RECOMMENDED RECORD: Natalie Merchant: Keep Your Courage (Nonesuch/digital outlets)

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one which comes in a gatefold sleeve as a double album with an all-important lyric sheet, extensive liner notes (including a piece about the Jeanne d'Arc cover) and four extra songs from earlier albums not previously available on vinyl and unavailable on the CD or streaming versions.

Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . .

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Formerly of 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant has enjoyed a respected solo career for three decades. However a 2018 operation affected her vocal chords and she couldn't sing: “It made me wish I had made more records,” she told The Guardian recently.

Then when her voice returned Covid intervened.

During isolation Merchant -- who released the extraordinary 2010 double album Leave Your Sleep, interpretations of grim poems about childhood fears – came upon the work of Scottish poet Robin Robertson, began a correspondence and was encouraged to write by their long-distance literary relationship.

Her words became the sometimes mystical songs on the affirmatively-titled Keep Your Courage, an assured collection opening with the heroically orchestrated Big Girls (“hold on”) and a belting soul-pop address to the Greek goddess of love on Come On, Aphrodite: “Can't you see you I've been patient . . . make me weak in the knees”.

Both uplifting songs feature gospel singer Abena Koomson-Davis and set the tone for an album which includes the glorious seven minute-plus Sister Tilly (oceanic orchestration, then pop-rock and ending with Indian cadences), the ancient-sounding Hunting the Wren (by Irish folk-goths Lankum) and the Celtic Eye of the Storm.

There's string-enhanced folk (Guardian Angel), a gorgeously elegiac tribute to Walt Whitman on Song of Himself, Latin soul-funk (Tower of Babel) and, in the closer, The Feast of St Valentine she sums up: “Love will be the bruising and the balm”.

A painter, single mother of a teenage daughter, self-funding recording artist, filmmaker and activist, 59-year old Natalie Merchant has found her voice again.

It is confidently beautiful and perhaps -- given it mentions "love" at least 26 times -- even necessary at this time.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.

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Elsewhere has an extensive interview with Natalie Merchant in our archive here.