The song’s title refers to a stretch of California highway known as the Grapevine-the steep grade on I-5 that takes you out of the farmland of the San Joaquin Valley, over the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains, and into the vast, glittering bowl of Los Angeles County. “And it was heartbreaking.” (She has now recovered, and the ex has apologized.) “I basically needed to leave him to go be sick on my own with my mysterious illness that nobody understood yet,” she said. She had been sick with long covid, though she hadn’t known at the time what was afflicting her, and he kept telling her that she was depressed, or just had to get outdoors or exercise more. “If a man can’t see his shadow / he can block your sun all day,” went the opening lines of “Grapevine.” Mering told me later that the song was about breaking up with a “narcissistic” musician she’d been “madly in love with” during the pandemic. The first time you hear them, you feel the swell of bittersweet emotion that usually comes from songs that you already know and have overlaid with memories and associations. I’d never heard “Grapevine” before, but it exerted a curious effect that I’d noticed with other Weyes Blood songs, all of which Mering writes. Mering has a warm, pure alto voice that has often been compared with Karen Carpenter’s-though it’s less sugary than Carpenter’s sometimes sounded. Her previously recorded vocals for a new song, “ Grapevine,” filled the control room. A string quartet would not be out of place there, and that day Mering had brought one in. Inside, it was as cool and dim as a bank vault. The Beach Boys made “Pet Sounds” there EastWest is where the Mamas and the Papas recorded “California Dreamin’ ” and “Monday, Monday.” The ceilings were high, the equipment sumptuous. The building, from 1933, had once been a burlesque joint called Madame Zucca’s Hollywood Casino and had been taken over in the early sixties by Bill Putnam, the pioneering audio engineer known for inventing many modern recording techniques. Mering half-jokingly described the record to me as “a doomer classic.”ĮastWest, which is on Sunset Boulevard, was the fanciest place Mering had ever recorded. The album, her fourth, was her breakthrough, critically acclaimed for the imaginative way Mering had recast the Laurel Canyon folk-pop of the nineteen-seventies for a new era of existential unease.
It was a nostalgic image rendered deeply eerie. For the cover of “Titanic Rising,” Mering had an elaborate re-creation of her teen-age bedroom submerged in a back-yard pool, and was photographed underwater, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The album, “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” which comes out on November 18th, is her first since “Titanic Rising,” in 2019. One afternoon in June of last year, Natalie Mering, the indie musician who performs as Weyes Blood, was working on a new album at EastWest, a storied recording studio in Hollywood.
0 kommentar(er)
