Pulse! - July 1989

Music is the Soul Speaking

by: Pete Clark

10,000 Maniacs' sparkling folk-pop vision - fronted by the elegant voice of Natalie Merchant - may not change the world, but it sure makes it sound better

It's a warm and sunny late afternoon in northwest London. Below Natalie Merchant's 12th floor hotel room, Lords cricket ground - world headquarters of that idiosyncratic game - is playing host to 15 white-clad figures (11 fielders, two opposing batsmen and two umpires) who entertain a crowd barely 10 times their number. Merchant isn't the least bit interested in cricket, but the conjunction isn't entirely inapposite: the music of Merchant's band, 10,000 Maniacs, has always been influenced by things British, both ancient and modem. Their Elektra debut LP, The Wishing Chair, was awash with Anglo-folk styling, augmented by their choices of American-in-England Joe Boyd as producer. What interested the band most among the frantic jumble of his curriculum vitae was his work with pioneering folk-rockers Fairport Convention and, to a lesser extent, the Incredible String Band.

In their earliest days (around 1981), 10,000 Maniacs would treat the inhabitants of upstate New York to cover versions of tunes by post-punk Brits like Joy Division and Gang of Four; this provides the other strand in their music, most clearly heard in the sharp guitar playing of Robert Buck.

I arrive at the hotel, but Merchant is off rehearsing an acoustic set for BBC Radio One with cellist Julia Palmer, a reprise of the acclaimed shows she played last year at London's Donmar Warehouse. In the interim, the band's manager, Peter Leak (English, naturally) keeps me entertained. Leak's career in pop music management began when he was sent to New York by his then-emplover, a bank. He then took the admirable, if not entirely sensible, step of giving it all up to manage the Comateens. Leak now manages 10,000 Maniacs and cult items the Cowboy Junkies, which make for a handy portfolio. As I pile through the next hour's cigarette ration (in order to spare my blushes later on), Leak goes to great pains to assure me that Merchant is, contrary to popular belief, a bit of a wild child: "There was this open air gig in Italy," he says, "and towards the end of the show, Natalie walked over to Dennis Drew's keyboards and picked up an almost full bottle of wine and just swigged it down. She didn't feel to well afterwards, though."

Reassured, I make my way to Merchant's room only to find her in a bit of a quandary - she's hit the wrong button on the mini-bar and it has coughed up a small bottle of champagne instead of the required Perrier; her problem now is how to put said bottle back without incurring an undesirable surcharge. But we're here to discuss 10,000 Maniacs' new LP, Blind Man's Zoo, which is sparkling enough for starters, hold the champagne. After their overtly folky debut, main songwriter John Lombardo left the band due to the record's lack of success, throwing the burden of composition onto Merchant, Buck, Drew and drummer Jerome Augustyniak. They rose to the challenge memorably, and In My Tribe, now just reaching platinum status, saw a toughening up of the sound and a clarification of lyric concerns. This process has been taken a step further with the new album, which balances musical virtuosity and upfront wordplay: the initial single, Trouble Me, is but a hint of a soundtrack to a scalded liberal conscience which makes up the meat of the record. Merchant says the general theme of Blind Man's Zoo is "betrayal" - on a personal level (the unwanted pregnancy of Eat for Two, the religious psychopath in Jubilee) and on a global level (the vicious colonialism of Hateful Hate, the prescient pollution saga of Poison in the Well, written long before Alaska's Exxon tragedy).

Natalie Merchant, resplendent in sports sportif, fixes me with what is undoubtedly the clearest gaze in popular music before delivering her verdict on what is an undeniably personal musical statement.

"Well," she says, "because it took us pretty much three months to write and three months to record, that's six months reviewing the songs repeatedly. I remember that from the beginning I was very excited about every single song and very intrigued by the music, and very moved by the music - and that generated lyrics that I felt showed the sentiment of each song. But eventually, I think the recording process can become a little dull and insensitive to your own music. So at this point I'm ready to play the songs for other people and find out how they respond."

The night before, the band had entertained the assembled press hordes and those people in strange clothing (who home in on free drinks and vol-au-vents) in the aquarium at the London Zoo. The soundtrack to this jollification was provided by Blind Man's Zoo: apart from the manta rays which were sent leering up the sides of their glass enclosures, it was hard to gauge the effect of the music on the grazing multitude. I wondered what Merchant's reaction was to this dose of 'public' exposure.

"Last night when it was playing at the new release party," she says, "I couldn't really listen, so I didn't really listen to it - objectivity comes in time, I think. I'm just beginning to be able to listen to In My Tribe and understand its strengths and its failings. I'm still too close to the new one, but it's time to give it up - it goes from the private to the public now."

Nervous about that? "It is a fearful step," she admits.

But not one that should worry this band unduly. It has, after all, rescued a career which seemed to be heading for the deeply unloved finger-in-ear folk circuit, and has put itself on a par with the likes of Throwing Muses, even R.E.M., whose Michael Stipe adds his seal of approval to the Maniacs' sound at every opportunity. But the sound and the words of the group proclaim an almost naked sensitivity - does this carry through to their reaction to criticism in the press?

