NATALIE BERGMAN
HAVE MERCY
When sudden tragedy struck,NATALIE BERGMANfound solace in the New Mexico desert. Shedding indie rock for psychedelic gospel-soul, music played a big part in her healing – while her latest album finds fresh hope in new life. “People form bands because we’re lost,” she tells Kevin EG Perry. “We’re like: ‘Hello, we’re looking for our home here on Earth.’”
“Next-level musician” Natalie Bergman at home in LA
Photo by ANDREAS EKELUND
“It was so insular”: Bergman circa her debut solo album
Mercy
ROBIN LAANANEN
N 2019, Natalie Bergman and her brother Elliot were in New York preparing to play Radio City Music Hall with their indie-rock band, Wild Belle. Minutes before soundcheck, they got a call from a coroner in San Francisco. Their father Jud and stepmother Mary had been in a taxi that was struck head on by a drunk driver speeding down the wrong side of a highway. The couple were killed on impact. Bergman, who had already lost her birth mother when she was still a teenager, felt herself buckle with the shock. The grief was so overwhelming she feared it might destroy her.
“I remember my heart physically hurt for five months,” she says softly. “I thought I had breast cancer. I was like: ‘Something is wrong. What the fuck is going on? Do I have cancer in my heart?’”
We’re sitting at the dining table in her home on a hillside in Los Angeles, looking south through glass walls over the urban sprawl of Glendale and towards the city’s distant downtown. Birds shelter in the tops of trees below our eyeline. The wide Californian sky, usually so reliably bright, has turned grey with a gathering storm. There is rain coming.
As the temperature drops, Bergman stands to close a window. She is dressed all in black: jeans and a loose buttoned shirt. On the middle finger of her left hand, beside her wedding band, is a ring in the shape of a thick silver cross. It signifies her Christian faith, but it’s symmetrically sized. It appears less like a crucifix than the universal symbol indicating an urgent need for medical care.
In the immediate aftermath of her father’s death, Bergman got sober and, two months later, took a vow of silence and entered The Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Chama Valley, New Mexico. After six days of solitude she emerged having wrestled with her grief and with her God. She also brought with her the beginnings of her first solo record, the psychedelic gospel album Mercy, released in 2021 by Jack White’s Third Man Records.