“Such a big record”: Weyes Blood celebrates the weird world of Syd Barrett’s ‘The Madcap Laughs’
They say you never really grow out of the first music you fall in love with, but the truth is a little more complicated than that. Sure, it’ll still have a hold on you, but everyone’s taste matures with age (or at least they should), and nowhere is this more apparent than with musicians. Very few artists spend their careers making the music they first fell for. You can tell because The Beatles weren’t a skiffle band, Thom Yorke doesn’t ape Queen, and Weyes Blood isn’t a Sonic Youth-style rock outfit. No matter how much the name might sound it.
No, instead, Weyes Blood is the work of Natalie Mering, the California-born, Pennsylvania-raised songwriter. While the first music that Merring fell for was the alt-rock of the 1980s and ’90s, devouring Our Band Could Be Your Life and worshipping Radiohead and Ween, the music she made as an adult couldn’t be more different. Apart from a brief period of time playing in the fantastically named noise rock bands Satanized and Jackie O Motherfucker.
No, by the time she’d gone solo and taken on the name Weyes Blood (it’s pronounced Wise), she was responsible for glowing, psychedelic chamber pop that Mering herself described as “Bob Seger meets Enya”. What artist could have inspired such a change of heart? Arguably, the Godfather of psychedelic pop himself, Syd Barrett.
During an interview with Mojo, she detailed precisely the record and song that gave her the change of heart she needed: “Eventually, I heard Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, especially that track Terrapin, with the lazy acoustic guitar, I got a nylon-string and went full-on folk weird.” The Madcap Laughs inspired every aspect of her artistry, telling Tidal how it inspired her to take up songwriting in the first place.
She added: “That was such a big record for me that really made me start writing songs. ‘Terrapin’, the first song, it was just so sleepy and lowkey, I was like, ‘I could write that!’ And if I could make it sound that good, then I should already just be playing shows, you know?”
If anything, it’s clear what attracted Mering to Barrett’s work. Not only did it retain the experimentalism of the bands she’d loved in the past, but it also allowed for an emotional complexity that the austere likes of Sonic Youth don’t. She told Tidal of the same record: “That was a big moment for me, discovering emotive expression that wasn’t really really tailored perfect. He was sloppy, weird and internal. And I was really attracted to that.”
Today, the high points of Mering’s work as Weyes Blood manage to capture the best of both worlds. They maintain the madcap invention of Barrett’s best work while combining it with a sheer songwriting classicism that’s entirely her own.
Like her inspiration, she manages to create a whole world of her own with her music, one that she adds to with each subsequent record. It’s easy to believe that if Barrett were still around, he’d be proud to have a legacy that could create timeless artists like Weyes Blood.
