Natalie Merchant: Keep Your Courage

The latest Natalie Merchant album is as beautiful and exquisite as you might expect. It's one for fans. Like every Natalie Merchant album.

Natalie Merchant

Keep Your Courage

Nonesuch

Natalie Merchant records are such an event. It’s an exquisite solo career, built on the back of a catalogue of songs with 10,000 Maniacs that feels like it’s only growing stronger with the years. It’s been over a quarter of a century since Carnival and Wonder and Tigerlilly – and each record has felt like a small, perfect offering; folk and traditional song folded in and blending with the originals.

Keep Your Courage is Merchant’s first record in nearly a decade, and only her second of original material this century.

The songs bubbled up under COVID-19, and were inspired by the mythological feeling of the pandemic. Merchant sings to gods and goddesses real and imagined, pays tribute to early feminism and finds strength, and conviction in celebrating the human heart. Which has always been the focus of her own writing. All of that. But where the brilliant, self-titled album of 2014 was dark in places and had the ominous beauty of Giving Up Everything as its centrepiece, Courage feels, well, all the more ‘courageous’ I guess; not least because Merchant lost her voice for a time and built this songs in and for small groups, Covid’s restrictions informing the arrangements and recording conditions.

The opening brace, Big Girls and Come On, Aphrodite both feature the absorbing vocals of Abena Koomson-Davis (Resistance Revival Chorus) in duet with Merchant. You almost wish they’d made the whole album together. Theirs is a special ‘Americana’ twist on Van Morrison’s fabled Caledonian Soul Music from the 70s.

But of course Merchant’s amazing voice (ageless) and mercurial wisdom does just fine – with (musical) strings attached. Sister Tilly and Narcissus arrive to carry the emotional weight of the album’s middle, both mini-epics, the former feeling like something from the re-recording of Tigerlilly, the latter as close as we might ever get to a Merchant-led 10,000 Maniacs reunion.

But one thing Natalie never does is repeat herself. So this music hovers around some of the sounds of her earliest projects but brings with it everything she’s earned and learned across the last quarter century. Her time in and out of the industry, her time carved off for herself.  Hunting The Wren, Guardian Angel, Eye Of The Storm, Tower of Babel, there’s conviction even in the very titles. Like Sinead O’Connor (R.I.P.) we can almost know what a Merchant song might sound like before we hear it, we can anticipate the levels and measures of quality; we know the world her voice and songs inhabit. And in that sense Keep Your Courage is very much the continuation fans could hope for and expect.

But there are some really beautiful heavy hitters here, like Guardian Angel which moves from near falsetto to stoic, almost spoken-word with pared back, strummed accompaniment.

And on Song of Himself she’s circling back to Ophelia’s gentle swirls.

Closer, The Feast of Saint Valentine, begins gently, deceptively simple too, and builds with all of the soft grandiosity of Motherland’s finest material.

It’s a Natalie Merchant album. And so you know what you are going to get. It’s her eighth. And it’s one of her very best. Just like all the rest.