Natalie Merchant is an award-winning, multi-platinum-selling, American singer-songwriter and producer known for her distinctive voice and captivating literary-pop songs. Her music blends folk, rock and world-music influences, and she continues to be regarded as a pioneering figure in alternative music.
On her beguiling ninth studio album, “Keep Your Courage,” Merchant examines love in all its guises. By the artist’s count, she mentions love 26 times across “Keep Your Courage.” “I think the pandemic was a great period of solitude and longing,” she said by way of one possible explanation for her fixation on matters of the heart. “I craved and savored human connection; it was the only thing that really mattered.”
“Keep Your Courage” is a sonically disparate and musically sumptuous collection produced by Merchant and recorded in Vermont with trusted collaborators and new friends. Whether it’s delicate chamber pop (“The Feast of Saint Valentine”), horn-driven soul (“Tower of Babel”), Celtic balladry (“Eye of the Storm”) or instantly infectious pop (“Come on, Aphrodite”), the album is anchored by Merchant’s unmistakable voice, whip-smart wordplay and emotional delivery.
Though this is her first album of all-new, original material in nine years, Merchant has been anything but idle in that time. In addition to raising her daughter, she has tackled several projects in the last decade, among them: rearranging her songs for string quintet and acoustic instruments for the CD and documentary “Paradise Is There,” directing “Shelter,” a documentary about domestic violence, curating the 10-disc box set “The Natalie Merchant Collection,” and somehow, for two years, finding time four days a week to work with children as an artist-in-residence with a local non-profit pre-school. “I felt like it was part of my job as a mother to be an example of someone who’s engaged in the community,” she said.
In November 2022, Merchant was appointed to a six-year term on the board of trustees for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress by Senate majority leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Winter 2025
Please note: Biographies are based on information provided to the CSOA by the artists or their representatives. More current information may be available on websites of the artists or their management.
