A half century ago, Brian Wilson weighed the end of a relationship against the end of the world on “God Only Knows.” Ever since, people have looked to the song as an ultimate testament to devotion, and it’s become a go-to for both weddings and pining mixtapes. But when Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering slipped a cover of the Beach Boys ballad into her set at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of Pitchfork’s Midwinter event earlier this month, it became something else: Situated among tracks from her upcoming fourth album, Titanic Rising, “God Only Knows” sounded like a meditation on our tenuous connection with a planet we’ve taken for granted. “God only knows what I’d be without you,” she sang, as if she was addressing the Earth itself.
The themes that recur throughout Titanic Rising are uncommonly heavy: climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the elusiveness of genuine human connection. The cover art finds Mering navigating a bedroom—posters on the wall, a teddy bear, an open laptop—that’s been entirely flooded with water. Without using any special effects, Mering designed the room herself before submerging it in a Long Beach, California swimming pool—a labor of love that became symbolic. “Doing anything underwater is twice as hard and twice as vulnerable,” she tells me before her Midwinter performance. “The set only lasted three hours before it was bloated and done. It was this very small moment.”
Building on the gently lilting melodies, complex harmonies, and sophisticated chord changes of her 2016 breakthrough, Front Row Seat to Earth, Titanic Rising is Mering’s most ornate and ambitious work to date. In writing the album, her first for Sub Pop, the 30-year-old songwriter found herself going all the way back to the golden age of pop standards for inspiration. “I wanted to find a way to use that timelessness in a 2019 way,” she says. The idea, she explains, is to speak to macro-level problems on a conversational level, to address “this feeling of smallness most people feel when we think about the scope of the issues we’re facing.”
Discussing her wide-ranging interests, Mering speaks as passionately about Jim Carrey (“Dude is beyond comedian at this point—total sensei madman”) as she does about the catastrophic problems facing our generation. She speaks coolly, even when you sense a surge of passion is running through every word, and her music plays a similar trick. It is comforting and familiar but somewhat surreal, revolving around the biggest possible questions with the quiet calm of a stoned, late-night conversation.
Weyes Blood: I want people to think about the reality of what’s going on but also to feel a sense of belonging and hope and purpose. I want to make sure everybody feels like they deserve to be alive, because in recent times I’ve had some close friends who have not felt that, and some have even taken their own life. I’m speaking to anybody who feels overwhelmed by the sheer mass of all these problems. I hope you could have a smile during the apocalypse and be grateful for whatever conditions exist, because life is a beautiful thing.
It actually gets a little easier because I kick into gear. For me, the hardest time in terms of climate change was when Al Gore released [An Inconvenient Truth]. Before that, there was this little bit of hope that it wasn’t real, that it all could be changed, that it was blown out of proportion. But that documentary rocked my fucking boat so hard, and I just knew, deep down in my heart, that things were never going to be the same. That the comfort of my childhood in the ’90s, just assuming the coral reefs were going to be there for my children—or even the fact that I should have kids—that whole foundation was rocked. It was almost this loss of innocence, like getting kicked out of the garden of Eden.
So once Trump showed up and all this shit started happening, I was already prepared for the worst. But I feel like I keep getting better at the “hope” thing, like it’s a muscle I have to exercise. And a lot of people have been kicked into gear because of this presidency—there’s a lot more education and anger than there was just five years ago. I’m so fucking stoked about the kids that are protesting [to fight climate change] in Belgium during school, I could almost cry.
I’m a big fan of horror films, particularly Friday the 13th. It’s one of the only genres that weaves abstract experimental techniques into the mainstream; having to be spooky requires a little more creativity. So it started with that. Then the song was so upbeat, with this restless, ADD feeling about dating. In our culture, the amount of people that get together through social media and Tinder—it almost seemed a bit like a slasher film quality of love. I wanted to bring that chaotic love-energy parallel.
I don’t mean it to be sarcastic, but I think it comes off a little sarcastic sometimes. I’m actually really sincere. But I feel like humor is a part of the great cosmic question. There’s this quote about a general in World War II who was overseeing D-Day, and he said the only way he could describe it was that it was actually sublime. Not like it was a good thing, but it was just so massive and destructive that it felt like this greater-than-us moment. Humor gets reduced to this stupid compartment where if something’s humorous it shouldn’t be taken seriously, but it plays such a huge role in how we experience and cope with reality. Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it’s all surrealism. It’s all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor—it all just overlaps.
Yeah. When I was a little kid, I was a huge fan of “The Kids in the Hall.” They were like my boy band. I was obsessed with sketch comedy. Being raised Christian, I was somewhat sheltered from the more radical high-art world. So to me, comedy was where people got to express themselves in an abstract way. It was a big part of my growing up.
I was on newsgroups for “Kids in the Hall” and Ween. It was more about creating your own little website with weird GIFs and getting on a message board and writing these long-winded posts about how obsessed you are with some obscure shit. You couldn’t really google “Black Flag” and find that much. By the time I was in high school, when MySpace came around, I was kinda into it, but I didn’t really bite the bullet until I was like 24. It took me a while to warm up to smartphones. I just reached a point where I was like, “If I continue to be a luddite, I’m just going to fall so far behind and become really bitter.”
I don’t like what it does to people’s self-esteem, or their concentration, or their spines. There’s little kinks that need to be worked out. But I don’t think there’s any turning back—trying to undo everything we’ve done so far is ridiculous. But I do hope there’s another revolutionary who makes the technology serve a greater purpose as opposed to draining humanity. I don’t imagine it’s very good for artistic endeavors, because boredom is such a huge component in creativity. It’s in those times that longform concentration and deep thinking happen, and that’s the stuff that makes great music and art. But then we cut off our boredom with some jacked-up stimulus, like, a video of some otters eating sashimi.
I would just hope, at some point, technology will keep changing and taking into account that we’re biological beings with certain propensities, like our desire to be connected. Getting on social media every five minutes is actually quite isolating. In some ways, it’s an impulse that leads to a dead-end. I would hope that it would just become evolved, and we’ll probably evolve with it, so who knows what the future holds. It’s kind of in an awkward phase right now.
There’s a little more of a gloss and a sheen that’s been put on everybody because they feel like they have to look good in photos. I remember when you never had to take a selfie or send somebody a nude, and it was great. You didn’t see yourself unless you looked in a mirror. That leaves your mind a lot of space, a lot of comfort. But then there’s lots of people meeting each other who probably never would have were it not for Tinder and OKCupid and these things. You can’t throw out the cat with the bathwater. Somewhere in that mountain of bullshit is some gold. But it’s not easy to find.
