Weyes Blood names “the angstiest song of all time”
Weyes Blood has felt like a lost relic that somehow didn’t see the light of day until the 2020s. Whereas most artists have taken music into the modern age with ease, Natalie Mering has been able to take bits and pieces from decades past and turn them into spellbinding music for a new generation, either through ballads like ‘Movies’ or psychedelic flourishes on ‘Andromeda’. Every positive song always has a darker counterpart, though, and she has The Beatles to thank for writing the epitome of musical anxiety.
When listening to her music, no Weyes Blood record necessarily screams the Fab Four. For all of her recent output on albums like Titanic Rising, she tends to sound like she’s taken the kind of smooth crooning of someone like Karen Carpenter and combined it with the sharp wit of Lana Del Rey, constantly trying to push herself further in terms of how much emotion she can get across to the audience.
Most of the album’s production also seems to reflect that kind of existential angst. There might be a lot of songs that resonate with people who have gotten a little bit grey on the sides of their heads, but the true power behind her work is the same as most other millennials, trying desperately to hold onto their youth while knowing that too much of it will kill them.
Even though that mindset feels like a purely 2000s mood, John Lennon knew that loss of innocence all too well. Before he had even started The Beatles, Lennon’s rough upbringing is something most wouldn’t wish upon their worst enemy, from his father leaving him when he was a child to losing his mother in a car accident right after re-establishing a relationship with her.
While Lennon carried that rage inside him, he seemed to come back to the innocence of love when he met Yoko Ono for the first time. Despite being married to his first wife, Cynthia, Lennon fell madly in love with Ono, making various experimental records with her and penning some of his greatest love songs about her, from ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ to ‘Woman’ to his solo album Double Fantasy.
Ono brought out Lennon’s sentimental side, but she also amplified every one of his emotions. Inspired by her minimalist way of writing poetry, Lennon wrote ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ about Ono, giving in to his primal urges under a bluesy riff and screaming like he’s in pain midway through the song.
When discussing some of the songs that shaped her, Weyes Blood would include Lennon’s lust-anthem as one of the most tortured pieces she had ever heard, telling TIDAL, “If I did and I had to ‘torture’ then I would play The Beatles’ ‘She’s So Heavy’ on repeat forever because that song is the angstiest song of all time. A spiral of torturous desire!”.
There are even a few seeds from this track in how Mering approaches some of her best songs. Just like The Beatles classic ends with that epic fadeout before coming to an abrupt stop, many of the recent Weyes Blood albums have been about enveloping the listener with sound, lulling them into a certain mindset, and the rest of the piece sprawls out across the headphones.
For all of the great love songs The Beatles have written, Weyes Blood was right on the money, talking about the painful aspects of the work. They had said that all we needed was love, but ‘I Want You’ is the moment where it feels like love is the only thing keeping you from going insane.
