Bearing traces of both the colorful hope of soul music, as well as the wistful, aching heart of country, My Home Is Not In This World, Natalie Bergman’s second album as a solo artist, does not stretch the limits of convention, nor does it set out to. It prefers instead to reach back for musical inspiration, to lift sounds out of earlier decades and to combine them into something new but resolutely familiar. The record is self-consciously planted in a sepia-tinged yesteryear, a beautiful, slow-moving work designed to offer both the artist and her listeners a moment to unplug from the blue-lit coolness of the digital contemporary and to luxuriate in the analog warmth of an idealized past. That is both its strength and, to a lesser extent, its weakness.
The title, My Home Is Not In This World, is a reference to Bergman’s alienation from the digital reality that we are all forced to maneuver through today. She has said so explicitly, remarking that the album, which was recorded onto tape, “represents my desire to not be a part of what’s going on digitally. I was trying to be the antithesis of a lot of modern music.” The past is endlessly fascinating, as is its music; it is inevitable that artists luxuriate in and use it to shape their own work. That is often a joyous thing, but in My Home Is Not In This World, there are moments where the longing for the way things once were can begin to feel faintly uncomfortable. It works best when it takes note of the beauty to be found in the present.
It sets its stall out early. The first song, “Lonely Road,” begins with a slow, ponderous drum intro, which offers a clue to the laid-back tempo that the rest of the album will sway along to, before Bergman’s voice, and its unique affectation, begins to lament, “I take the lonely road baby / If I can’t have you / I spend my days alone darling / If what you said is true / I will never, ever find another man like you.” Bergman’s lyrics, throughout both her solo career and her time in Wild Belle (the band she shares with her brother Elliot), are rarely challenging, but their very simplicity can itself be what’s attractive. On this record in particular, where the music is so warm and so wistful, that rule holds especially true. Complex stories and sentiments would probably prove jarring against sun-bleached music as gentle as this. This project is not meant to be difficult. It represents an opportunity to sit with some bare fundamentals: love, longing, loss, and hope.
Her opening words to the track “Dance,” a gently groovy song built over a dreamy, wavering organ, are admirably clear: “Baby, when I see your smiling face / Oh, it really makes me happy.” The experience of love can be a challenging endeavor at times, and our art often seeks to grapple with that. But it can be utterly simple, too, and the clarity with which Bergman expresses the joy of seeing a loved one smile here is blissfully uncomplicated. It doesn’t need to be more than that. On “You Can Have Me,” Bergman, singing over a piano and the gorgeously warm rise and fall of a bass, addresses her love, who is easily distracted by the false promise of all the wonderful, pretty things in life that they perceive around them but will never realistically claim. This person has become consumed by fantasies of fame, awards, and vintage Cadillacs, warped, perhaps, by the seductive algorithmic dreams that spew forth from our devices every day, infecting our minds and never allowing us to find peace with what we’ve actually got. But, through the song, she reminds her love that, while they can’t have everything, they can have her. That is enough.
It is a similar theme to that explored in the deeply soulful “Looking For You,” but here it is Bergman herself who has been too eagerly pining for something that she hasn’t got. She tells us how, for her whole life, she had been looking for someone to love, but it was only when she paused and took stock of all that was actually around her that she finally realized, “there you were” all along. These two songs, “You Can Have Me” and “Looking For You,” serve as Bergman’s encouragement to live in the present and to treasure what is already in our lives. Those things, and those people, can too easily be torn away for us to take for granted.
Mercy, Bergman’s last album and her first as a solo artist, was a mournful, religious thing, written in response to the deaths of her father and stepmother. This new album represents the next stage in coping with that terrible loss. While grief never truly leaves a person, there is a sense, on My Home Is Not In This World, of a woman beginning to step out of its earliest, darkest moments. The sadness remains, as it always will, but it is no longer total or crippling. Bergman gave birth to a child last year, which seems to have returned to her a sense of enchantment with life that was once lost through grief. The song “Give Me A Reason” describes this experience, speaking of a painful period in which she was confined to bed “for three long years,” unable even to write a note of music. It was a too-long stretch in the wilderness, but the birth of her child eventually gave her “sweet love again” and carried her back into the world. The album, in many ways, can be understood as a celebration of that fact.
My Home Is Not In This World is at its finest when it roots itself in the beauty of now, but it also spends a great deal of time looking backwards. Its musical influences, while melded together in a decidedly contemporary way, owe a lot to the ’60s, and lyrically, too, there are moments where the songs feel like they have been dragged forth from a past era. This is not always entirely agreeable. The second track, “Gunslinger,” is driven by a kind of golden American nostalgia that is seductive and pleasant. It is a colorful, summery track, which tells the tale of Bergman, as the song’s narrator, falling for a bad boy sort, a dangerously charming man with “diamond eyes” and an “eye for young women,” whom he has a habit of shooting “down like a gunslinger.” She sees his faults, but yearns nonetheless to be his “queen.” Both the music and the words are profoundly old-fashioned. The dynamics of the relationship implied by “Gunslinger” feel a bit dated in 2025—“Without him I’d be nothing at all,” Bergman sings, “I’m just a prisoner of your love. Baby, don’t you let me out”—and it is difficult not to recoil from them a bit, particularly in light of what she said about the album being the “antithesis of a lot of modern music.” It suggests a perfectly reasonable discomfort with the way things are going in the world at present, but one that is dealt with by looking backwards rather than forwards.
Nostalgia is a powerful human experience, and it can be extremely pleasurable to play with. But if it is too unquestioningly consumed, it can blind us to the present and the more pernicious aspects of the past. “Gunslinger” is a lovely song, but the eponymous gunslinger himself sounds like a bit of an asshole whose behavior, while in the not-too-distant past would have been celebrated as quintessentially manly, should probably now be considered shitty. The present day may be terrible in many ways, and the fairly recent past may even have been broadly better for some people. But it wasn’t perfect, and a total rejection of the present in exchange for fantasies of an idealized past does bear a whiff of the reactionary about it. Perhaps that would be less obvious or pressing if we weren’t living in a time in which the forces of reaction are ascendant, but we are. The lionization of the past is, therefore, something to be interrogated with care, with both its positives and its negatives needing to be parsed through.
This is perhaps too harsh a criticism, because there is no real indication that the album and its maker seek to emit anything other than human warmth. It is an often lovesick and melancholic record, but, despite that, it is its hope and joy that glitter brightest. This is perhaps best encapsulated in “I’ll Be Your Number One,” in which Bergman sings, “When you are lonely / And you’re feeling blue / Baby, you can call me / I’ll be there for you.” The song is a bouncy, hopeful assurance of support that owes a great debt to Motown at its most splashy, and the optimism it expresses is, fundamentally, what one should take from the album when it ends.
My Home Is Not In This World has its brief weirder moments, as with the Morricone-style whistling in “Please Don’t Go,” a song which, thereafter, drifts close to the space occupied by Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness,” and “My Home,” which bears the reggae tinge and hard saxophone stab of Wild Belle, making it clear that Bergman’s brother remains her collaborator today, producing this record as he did Wild Belle’s albums. In general, this LP keeps things earnestly uncomplicated, evoking love at its sweet simplest and sonically gesturing towards the comforting safety of the analog past. The nostalgia it reaches for can, at times, feel a bit too eager, but the record at its best marks a woman’s return to the light, after too long spent in the dark.
