Margaret Talbot profiles WeyesBlood, whose new record is out in November. “One of the rewards of a Weyes Blood album is the sense that, beneath the transistor-radio prettiness, something stranger lurks,” she writes.
Mering’s collaborators describe her as having an uncommonly confident artistic vision, but one that she pursues through a lot of improvisation and open-ended experimentation. In addition to singing and writing songs, she plays guitar, piano, bass, and drums. “I can make noise out of anything,” she said. “But mainly guitar.
Still, if Mering has often looked to the past, she has also expressed frustration with her elders—baby boomers, in particular. She especially resents the grip that boomer-era classic rock has held on everything from radio formats to song purchases. “Now that we’re all on streaming, you’re competing with every other music that’s ever been made at any time,” she told me. It was harder for new music to break through and define a generational identity.
Mering’s family background and upbringing set her up nicely for the kind of cultural time travel she likes to engage in. Her mother’s mother was a vaudeville singer who once played the role of Indian Child in a lost silent movie called “The Gateway of the Moon.” Mering’s mother, Pamela, also sings; she had a florist’s shop in Santa Monica for a while, and when Natalie was little Pamela would sometimes take her along on deliveries and entertain her by crooning standards.
As a little girl, Mering told me, “I was moody and weird, and I had a lot of extra emotional software that I didn’t know what to do with.” She said of herself, “I am a really high-functioning depressive. I definitely feel all the feels.” In middle school, Mering discovered the D.I.Y. music scene and began taking the train to Philadelphia to see punk and experimental music shows in run-down row houses and dank church basements.
Some fans of the dreamy chamber pop that Weyes Blood makes today might be surprised to know that she was once the lead screamer for a grindcore band called Satanized, whose performances sometimes involved exploding packets of fake blood. Around this time, Mering and Strong also had a performance-art act, the League of the Divine Wind. Their shows often featured the odd spectacle of the duo biting into fruit embedded with microphones, which amplified the sounds of their chewing and swallowing.
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