WHEN NATALIE MERING WAS SIX YEARS OLD, SHE BECAME AWARE OF HER father’s secret.
Weyes Blood, album by album, by Bob Mehr.
This was not a family scandal or stain of some dark past, but the fact that her dad had once been a professional musician. More than that, Sumner Mering had stood in the vanguard of Los Angeles’ late-’70s new wave explosion, with a major-label deal in his back pocket.
THE OUTSIDE ROOM
“He always played guitar in church, where he was the worship leader,” recalls Mering. “So I knew he played music. But around that time he sat me and my brother down and sang us these songs he’d written. It was a crazy moment where it clicked in my head: my dad was a rock star!? Really?”
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Three decades later, Mering – recording and performing as Weyes Blood – has accepted that inheritance. Her path, however, has been circuitous, from precocious teenage freak-folker to noise-rock miscreant, to West Coast dream-pop diva worshipped by musical aristocrats. Featuring on recent albums by John Cale and Lana Del Rey, and on the eve of a world tour to support a fifth Weyes Blood LP, Mering seems poised for even greater triumphs.
“In my family, I think we knew that music was the secret, the top secret actual priority,” she says. “Maybe there was something inevitable about all this.”