Towards the end of last year, Nonesuch Records announced the release of Natalie Merchant’s Keep Your Courage, her ninth solo studio album and first of new material since 2014’s self-titled record, on April 14, 2023. Today she has shared her first album single ‘Come on, Aphrodite’ featuring singer Abena Koomson-Davis (Resistance Revival Chorus). The song establishes the record’s themes of love and passion as essential to the human experience.
“‘Come On, Aphrodite’ is an invocation to the goddess of love and passion,” says Merchant. “In the lyrics, I list all the clichés we use to describe falling in love: being drunk and blind, over the moon, weak in the knees, and half out of our minds. For the Greeks, when the spirit of love descended, it was seen as a kind of assault; you would become powerless against an all-consuming, sweet madness. Amazingly, humans still crave it, in spite of the perils.”
Keep Your Courage is set for release on April 14 on Nonesuch Records; pre-save/pre-order here.
Read more about the album in our earlier post here.