J.L. Sirisuk: I know you come from a very musical family with deep roots in music, what can you share about that?
Natalie Bergman: My parents really gave me the gift of music. They were so supportive growing up. I asked my mother if I could play violin at a very early age and started playing when I was five. I loved playing, I learned from the Suzuki books and that was sort of my beginning of music. Then I moved to the piano and started teaching myself songs. Both of my parents were very creative and musical – my mom played a lot of George Gershwin on the piano and my dad made up his own renditions of Bob Dylan songs, it was always around us. It was always encouraged, which I think is not always the case in houses. You know, a lot of the time parents are like, “Go play your music in the garage,” or something, but it was a free environment to create and express myself.

JLS: What are a few records that you gravitated towards?
NB: Somebody just reminded me yesterday that I sang a Lucinda Williams song in a talent show when I was ten years old, I really love her. My brother was studying jazz when he was young so he turned me onto Coltrane and Miles Davis, of course Pharoah Sanders. That was one side of my musical upbringing and then there was the soul side. Aretha Franklin and Etta James are my number ones, that’s who I sort of learned who to sing from. I mean, of course I can never sing like Aretha Franklin or Etta James, the two queens, but that was the kind of stuff I was moved by.

JLS: I’m going to move to something personal. My father went to a monastery in Asia after his mother passed, and I know that after the passing of your father, you spent time at a monastery in the Chama Valley. Monasteries are such places of solitude and removal, can you share what led to your decision to spend time there?
NB: Well, first of all thanks for sharing about your father’s experience about losing his mother. The months after my father died, I felt as though I’d just lost my identity. I was very close with him and I’d lost my mother when I was sixteen, she had brain cancer. So when I lost my dad I felt completely untethered and had no attachment to anything. I didn’t have any sort of umbrella of a parental figure, so it was impossibly disorienting, and I was like, “Who am I? Am I a musician? Am I an artist?” I wasn’t able to create anything because I was so deeply hurt and heartbroken. I took a few months to just understand my grief, and then I thought: I needed to talk to God. I needed a place where I could go and isolate myself. I wanted to find a safe place and thought maybe that would be surrounded by monks who devote their lives to Christ. It was kind of a scary experience, to be honest. I was the only woman at the monastery and it was a very cold time of year. It was in February, so there was frost on the ground every morning. I went to the chapel seven times a day and the first prayer was at 4am. To walk to the chapel was a ten minute walk on a dirt path in the dark, and I used the moon to navigate me, it illuminated the path. I didn’t have a flashlight and I was sleeping in a tiny cell that had a desk and a twin cot – it was a very lonely experience but I had a lot of questions to ask God and it was a really revealing time. I learned a lot because I had to listen. I asked questions and I received some beautiful answers.

JLS: During your talks, was there anything unexpected that came to you in your spirit and mind?
NB: Well, one of the most important answers that I got from the heavenly father is that heaven is a realm that exists and we have no idea what it is. I did a lot of reading there, and one of the scriptures I read was that, “Everything the eye has seen, and the mouth has tasted, and the heart has felt, that is not what heaven is.” Heaven is such a different realm than anything we’re even capable of experiencing, and it’s this great mystery, which is why it’s so hard and challenging to have such a strong faith because no one is promised this. I really needed to know that it existed because I need my father to be there and I need my mother to be there, whether it’s a physical place or a spiritual one. Whatever this place is, I learned that it indeed exists and that was the greatest comfort to me. That was the biggest thing I took from the monastery.

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