Natalie Merchant Keeping Her Courage

Years ago, Natalie Merchant unabashedly began taking a Friday morning Hatha yoga class near her home, just outside of Woodstock, New York, out of sheer awe of the women in the group. Easily 20 to 30 years the junior of her fellow yogis, some of whom were in their 80s, Merchant was enraptured by these “radical reformers,” their quirks, vigor, tenacity—and stories. 

Inspired and captivated by their tales of coming-of-age in the 1960s, from hitchhiking across India in the ’70s to living at the Hotel Chelsea and all of their political rallies, misadventures, and lovers along the way, Merchant wrote “Sister Tilly,” one of the 10 tracks on her ninth album, Keep Your Courage.

“The town is full of Sister Tillys, a woman who came of age in the late ’60s, early ’70s—a cultural radical,” says Merchant. “I love these women. I loved hanging out with them. It’s my mother’s generation—my mother is gone now—but a lot of her friends, I can see traces of ‘Sister Tilly’ in them, so I just combined, with every verse, a different characteristic from a different woman.”

“Sister Tilly” is Merchant’s composition sketch of all the fiery souls that came before her. “I talk about her home and her surroundings and her hair and her clothing and her activism and her musical taste,” says Merchant, who praises their bright yellow walls and your pashmina shawls / Crystals, chimes and your moonflower vines. “I just kind of put it all together and created this woman who I celebrate.”

Toward the end of the song, Merchant sings Sister Tilly, you’re a constellation / Sister Tilly, you’re a white light vibration now / Everything fades away, acknowledging the passing of this generation, and her own mother, Anne, who died in 2010.

“It’s very triumphant at the end and sad at the same time,” shares Merchant. “And that’s the way I’ve felt at the funerals of these women. It is triumphant, because they have an amazing life, and I think everyone should live life—especially women.”

She adds, “If you look at it on a meta scale, this is the generation of women who changed the world, and I’m eulogizing them, and paying tribute to them, through one woman.”

Keep Your Courage is a celebration of women and their triumphs, opening with more odes to womanhood: “Big Girls” (Big girls, they don’t cry) and “Come On, Aphrodite,” featuring a duet with Abena Koomson-Davis of the Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of women and non-binary singers. 

It’s also a collection of songs “about the human heart,” reveals Merchant, who doesn’t shy away from the heap of social and political unrest over the past several years. 

Along with ruminating on connectedness, another recurring theme that runs through Keep Your Courage is the risk of love, says Merchant. 

“It takes courage to love, and there’s always a chance of being injured,” she says. “I even compare love to a battlefield at points. The whole album starts with an invocation to love with ‘Aphrodite’—bring me that sensation, bring me that experience—and then it moves through so many incarnations of love.”

Along with Aphrodite, Merchant also cites other gods, goddesses, and her “Guardian Angel,” along with “Narcissus” and another religious guide in her closing love story, “The Feast of Saint Valentine.”

Sharing an excerpt of the lyrics to ‘The Feast of Saint Valentine,” Merchant recites: Don’t stop your search now / Go, by the grace of God /  Keep your courage, keep your faith / And take this paper heart to keep you safe. “There’s so many songs on the album about love and all its different forms and the way that love affects us, and impacts us, and impacts others,” she says. 

“On ‘Feast of St. Valentine,’ I tried to imagine a legion of brokenhearted people coming to console each other,” Merchant says, before reciting more lyrics from the track: Take courage in the thought that you belong / Good comrade, you’re not alone / We’re here to give you shelter from the storm.

Midway into the album, Merchant shares her own interpretation of the 2019 song “Hunting the Wren,” originally released by Irish band Lankum, and offers the echoing coils of “Guardian Angel,” the lone track she wrote prior to the pandemic. The remainder of Keep Your Courage was penned over the course of the past several years. 

On the brooding “Tower of Babel,” Merchant doesn’t dismiss the climate crisis or the social and political unrest that stemmed from the pandemic, including violent insurrections and the detriment of women’s rights. 

“As much as I had wanted to not let events in the world intrude,” Merchant has said previously about the track, “I couldn’t disregard the prevailing atmosphere of fear and confusion that we have been living in.”

