Weyes Blood Discusses Going On A ‘Subterranean Journey’ With Herself

The singer-songwriter takes Karl Puschmann from the dawn of time to the fourth dimension.

Aotearoa, Covid and lockdowns are all intrinsically linked together in Natalie Mering’s mind. The singer-songwriter, who is better known by her stage name Weyes Blood, last played here in March 2020, right before we sealed ourselves off from the world.

“It was really psychedelic,” she tells Viva from her home in Los Angeles. “I think we played the last legal gathering in New Zealand. It was a miracle that we got to finish the tour. It’s great to get things back.”

Even though lockdowns are now a thing of the past, their effects still ripple through people and society. Mering describes the Covid years as a “truth serum for the culture”, because it was a rare moment when everyone, no matter their differences, had to deal with the same thing.

“It helped me go internal. I went on this subterranean journey within myself,” she says. “Before I had been so extroverted and putting myself out there with music that I hadn’t had much time to sit with myself and really go inward. I think that was really valuable for everybody.”

She says the result of her entering this chamber of her psyche was that she now sees things — culture, society, herself — more clearly. It informed Weyes Blood’s latest record, the heavenly warning And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. The album’s an exquisitely lush and ethereal howl at environmental collapse, the tech takeover and the fraying threads of society and, by extension, humanity.

It’s a harbinger that we must somehow heal this, in her words, “sick society”, although she notes hers is not a new diagnosis.

“This has been an unfurling process that can go back to the dawn of time, the dawn of civilisation. It’s a reoccurring theme that keeps spiralling into new territory,” she offers. “The territory we’re in now is this digital age. The idea of AI and all of these extremely cataclysmic shifts. It’s important to keep it in perspective. Maybe it’s always been a cataclysmic shift. And even if this is a very unique experience, watching this rise of an artificial means of life, it’s still an extension of our nature. I think that times have always been crazy.”

With AI such a hot topic at the moment, especially in creative industries where the tech world can barely contain its glee that computers can now approximate all forms of art, be it words, music or visuals, I wonder what her take on technology is.

“I believe there are higher processes within the human mind that we haven’t fully cracked digitally yet. There’s stuff that we don’t understand biologically about our own brain. So how could something that we invent somehow transcend our perceptions?”

This, she says, will lead to AI’s creations feeling soulless, evoking the same emotional response as advertisements.

READ: Taylor Swift & The Sparkling Trap Of Constant Reinvention

“But, you know, that’s the best-case scenario — that there is some secret sauce to human consciousness. Unless the AI is sentient, it’ll always be in our service or lacking authenticity.”

This leads to a wild conversation speculating around the unexplainable, faith and bigger unworldly things.

“I’ve definitely had moments of psychic intuition,” she says. “I really do believe in gut feelings. I think there’s a clear channel that exists within more primordial forms of perception that we might not have as much access to, but the moments that we do it all make sense. In quantum physics, they say an event in the future can reach far back into the past. Science has been trying to crack the code on these fourth-dimensional, nonlinear time qualities for a long time. Albert Einstein, all that. It’s definitely real.”

“Yeah, it’s comforting,” Mering smiles. “It’s comforting that we can be like, ‘Okay, the crazy scientist says this is real, just like the crazy esoteric, new-agey person.’ I think it’s fun that there are these meeting points of our folkier, lineage-based intelligence and our modern, progressive, scientific intelligence.”

Weyes Blood has visited our shores a few times now, building an audience and gradually upgrading her venues each time thanks to her spellbinding, rapture-inducing performances.

But she says she hasn’t had much time to explore, her visits have been lightning-fast and just as illuminating and electric for those lucky enough to have been in attendance. Even though she’s only a week or so away from landing she rattles off a list of countries she’s playing before touching down.

“There are a lot of shows I didn’t get to play that we’re making up for now,” she laughs when I comment on the packed schedule. “It goes well for me to have my life moving so fast. It suits my personality.”

Weyes Blood plays all-ages shows at Auckland’s Powerstation this Monday night, May 29, and Wellington’s Opera House on Tuesday, May 30.