Weyes Blood at the Ballroom Marfa/Mexican Summer Festival in Marfa, Texas, March 8, 2014. Photo by Alex Marks.

Tobias Carroll interviews Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood, who played for us last year at our Mexican Summer Festival (and will return this year, more info coming soon). Natalie is touring the West Coast with one of our all-time faves, harpist Mary Lattimore, who rolled through Marfa last week on her way to meet Natalie in California. Tour dates here.

An excerpt about Natalie’s influences:

TC: Listening to the two albums, The Innocents has a little bit more of a folk feel to it, and you’ve mentioned that your parents are musicians. Did that have any influence on you or the sort of the music that you started to make?

NM: My dad taught me how to play some guitar chords when I was little and I always looked up to him because he was in a crazy band, and he always liked weird music. He really liked the band XTC. He was in a weird New Wave band with an electric viola player, so I was always attracted to the weirder aspects of the music world. My older brothers were into Ween, and XTC and Ween are pretty weird bands, and my mom was obsessed with Joni Mitchell. I grew up hearing a lot of Joni, but I didn’t really get it as a kid. I thought it was cool, and I liked some of her songs for sure, but I didn’t try to emulate her at any point. Now I kind of feel like I’m ready to do that. She’s kind of a beast.