At times, Merchant wanted to cut the song from the album completely. “I was ready to ban that song about 100 times,” she says. “I wanted to write about mass media, and how we’re supposed to be living in this information era, and we find ourselves more confused than ever sometimes with all this misinformation, but every time I tried to sit down and write that, it was an essay. It wasn’t a lyric. I decided I would just write a song that tried to capture the zeitgeist, which is fear and confusion, and I was writing this during the lockdown.”

Produced by Merchant, Keep Your Courage was orchestrated with contributions from Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, jazz trombonist Steve Davis, and the Celtic folk group Lúnasa, along with composers Gabriel Kahane, Colin Jacobsen, Megan Gould, and Stephen Barber.

Filling each track with the woodwind and string sounds in her head, Merchant knew exactly how she wanted the album to sound. She will continue capturing these arrangements on the road with a string of concerts backed by local symphony orchestras throughout 2023.

“They weren’t small [songs],” she says. “They were large, and the arrangements are very sophisticated with the songs. I wanted all the textures.”

She continues, “These are the songs that kind of summed up how I was feeling for the eight months that I was writing them.” 

Merchant adds that when her daughter, Lucia de la Calle, went off to college, it marked another shift in her life. “I knew my life was radically going to change, and I wanted to have a big project to be involved in,” she says. “I decided, ‘I’ll make an album,’ and I forgot how much is involved in it because I can’t seem to do anything on a small scale and needed an entire woodwind and brass section.”

Sequencing Keep Your Courage was also crucial for Merchant. “Sequencing is an art form,” she says. “You’re planning the journey. Of course, I can take everyone through the peaks and valleys. I show them the vistas, then lead them into a dark room, and make them cry.”

Recently appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, Merchant is working to make folk archives more accessible for education. Within Keep Your Courage, she leans on some of her literary heroes, giving a nod to Joan Didion in “Sister Tilly” with your feminist raves in your Didion shades. Merchant also dedicated the album to Didion, who died in December 2021, during the same week that she recorded the vocals for “Sister Tilly.” 

Along the way, she also venerates American poet Walt Whitman on “Song of Himself”—Set us free, with words conferred by ghost, by poetry. “I read that about Whitman,” says Merchant, “and he’s just a fountain of love, for humanity, for his own body.” 

After taking a long hiatus from touring from 2003 through 2009 to raise her daughter, Merchant admits that she didn’t write anything for roughly six years following the release of her self-titled album in 2014.

“I was raising my daughter, and I’m a single mom,” Merchant says. “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.”

Outside of music, Merchant also filled her days volunteering at a nearby Head Start, a preschool program serving low-income children and children with disabilities. Working three days a week, Merchant taught dance, music, and poetry at the local preschool, and sewed 150 costumes for the kids’ plays.

In 2014, Merchant released a short documentary, Shelter: A Concert Film to Benefit Victims of Domestic Violence, inspired by an event held by One Billion Rising, a global campaign working to end violence against women. She spent another three years campaigning against fracking, and curated a 10-disc box set of her solo albums, all while penning just enough songs over the years for the run of a new album.  

“I’m not that prolific,” jokes Merchant of the 10 tracks on Keep the Courage. “I only wrote 11 songs.”

Keep the Courage also speaks to Merchant’s own personal struggles over the past several years, including a recent health scare. In 2018, while in London visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum, Merchant felt a tingle, numbness, and pain in her arm. After having an MRI once she returned to the U.S., Merchant learned that she had a degenerative spinal disease that was causing her spine to crumble.

Her condition led to a six-hour surgery at the start of the lockdown in March 2020.

“I feel like this album was written at a time when I was just reemerging. I had trouble singing because the incision went across my throat,” says Merchant. “I lost the use of my right hand but couldn’t really play the piano. As I healed and the nerves regenerated and tissues and the soft tissue, my throat started to ease up a little and I could sing again. It took months but when I could do it [sing] again, I really valued it more than ever.”

Merchant adds, “It definitely sensitizes you to other people’s pain, because you’ve felt it. You’ve lived in excruciating pain, and you know how desperate you can feel. I also have so much admiration for neurosurgeons now. We do live in an era of miracles.”

The essence of Merchant’s renewal over the past few years is immersed within Keep the Courage.

“If we just tried to cocoon ourselves and avoid any kind of pain, we probably won’t mature. We won’t grow, and probably won’t evolve,” says Merchant. “You’ll end your life with very little wisdom, and you probably won’t be able to empathize as well with someone else who’s been in pain.”

Photos by Shervin Lainez