Natalie Bergman

Natalie Bergman

MY HOME IS NOT IN THIS WORLD
(Third Man, 2025)

Natalie Bergman is back and just in the nick of time. The velvet voiced songstress who set the world a-smoulder with her gospel drenched debut “Mercy” (Third Man, 2022), fans the flame with her new knock-out super disc “My Home is Not in this World,” and we can only say “burn, baby, burn!”

The title lays it on the table; “My Home is Not in this World” is an album that addresses the sense of exile — aesthetic, political, and emotional — in the contemporary context. This record is an outsider. It’s got hooks, charm, wit, & might even whisper in your ear to tell you things will be alright. But it won’t blend in with the increasingly innocuous & robotic sounds played on the radio. In a world too often caught up in cynicism, apathy, and fearful conformity, “My Home Is Not In this World” is a testimonial to vulnerability, feeling, and soul.

In Bergman’s estimation: “I am in the business of writing about love, because that’s what I have, you know? That’s the gift God gave me; my ability to love and to write about it.”

This makes sense; the first time you hear Natalie Bergman, it’s “love at first listen.” Whether it’s on the radio, up onstage or from the grooves of a plastic disc, you hear the voice and you’re hooked. Its
raspy, sweet, a little wistful, and a whole lot soulful. The Midwest strikes again.

“I’m from Chicago, so there was a lot of Chicago soul that my parents listened to, gospel and Motown; and all of the surrounding cities were making this beautiful, soulful music. So that has been a big inspiration in my life.”

Building on this classic foundation, Bergman’s songs are stories; confident expressions of love and lust and pain and loss. She was raised in the woods, she says, listening to all kinds of songbirds, salamanders, frogs, and finches. Maybe the “Natalie Bergman Sound” is one part gospel, two parts classic soul, a half-cup of country, plus a healthy dash of the tree-top calls of woodland fauna, half remembered from a formative paradise. Whatever it is, these otherworldly strains of soul and gospel tinged disco-rock ’n’ roll melodrama are just what the doctor ordered; a one way ticket downstream from the digital maelstrom that makes up the modern condition.

Natalie Bergman lives in Los Angeles but her music is universal; it lives in the hearts and minds and souls of her fellow travelers; born again believers in love, joy, and music’s role as guiding light and lightning rod. Her new record is a transmission, a clarion call to all those disaffected by the digital morass; looking for their kin. Blues, gospel, folk, soul, country, rock ’n’ roll – the best byproducts of the USA –compressed into bite sized salves to heal the angst and loneliness that haunt the modern psyche; smooth as silk electro-shock to chase off alienation.

Natalie Bergman – with brother Elliot as producer – recorded “My Home ..” with the Dap-Tone rhythm section on an Ampex magnetic tape machine and then taped the tape onto more tape in a perverse gesture of analog absolutism; an extravagant act of defiance against the digital monolith.