Keep Your Courage

Product Information

Keep Your Courageshowcases Natalie Merchant’s soulful songwriting. Her ability to create atmospheric songs invites us to find ways we can negotiate the permeable boundaries between the spiritual and the physical. Half the women in my country have lost the ability to control their reproductive health. Men need to empathise because I feel we’re losing the fight 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.” When you were recovering from something, you want to be around someone, and all of a sudden, it's like, "Nope, you need to be by yourself." 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.

Honigmann, David (April 12, 2023). "Singer Natalie Merchant: 'It was important to assert my identity. Because I'd lost it' ". Financial Times . Retrieved April 12, 2023.

"I lost a lot of hair because it's very stressful," the artist tells Salon about the gorgeous "Keep Your Courage"

So I really stepped away from that way of life. But I felt that if she'd be going off to college, that I would suddenly have this massive expanse of time and space that I would want to fill, and I wouldn't want to feel alone, because it's a big transition when your child goes away to college. So those were some of the motivations. Over her forty-year career Natalie Merchant has attained a place among America’s most respected recording artists. She has earned a reputation for being a songwriter of quality and a captivating stage performer and has distinguished herself as a social justice and environmental activist. Merchant began her musical career as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the pop music band 10,000 Maniacs and released one platinum, two double-platinum, and one triple-platinum records with the group: The Wishing Chair (1985), In My Tribe (1987), Blind Man's Zoo (1989), Hope Chest (1990), Our Time in Eden (1992), and 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged (1993). Merchant left the group in 1994 and has subsequently released nine albums as a solo artist with combined sales of seven million copies: Tigerlily (1995), Ophelia (1998), Natalie Merchant Live (1999), Motherland (2001), The House Carpenter’s Daughter (2003), Leave Your Sleep (2010), Natalie Merchant (2014), Paradise Is There (2015), and Butterfly (2017). Very proud of the songwriting. I've been doing this for many decades, but I really feel like this album proves that I've mastered the craft of songwriting. I'm proud of that. Guardian Angel lifts the senses following the tonal shift of Hunting The Wren and while it’s a rather simple composition, it allows Merchant’s delicate vocals to reach every aspect of your soul. Merchant is so clear and present, in the mix, that your speakers will disappear and should you close your eyes, you’d swear she is in the room with you. Plus, the musical interlude around the midway point is nothing short of incredible. Guardian Angel is a true masterpiece in every sense of the word. RASCOE: That's singer songwriter Natalie Merchant. Her latest album, "Keep Your Courage," is coming out this week. Thank you for joining us.

Later, on songs like “Narcissus” and “Eye of the Storm”, love becomes a knottier concern. Everyone knows the cautionary tale of Narcissus, the hunter so fixated on his own beauty that he can’t look away from his own reflection, staring at it until death. But few remember his fate as divine retribution for his cruel rejection of the mountain nymph Echo, who, silenced with a curse, was at a loss to intervene as he fell in love with himself. Merchant’s passionate retelling gives life to Echo’s perspective, raging with helplessness and sorrow as Narcissus wastes away. “Love can be blissful, but it can also be dangerous, injurious,” she says. “I wanted to talk about all these different ways to experience it.” 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. And there were a couple songs I wrote for the record that we tried and I realized they didn't fit in with the others. It's just smarter to make that decision earlier than later. RASCOE: Let's dive into that tune, "Sister Tilly." You're singing about a character who wears Joan Didion sunglasses. Keep Your Courage" album by Natalie Merchant (Nonesuch) One of the things I really loved is you said the album is "a song cycle that maps the journey of a courageous heart." What drew your writing in that direction and when did you realize that's what you had landed on?

After several years of focusing on being a single mother, Merchant returned to songwriting as an emotional outlet, composing songs for Keep Your Courage beginning in late 2020 or early 2021. [2] These represented the first songs that Merchant had written in six years. [3] The album is a song cycle built around the concept of having a courageous heart, [4] and is a concept album composed entirely of love songs, which Merchant was inspired to write after having surgery for ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament [5] as well as an anaplasmosis infection that led to sepsis [6] and experiencing healing from love and care by others. [7] [8] Lyrics discuss feelings of isolation that she had during the COVID-19 pandemic [9] and the album also explores political themes and feminism [10] and womanhood. [11] Many of the songs are written about or to fictional or mythological characters, which is a songwriting tool that Merchant uses to approach contemporary issues. [8] [12] She also read mythology during the pandemic, as it felt like a mythological event to her. [13] These songs are alchemy in the highest form possible.We all need to be reminded that such beauty exists.” – Valerie June Dutchcharts.nl – Natalie Merchant – Keep Your Courage" (in Dutch). Hung Medien. Retrieved April 21, 2023. a b Kennedy, Mark (April 11, 2023). "Natalie Merchant emerges from darkness with nothing but love". Associated Press . Retrieved April 12, 2023.

Just the fact that I was doing it, that was what was different. [Laughs.] I redirected my creative energies for years into other areas, in other directions. I couldn't commit to that cycle of writing, recording, touring that I'd lived for 20 years before I had my daughter. It consumes so much energy and time. I wanted to be a good parent. And I'm a single mother, so I'm it. MERCHANT: (Singing) Tinctures, teas and your secret remedies and your voice like Buffy Sainte-Marie... Keep Your Courage is Natalie’s ninth solo studio album and the first of new material since her 2014’s self-titled record. An eclectic album, produced by Merchant, it features two duets sung with vocalist Abena Koomson-Davis (Resistance Revival Chorus), contributions from the Celtic folk group Lúnasa, Syrian virtuoso clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and horn arrangements by jazz trombonist Steve Davis. There are lush orchestrations throughout by seven composers including: Gabriel Kahane, Stephen Barber, Colin Jacobsen, David Spear and Megan Gould. Keep Your Courage comprises nine original songs by Merchant as well as an interpretation of “Hunting the Wren” by Ian Lynch of the Irish band Lankum. And, yeah, on this album, every time I used love, I was describing love in a different form, whether it was platonic or romantic or this kind of expansive, inclusive love. And then the song "Come On, Aphrodite," it's an invocation to the goddess of love and passion saying, bring it on, right? And then the song "Big Girls," it said, ooh, it hurts. RASCOE: Is that true? Like, is that - what is your relationship to fame? Because you've had, like, massive hits. And, I don't know, like, you are a star, right? So what is your relationship to fame?Turning our attention to the visual senses and one finds the album’s artwork to be truly unique. Merchant normally appears on her cover art design, but the Joan of Arc statue certainly plays into the album’s title as well as much of the lyrical context throughout. The chosen design, with the coloured elements in the lower left-hand corner, is intriguing for I can’t fathom their purpose or meaning, but they simply work. Without them, the album cover would have been a little visually dull in its monochromatic state.

Though it’s written in the form of a eulogy, “Sister Tilly” is one of Merchant’s most romantic, playful and expansive songs, blooming up into the cosmos with its midway change in tempo. Death can break your heart, but Tilly gets a send-off that’s peaceful and poetic. Merchant credits Scottish writer Robin Robertson for reawakening her love of language, first with his “brutally visceral and luminescent” narrative poetry book The Long Take and then through their correspondence that continues to this day. “We finally met this week for the first time,” she says, beaming. “It was so lovely. We felt like long lost friends.” Natalie Merchant: 'Christy Moore covered my song Motherland, and when I played Irish shows people would say to me afterwards that it was great to hear a Christy Moore song being covered by me!' Photograph: Shervin LainezMurphy, John (April 14, 2023). "Natalie Merchant– Keep Your Courage". musicOMH . Retrieved April 14, 2023.