The title of Natalie Bergman’s new album, “My Residence Is Not In This World,” begins to make sense while you spend a while with the singer-songwriter at her childhood escape in Barrington. Tucked away in a forested pocket of city accessible by a slim gravel highway, the fantastically upkept farmhouse looks like a movie splice from yesteryear.
Upon settling into the lounge, the area comes throughout like a rebuttal to trendy life. The vibe echoes Bergman’s classic musical palette, which is at all times true to the oldies: Motown, soul, gospel, folks and nation western. There are not any TVs or electronics in sight. Simply partitions of books, an previous Chickering & Sons piano within the nook and film home windows that reveal lush greenery and a quaint steeple within the distance.
“It’s like we lived within the woods. We spent a whole lot of our time exterior,” Bergman says of her childhood. She runs via a scavenger listing of nature’s treasures to be discovered: blue-spotted salamanders, nice blue herons, centuries-old oak timber. “There’s a lot life right here. And that’s what I reply to. That’s why I come right here rather a lot, to work on music. I simply really feel so linked.”
“The final [album] I did, the entire songs had been so heavy, about dropping my dad. Now I’m like, possibly I can simply have some form of candy love songs?” Bergman stated. “Dying is on this album, inevitably, however I began it with life. With new life. That was the entire inspiration.”
Courtesy of Leslie Kirchhoff
That is the place her love of music really first started. “We had been a really musical household,” she says about her father, Judson, a neighborhood businessman and philanthropist; her author-mother, Susan; and three siblings who all went into the humanities. On any given day, the home could be crammed with Motown or Chess or Stax data, some Howlin’ Wolf or Etta James or Nigerian jùjú musician Ebenezer Obey. When Bergman was a toddler, her mom enrolled her in classes with a Chicago Symphony violinist, although the younger Bergman quickly turned to piano classes on the Chickering.
“I might simply sit there with my mother and sing and play. There have been a number of singalongs,” Bergman says with a smile. Even within the somber occasions, music was there. On the day Johnny Money (one in every of Bergman’s idols) died, she recollects her dad “parked the automotive within the driveway and we listened to [Cash’s cover of] ‘Harm’ in all probability 10 occasions, simply in silence. That’s how we processed his demise.”
Her siblings additionally took up music. Brother Elliot, one other musical sage engaged on his forthcoming solo album, has turn into Natalie’s go-to producer. He’s additionally her cohort within the psychedelic reggae pop act Wild Belle that signed to Columbia Information some 15 years in the past and has launched three albums up to now. They’ve been on hiatus since 2019 however Bergman says a brand new album is near being completed and should be launched this yr.
Bergman and her brother Elliot (proper) have carried out because the group Wild Belle. The group has been on hiatus since 2019, however Natalie Bergman says a brand new album is near being completed and should be launched this yr. Right here, they carry out at Austin Metropolis Limits in 2013.
John Davisson/Invision/AP
Sister Elise, a clothier, can also be concerned in a neighborhood bluegrass/roots music mission referred to as Massive Sadie, and brother Bennet is a broadcast poet. Whereas the 4 are unfold throughout the nation, in Chicago, New York and L.A. (the place Natalie and Elliot now dwell), the Barrington abode is their glue. “There are such a lot of recollections on this home … it’s such a blessing to have it,” Natalie says. “I don’t ever wish to give it up.”
Naturally, it was right here that she selected to gap up for every week in mid-July to rehearse for her newest homecoming blitz, a sequence of exhibits in preparation for her album launch July 18. The brand new album, her second on Jack White’s Third Man Information label, delivers a swirling mixture of swinging ‘60s R&B, nation soul and hazy psychedelia.
Past providing a sprawling rehearsal area for Bergman and her band, house additionally invited Bergman to faucet into the sturdy feelings which have impressed her solo works since her very good debut, “Mercy.” Launched in 2021, the gospel-fueled album developed as Bergman looked for her religion within the wake of a automotive accident that killed her father and stepmother two years prior.
The accident, which was brought on by a drunken driver, despatched Bergman on a retreat to a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico as a method to attempt to cope. (In 2006, Bergman’s mom, Susan, died from mind most cancers.) Bergman and her brother obtained the information about their father’s accident simply minutes earlier than Wild Belle was to make its debut at New York’s Radio Metropolis Music Corridor, and the shock made the singer query whether or not she may ever make music once more.
“I misplaced my identification. … I simply felt sort of paralyzed for some time. After which the music got here to me,” she says, referencing the sort of divine intervention that begat John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
“He channeled God via his work … and I feel that that’s what occurred with me. … I went inward and I went upward,” Bergman says. Though an entire album about Jesus appeared dangerous at first, “Mercy” turned a essential darling as audiences recognized with the central theme: the therapeutic energy of music. Even at Bergman’s current sold-out present at The Hideout, songs “Discuss To the Lord” and “Shine Your Gentle On Me” had been a few of the most well-received with the viewers turning them into true sing-along hymns.
Bergman’s spirituality carries over into “My Residence Is Not In This World,” which has one other highly effective which means past simply that reference to her previous soul. “It’s form of alluding to your property over yonder, you understand, that heavenly house that a few of us hope to belong to after we depart this place,” Bergman says.
Now, although, her focus is on making her house within the current. In between her two solo albums, Bergman met her husband, Andreas Ekelund, who’s a artistic director (and now music video director). The 2 lived in the identical residence constructing in L.A. and had a fateful run-in within the mailroom. Fateful as a result of, for some time, Bergman innocently thought Jack White could possibly be her soulmate. Her schoolgirl crush appeared prefer it had an actual shot when she opened some dates on his Provide Chain Points tour in 2022. “I used to be, like, that is my alternative to let him know I’m the love of his life.” The day the tour kicked off, nevertheless, White staged a spontaneous marriage ceremony with now-wife Olivia Jean.
Now fortunately married to Ekelund, Bergman expanded her household in 2024 with the arrival of their son, Arthur. The blond-haired, blue-eyed tot, who’s the spitting picture of his mom, impressed the levity heard on Bergman’s newest materials.
“It’s like I’ve made music my complete life. However having a toddler is that this new reward and this new perspective on life,” Bergman says. “To have the ability to take a look at the world in a infantile manner can also be tremendous good in your music. Since you return to the playfulness, the innocence.”
You possibly can sense that tonal shift on most of the album’s 12 tracks from the western rodeo of “Gunslinger” to the bouncy pop of “DANCE” and the reverent folks of “California” that pays homage to her now-adopted house. There are tender moments too, just like the candy lullaby “Track for Arthur” and the touching “Didn’t Get To Say Goodbye,” about her aunt, the late actress Anne Heche, who was her mom’s sister. “She was such a tremendous girl, tremendous proficient, wildly clever and exquisite,” Bergman says. “I used to be very shut together with her.”
Whereas unimaginable loss has been layered into Bergman’s work, there’s a way that she’s discovering methods to finish the circle and turn into complete once more. Her new album artwork alludes to this as nicely, that includes Bergman within the desert, standing inside a virtually full orb she’s drawn within the sand. “The final [album] I did, the entire songs had been so heavy, about dropping my dad. Now I’m like, possibly I can simply have some form of candy love songs?” she says, including, “Dying is on this album, inevitably, however I began it with life. With new life. That was the entire inspiration.”
As we wrap up, Bergman has one very last thing to indicate me, exterior within the yard jungle, a selection of 4 towering cypress timber which have come to represent this new ethos. “My dad planted these for us 4 children after we first moved into this home,” she says. The timber are a present, she says, one which retains the whole lot — together with hope — alive.
