sure, "Is everyone happy? Is anyone having a blood sugar crash? Does someone need to take a walk? Did someone not sleep enough last night?" Musicianship is really tied into physicality. When I see people flagging, they need food. Being a mom, I could just read the signs. [Laughs.] I know what's happening. I just scan the room and I can tell how much sleep or food everybody in the room has had. A little [pie] graph in my head. Having raised her daughter alone since she was four and half, Merchant says she doesn’t mind being single at all. “Yes, it’s lovely to feel connected to another person, and I won’t lie, I love having sex. But I have lovely, deep friendships with so many people. I have my daughter. And I have this incredible, tangible response to beauty and art and nature, and I’m valuing those things more and more.”