Weyes Blood - From Raising Awareness To Getting Closer To The Action

At 15 years old, LA-based artist Natalie Mering knew she wanted to be "Weyes Blood". The moniker stems from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a dark, satirical novel about faith and redemption. “It resonated with me, as somebody who had grown up in a very Christian household. There’s some strange, sad poetry to the whole story,” notes Mering.

In her earlier albums, you’ll find a similar darkness in Mering's lyrics and melodies, which became lighter in 2016’s Front Row Seat To Earth and last year’s Titanic Rising. “I think when I was a young woman, I was just kind of goth. I liked the macabre. I liked things that were dark and mysterious, and noisy and lo-fi,” she says. “I think that my message has gotten a little clearer as I get older, and as hope becomes more of an important commodity.”

Spending her formative years in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Mering’s upbringing and time spent harmonising in gospel and madrigal choirs has left a mark on her sound – her choral arrangements often feel reminiscent of church hymns.

As a child though, she was hyperactive, a daydreamer. “I have debilitating ADD," she says. "I don’t take pharmaceuticals for it, and I never have." That’s not to say she’s against medication, having seen it help peers in the past. “I’ve been making it work, on my own, for years,” she says, with a laugh. “It’s just one of those things that makes it difficult to get anything done sometimes. And that is definitely worth diagnosing and acknowledging.”

As our exchange on attention deficit disorder continues, she shares, “I can imagine that it is incredibly hard with someone with really bad ADD, to deal with the tedium of modern culture where it’s just endless stimulation, endless email, endless to-do, endless doing one thing that makes you have to do six other things. I feel particularly lucky that I get to be an artist, and, I think, as much as it still affects me, I can just play music and do things that come very naturally to me.”

Her lyrics are often laced with dreams and ruminations on unrequited love. “I want you mostly in the morning/When my soul is weak from dreaming,” she sings on Seven Words. “It’s like failure to launch, like every love story in my 20s was always muddled by timing and circumstance, but I think my compass was correct,” she says.

Mering’s spoken publicly about her refusal to watch Hollywood movies while going through puberty. “I knew that they were bogus and emotionally manipulative. But in my 20s, I think that my perception of love was honestly pretty spot-on,” she says after being queried if romantic blockbusters influenced her approach to love. “But the difference was that the men and the people I was loving were not ready for that.” Now, in her early 30, she’s resisting becoming closed off by what she calls the “small-t trauma” of love and loss in your formative years.

Embellished with EBow guitar melodies, layered strings and a tape machine warping the mix, A Lot’s Gonna Change feels at once futuristic and like an early-Hollywood musical number, wherein a young woman sings to her adolescent self about the loss of natural wonders. “The chords are very much like an old-school Gershwin-type song. I wanted it to be very atemporal,” she says. The melodrama almost lends way to humour, Mering comparing herself to “the harlequin” mask – she appreciates the closeness of comedy and tragedy. 

Now, closing in on a year since the track’s release, Mering wants to work harder to materialise the environmentalist messages within her music: “I think we’ve raised enough awareness. I think everybody is completely aware of what’s going on. And it’s not a matter of trying to convert people’s hearts anymore. It’s a matter of trying to sway votes and elections and literally volunteer and sign petitions and just get involved locally.”

“I do feel, after the record has been out for a while, that I’ve seen the kind of groundswelling around people that feel something about it," she concludes. "I just know in my heart that the next step is something a little bit closer to the action.”