Natalie Bergman Lets the Sunshine In

Natalie Bergman straddles a razor’s edge in her music: Her new album, My Home Is Not In This World, is august in tribute and euphoric in execution. She summons the work of her totems—Motown hit-makers, dusty, dollar-bin bottom-dwellers, and the enclave of hedonistic, gold-tongued singers that warped Hollywood 60 years ago—often but never recedes too deep into the retro. And her talents are a paradox. Some of those rhythms, at once spacious, ecstatic, and full of gospel, sound out of time; but the riffs that sugar her sun-bleached soprano voice also bite into a songcraft that is timeless.

The bluesy vibrancy of her old band Wild Belle, which she formed with her brother Elliot, was traded in four years ago for an intentionally curated closet of monochrome garments, soul injections, and visual aesthetics to match. But the presentation of Natalie Bergman is no less splendid. “I love color, and I think color is so important,” she says. “And, obviously, we view the world in color. But I think, sometimes, color can be distracting. It helps you focus on the image and the music when you’re watching something in black and white.” She takes a moment for herself, before citing Mark Rothko’s famous palette: “He has muted colors but then he uses insane reds and oranges and he’s conveying a deep sadness and darkness. Color can be overwhelming to me.”

Bergman, a Chicago native in Glendale who’s called LA County home now for some 15 years, puts all of herself into her art. Cliché as that may be, she is a woman being pulled towards two cities always. “There’s Orioles here [in LA] that are so yellow,” she celebrates. “We’ve got these cool, red-whiskered bulbuls.” Listen to her 2021 solo debut Mercy or the very good Keep Those Teardrops from Falling EP that came shortly after and you’ll find glimpses of a green paradise that spans 2,500 miles (“I want to go outside, tell the trees that I love them; open my eyes, see the children in the garden dancing underneath the sunshine,” she releases on “My Home Is Not In This World”). Bergman owns some wooded property just outside of Chicago, and Elliot built a studio there, under a canopy of oak trees filled with songbirds. “It’s beautiful to work out there,” she says. “You feel isolated, it’s very quiet.” She and Elliot have another studio in Cypress Park near the Los Angeles River too, which she lovingly calls a “clubhouse.”

Musicians came and went while the siblings worked on My Home Is Not In This World, including drummer Homer Steinweiss, bassist Nick Movshon, and pianist Neal Francis, whom Bergman holds in high regard: “He’s kind of the closest thing we have to Billy Preston, or maybe even Stevie Wonder. He has that musicality and he’s got a soulfulness.” Mercy, which came out at the dawn of summer four years ago, was an insular body of work. Bergman missed collaborating and wanted her next effort to capture a lively, energetic soundtrack without borders. She spent half of 2024 in Chicago and half of 2024 in Los Angeles. While stationed in Second City, Bergman’s friend Doc McKinney, an “old-school punk rocker from the Midwest” she met through Columbia Records during her Wild Belle years, lent some bass playing to My Home Is Not In This World and co-wrote “You Can Have Me” with her. “He sold his publishing and peaced out to Brazil,” she recalls. “And en route to Brazil, he was like, ‘Can I post up at your place for a few days?’ So he came over, and we had a spiritual weekend in the woods. McKinney, according to her, is leaving the music industry, which she calls “beautiful and frightening.” “It’s been such a home for him for so many years, and now he’s realizing, ‘You know what? I need to focus on my family,’” she elaborates. “He’s just such a remarkable person.”

Steinweiss and Movshon eventually migrated with the Bergmans to New York City, where they all put further touches on the songs. “We took this record all over North America,” Natalie admits. But it was the climate and agriculture and wilderness of Chicago’s outskirts that hitched Bergman into focus, because she puts a great deal of importance on sharing her first home with her son, Arthur. She drafts an image of her space there for me, shouting out the “snappers and tree frogs and toads and salamanders and herons and otters.” “For him to experience those and call them his friends, that’s one of the most important things in the world to me,” she says, “because all of those animals were my friends growing up.”

While it’s true that the swelling, lush dimensions of My Home Is Not In This World are all over the map, the sound is unified by one part: her voice. Bergman, who first tinkered with storytelling by rewriting other people’s songs when she was little, calls herself an “analog journaler” now, referring to her many “notebooks with scribbles and drawings and lyrics” that she later weaves into songs. “I sometimes will have a moment in the middle of the night, where something comes to me and then I get so excited about it and I have to write it down,” she says. “Then, the next morning, it takes on a life of its own, just from a little seed.”

Bergman isn’t a stranger to the classic songwriting exercise of picking up an acoustic guitar and massaging the germ of an idea in the studio. But she thinks of her style as mostly unconventional, as she builds the architecture of a track before even considering or crafting a vocal. It’s a method that’s proved problematic recently, at an acoustic performance in May. “I stripped all of the imagined parts until it was just me and the guitar,” she recounts. “I realized that, some of the time, it can hurt you, because you’re writing these elaborate string arrangements and then, when you take those away, you don’t always have a complete song.” She made it through the My Home Is Not In This World material she’d prepared, but “wouldn’t always recommend writing that way.” “The power of songwriting,” she contends, “really comes from the song itself.”

MUCH OF BERGMAN’S WORK has been colored by loss: 19 years ago, her mother Susan passed away from a bout with brain cancer; she made Mercy after her father and stepmother were killed by a drunk driver in 2019; her aunt, the late Anne Heche, died in 2022 after a string of auto collisions. But My Home Is Not In This World comes with a different caveat: the birth of her son Arthur, whom Bergman sings of often on the record: “Look at your smile, you came to me at the very right time.” She says, “Some people have told me, now that Arthur is here and he is alive, that it’s my father living on through him. People always try to be helpful in their condolences in a positive way, and that’s so kind. Sometimes I’m like, ‘You don’t have to be hopeful when there’s loss.’ You can divide the two things, life and death, and they’re both very much important things in life—and it’s the beginning of life and it’s the end of life. I think they should be celebrated independently of each other.”

Five years ago, Bergman fled to a New Mexico monastery to write Mercy. She filled the album with worship vernacular, faith-driven details, and mentions of Jesus Christ, and the practice of speaking to God through her art remains a tenet. “My will, my faith, and my belief in God have always been an integral part of my work,” she says. “Even in my Wild Belle days, or just as a young songwriter, I’ve always used God as a compass or even a tool to find lyrics, melody, or purpose.” She argues that, when you begin writing a song, with or without God in the room, you have to have some sort of faith present. “You either have faith in yourself, or you have faith in the subject that you’re writing about, or you have faith in the instrumentals that you’re composing. That’s the first step of writing a song, believing in something, believing in yourself, believing in God. I have to ask God to come into the room with me every time I begin writing, because I need the backup. I need the assistance. When you bring God into the room with you, I’m able to channel more emotions and more truth. I find that the songs end up being more honest.”