The title of Natalie Bergman’s new album, “My Home Is Not In This World,” starts to make sense when you spend some time with the singer-songwriter at her childhood escape in the northwest suburbs. Tucked away in a forested pocket of town accessible by a narrow gravel road, the beautiful farmhouse feels like a film splice from yesteryear.
The living room comes across like a rebuttal of modern life. The vibe echoes Bergman’s vintage musical palette, which is always true to the oldies: Motown, soul, gospel, folk and country western. There are no TVs or electronics in sight — just walls of books, an old Chickering & Sons piano in the corner and picture windows that reveal lush greenery and a quaint steeple in the distance.
“It’s like we lived in the woods. We spent a lot of our time outside,” Bergman said of her childhood.
She runs through a scavenger list of nature’s treasures to be found: blue-spotted salamanders, great blue herons, centuries-old oak trees.
“There’s so much life here. And that’s what I respond to. That’s why I come here a lot, to work on music. I just feel so connected.”
“The last [album] I did, all of the songs were so heavy, about losing my dad. Now I’m like, maybe I can just have some sort of sweet love songs,” Bergman said. “Death is on this album, inevitably, but I started it with life. With new life. That was the whole inspiration.”
Courtesy of Leslie Kirchhoff
This is where her love of music truly first began.
“We were a very musical family,” she said of her father, Judson, a local businessman and philanthropist; her author-mother, Susan; and three siblings who all went into the arts. On any given day, the house would be filled with Motown or Chess or Stax records, some Howlin’ Wolf or Etta James or Nigerian jùjú musician Ebenezer Obey. When Bergman was a child, her mother enrolled her in lessons with a Chicago Symphony violinist, though the young Bergman soon turned to piano lessons on the Chickering.
“I would just sit there with my mom and sing and play. There were lots of singalongs,” Bergman said.
Even in the somber times, music was there. On the day Johnny Cash (one of Bergman’s idols) died, she recalls her dad “parked the car in the driveway, and we listened to [Cash’s cover of] ‘Hurt’ probably 10 times, just in silence. That’s how we processed his death.”
Her siblings also took up music. Brother Elliot, another musical sage working on his forthcoming solo album, has become Natalie’s go-to producer. He’s also her cohort in the psychedelic reggae pop act Wild Belle that signed to Columbia Records some 15 years ago and has released three albums. They’ve been on hiatus since 2019, but Bergman said a new album is close to being finished and could still be released this year.
Natalie Bergman and her brother Elliot (right) have performed as the group Wild Belle. The group has been on hiatus since 2019, but Natalie Bergman says a new album is close to being finished and may still be released this year. Here, they perform at Austin City Limits in 2013.
John Davisson/Invision/AP
Sister Elise, a fashion designer, is also involved in a local bluegrass/roots music project called Big Sadie, and brother Bennet is a published poet. While the four are spread across the country, in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles (where Natalie and Elliot now live), the suburban abode is their glue.
“There are so many memories in this house,” Natalie Bergman said. “It’s such a blessing to have it. I don’t ever want to give it up.”
It was here that she chose to hole up for a week in mid-July to rehearse for her latest homecoming blitz, a series of shows in preparation for her album release July 18. The new album, her second on Jack White’s Third Man Records label, delivers a swirling mix of swinging 1960s R&B, country soul and hazy psychedelia.
Beyond offering a sprawling rehearsal space for Bergman and her band, home also invited Bergman to tap into the strong emotions that have inspired her solo works since her superb debut, “Mercy.” Released in 2021, the gospel-fueled album developed as Bergman searched for her faith in the wake of a car accident that killed her father and stepmother two years prior.
The accident, caused by a drunken driver, sent Bergman on a retreat to a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico as a way to try to cope. (In 2006, Bergman’s mother, Susan, died from brain cancer.) Bergman and her brother received the news about their father’s accident just minutes before Wild Belle was to make its debut at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, and the shock made the singer question whether she could ever make music again.
“I lost my identity. … I just felt kind of paralyzed for a while. And then the music came to me,” she said, referencing the kind of divine intervention that begat John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
“He channeled God through his work … and I think that that’s what happened with me. … I went inward, and I went upward,” Bergman said. Although a whole album about Jesus seemed risky at first, “Mercy” became a critical darling as audiences identified with the central theme: the healing power of music. Even at Bergman’s recent sold-out show at the Hideout, songs “Talk To the Lord” and “Shine Your Light On Me” were some of the most well-received with the audience turning them into true sing-along hymns.
Bergman’s spirituality carries over into “My Home Is Not In This World,” which has another powerful meaning beyond just that reference to her old soul. “It’s sort of alluding to your home over yonder, you know, that heavenly home that some of us hope to belong to when we leave this place,” Bergman said.
Now, though, her focus is on making her home in the present. Between her two solo albums, Bergman met her husband, Andreas Ekelund, who is a creative director (and now music video director). The two lived in the same apartment building in L.A. and had a fateful run-in in the mailroom. Fateful because, for a while, Bergman innocently thought Jack White could be her soulmate. Her schoolgirl crush seemed like he had a real shot when she opened some dates on his Supply Chain Issues tour in 2022.
“I was, like, this is my opportunity to let him know I am the love of his life.” The day the tour kicked off, however, White staged a spontaneous wedding with now-wife Olivia Jean.
Now happily married to Ekelund, Bergman expanded her family in 2024 with the arrival of their son, Arthur. The blond-haired, blue-eyed tot, who is the spitting image of his mother, inspired the levity heard on Bergman’s latest material.
“It’s like I’ve made music my whole life, but having a child is this new gift and this new perspective on life,” Bergman said. “To be able to look at the world in a childish way is also super good for your music. Because you go back to the playfulness, the innocence.”
You can sense that tonal shift on many of the album’s 12 tracks from the Western rodeo of “Gunslinger” to the bouncy pop of “DANCE” and the reverent folk of “California” that pays homage to her now-adopted home. There are tender moments too, like the sweet lullaby “Song for Arthur” and the touching “Didn’t Get To Say Goodbye,” about her aunt, the late actress Anne Heche, who was her mother’s sister. “She was such an amazing woman, super talented, wildly intelligent and beautiful,” Bergman said. “I was very close with her.”
While unimaginable loss has been layered into Bergman’s work, there’s a sense that she’s finding ways to complete the circle and become whole again. Her new album art alludes to this as well, featuring Bergman in the desert, standing inside a nearly full orb she’s drawn in the sand. “The last [album] I did, all of the songs were so heavy, about losing my dad. Now I’m like, maybe I can just have some sort of sweet love songs,” she said, adding, “Death is on this album, inevitably, but I started it with life. With new life. That was the whole inspiration.”
As we wrap up, Bergman has one last thing to show me, outside in the backyard jungle, a spread of four towering cypress trees that has come to symbolize this new ethos. “My dad planted these for us four kids when we first moved into this house,” she said.
The trees are a gift, she said, one that keeps everything — including hope — alive.