Natalie Merchant With 'Courage' in Return

Three cuts from new album and excerpts from interview. Plus five hot political cartoons, as usual.

Apr 19, 2023

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films, including this one coming to PBS stations in May. He was also a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy.

I previewed the long-awaited (after many years) album Keep Your Courage by Natalie Merchant several weeks back. I can’t comment on it as I have just ordered the vinyl, but No Depression is out with a rave which is good enough for me. The Guardian just came out with a lengthy feature/interview so I excerpt a bit of that below along with three tracks from the new album. She is also at the start of her first major tour in a long time, partly due to a very serious operation five years back. We were fortunate to see her with just a piano accompanist in a small parlor up at Mohonk just before that operation. Our usual political cartoons way down below. Enjoy, then subscribe, it’s still free!

From The Guardian:

It was late 2018 and Natalie Merchant was in London visiting the V&A museum when she felt her arm start to tingle and then go numb. Next came intense pain. She flew home immediately and within days was in hospital having an MRI. The results were not good: she had a degenerative spinal disease. “My spinal column was collapsing into my spinal cord,” Merchant says. “I needed to have emergency surgery.” The six-hour operation involved making an incision below her throat and shunting her vocal cords to the side while surgeons removed three bones from her spine. When she regained consciousness after surgery Merchant discovered she could no longer sing. “It took me to a place of panic,” she says. “It made me wish I had made more records.”

And:

Merchant’s gift is that her songs are not always comfortable listening, but they are comforting. “Tell Yourself” was written after a niece attempted suicide at 13, “Life Is Sweet” offered hope to those “who have jobs that make them feel beaten down” and “Wonder” was inspired by working at a day camp for children with special needs. Even in a bland hotel room, Merchant radiates empathy. She tells me about a young woman she met a political rally who was an activist for disabled people. “She said: I started listening to you when I was a teenager, and your song Wonder completely changed the way I thought about myself,” she says, tearing up. “That’s pretty profound, to have had that influence.”

Here is the aforementioned “Tell Yourself,” one of her greatest songs, I believe.