MERCHANT: ...And kept walking. I thought, this is going to get me in a room. And it didn't. I stayed in the hallway for another two hours. One of those advances, she reveals, is when she gave birth to her daughter, Lucia, in 2003. “We had a beautiful, well-equipped and enlightened medical facility called the Birthing Centre, in which you could have any childbirth experience you wanted. It could be completely unmedicated, you could have your baby in a pool, you could have as many people as you want in the room, and you could have a surgical suite if things were going haywire. Those options didn’t exist when my mother had all four of her children. She was also completely anaesthetised – she doesn’t remember any of the births – and they handed her jars of formula milk when she walked out the door.”

It was a time when there was still slavery and women had absolutely no rights whatsoever. Native American people were being murdered on their own land. And he was aware of all that. He was a reporter, and he volunteered in the hospitals of both the Union and the Confederacy [in the American Civil War], caring for men who were dying of the racism and horrible hatred that turned our country against itself. He lived through all of that but could still say, ‘I believe in the promise of this country’.” I started writing songs, which I hadn't done in probably five years, and it seemed like the theme that just kept recurring was intimacy and risking intimacy. So that's what I started writing about. I think it was the isolation of the pandemic. [Laughs.] RASCOE: That really - you know, that got me in my feelings, when I said - you know, it kind of made me tear up, you know, because it's talking about, you know, how you hold all this pain inside and never show them that you cry. Where were you coming from with that? RASCOE: You were at a point where people could really hurt you when you love them, right? That's the deepest hurt, right?MERCHANT: (Singing) Come on, Aphrodite, you goddess of love. Come on, Aphrodite, from that mountain above. Rather than living in a state of wistful longing for love, Merchant feels complete with what she has. "It’s almost like your beloved is in you all the time and you just project your beloved onto a passing stranger. You can basically fall in love with anybody, especially if you want to be blind to their faults. You know, every time I’ve been in love, my first impression of the person was the most honest. But then it’s like you fall under a spell: I can change this person! My love can fix them!” Although she’s not entirely sure, given the pandemic’s weird way of compressing all of eternity, she thinks she started writing the songs for Keep Your Courage in September that year. Home from the hospital and confined with her piano, her journals, and decades’ worth of sketching, painting and unfinished songs, she got to work. The result, she says proudly, is an album about love in all its guises, “the journey of a courageous heart.” “It just seemed to make sense to me, after all that isolation,” she explains. “Whenever I’m in any kind of crisis, I play the piano. But I couldn’t even do that at the start of the pandemic because I couldn’t use my right hand for months. So when I say ‘keep your courage,’ I’m talking to myself as much as anyone.” That lush, layered contralto voice can belong to only one person,” says NPR. The New Yorker says: “Her passion is for forgotten people, problems, and sounds.” Natalie Merchant sees right through the sexist music industry: "The patriarchy wants to dispose of women at a certain age"

These songs are alchemy in the highest form possible.We all need to be reminded that such beauty exists.” – Valerie June Guardian Angel lifts the senses following the tonal shift of Hunting The Wren and while it’s a rather simple composition, it allows Merchant’s delicate vocals to reach every aspect of your soul. Merchant is so clear and present, in the mix, that your speakers will disappear and should you close your eyes, you’d swear she is in the room with you. Plus, the musical interlude around the midway point is nothing short of incredible. Guardian Angel is a true masterpiece in every sense of the word. Merchant left 10,000 Maniacs in 1993 having felt that she had outgrown the band and went on release a series of solo records starting with Tigerlily, which sold 5m copies in the US. She hasn’t matched that level of popularity since, but “there is a certain loyal base of people who will be open-minded about whatever it is I am doing,” she says. “Whether I am doing klezmer music or early jazz or so many different styles of music that I have explored since I went solo – people will go with me on the journey.”

But even as there's a thematic throughline on the record, each song is different orchestrally and musically. "They're all little intrinsic worlds unto themselves," Merchant says.