"I would feel that this album is our most confident of all," she says. "We're most proud of it. It's a very odd time right now, because it's just been released and reviews are starting to come in - they're reviews of particular people's opinions, and we have to try to keep them in perspective. Overall they've been good, but occasionally there are people that just don't agree with our point of view and they just don't like our music, so that's what an artist fears - it's a case of developing a second layer of skin. It's not impossible to be defeated. But anyway, as I said before, we're all pretty happy with it. At times, ecstatic with it. There were points when we were recording when I was just amazed at how moving the songs were.

"Everyone experiences music in a different light," Merchant continues. "Some people find the lyrics inconsequential, some people find them very important. I just feel that if I put out the best effort that I can and the lyrics are well-crafted, and I'm pleased with them, then that's my best defense. If people don't like it then I can say, 'They're the best that I could write at that point in my life.' And if they do like it, then it's the best reward I could imagine, additionally to liking them myself!"

The creation of the songs is very much a group effort for the band. "Most of the songs are collaborations and always have been so," Merchant says. "We'll come to rehearsal. I think we all are pretty private about the way we write, and enjoy writing at home and that sort of thing, and we bring the songs to each other. So, in the case of collaboration with, say, guitar or piano progression, then I'll just improvise over it with a melody which inspires the lyrics. It sounds simple but it's ... not.

"In the case of this album," she continues, "I listened much more closely to the music than I ever have before. You see, in the past my lyrics were a representation of whatever I was thinking about at the time and I was ignoring the music, and this time the lyrics were a response to the music. Which I think takes away the irony that we used to have to try to justify. We always said that we intended that irony, but now we have to admit that it was an accident. But in some ways it was an accident that worked in our favor, but in other ways I think those collisions of words and music were, looking at the other albums, where we failed sometimes."

Given 10,000 Maniacs' geographical origin (Jamestown, N.Y., seven hours upstate from Manhattan), almost beyond the reach of radio waves, it seems a strange stroke of fate that led to the formation of the group in the first place.

"When we began playing together it was mostly because we lived in an area, in a small town, where there was no entertainment for us," says Merchant. "Jamestown, 30,000 people - one hospital, one high school, one post office kinda town. But we knew all these people there from the age of 16 to about 35 who had creative ideas and had some sort of skill to offer. There were a lot of painters and a few budding filmmakers. All these people that we knew either in the process of going to school or had gone to school and then found themselves trying to remain in this town that they really enjoyed, but now they have all moved to cities because they couldn't find work. But anyway, there was a warehouse basement, and all these fun parties and artists had their studios there and it was when we started playing together. I was 16 years old. We actually had situations when, if the club was raided by the police, I'd be taken in as part of the club because I was too young. Then the management would be out arguing with the police: 'She's working here'; 'But she's underage' - things like that."

Did Merchant have any misgivings about singing in public when she wasn't even allowed to be on the premises? Or did she relish the frisson of illegality? "Not really," she says. "I was terrified, I didn't really aspire - it was something that just happened at a party that was going on and other people were just taking turns at the microphone. And I just started singing, and the next time there was a party and the same group of people were together, we kind of realized we were becoming a band."

Did she sing in the bath? "Everyone does, I think. I think as a child, it's an American fantasy, and probably a British fantasy too, to be a pop star. It's the equivalent of being, say, a famous actress in the '30s - I probably would've wanted to be Greta Garbo if I was a young girl in the Depression. But we all grew up listening to pop radio when we were kids."

Ah, pop radio, the baleful influence that has led to thousands of apparently normal kids leading their lives in the dark recesses of the underground. But what were the sounds emanating from the magic box that created a particular commotion in the late '60s?

"In 1968," she recalls, "I'd say, when I was five, I started becoming aware of the radio. We had a portable clock radio, my sister and I had in the bedroom - Elton John, Barbra Streisand had an occasional hit, John Denver, a lot of groups that I couldn't even remember their names, then 'We had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun' (the immortal Terry Jacks) and One Tin Soldier (Coven), that was one of our favorite songs. My sister and I knew every verse and we'd terrorize the family, driving around in the station wagon to the national park for camping vacations. It's very ordinary.

"When I was 14," she continues, "I started going to the drugstore and buying up cassettes at Woolworth's, and I was really interested in art at the time, and I was going to the library and finding books, art books with reproductions, photography books, and something really intrigued me about the covers of these Brian Eno solo records and I got Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. That was on eight-track cassette [sic], 'cause my sister and I had now graduated to an eight-track player that we shared in our room, so I started buying all these Brian Eno tapes."

The leap from Terry Jacks to Brian Eno looks like one of Bob Beamonesque proportions, if not conceptually, at least in formal terms. Was this not considered remarkably precocious in one so tender in years?

"And irritating for my family," she confesses. "My sister hated it. I just stumbled on it not knowing what it was and it was a great discovery." Still like him? "Oh, yes. I think my most-loved material of his is the vocal material, and something about his lyrics, too. Those records took me to this place, but this was just the beginning because my sister hated the records so much she liked Barry Manilow quite a lot - and I bought a pair of those old Realistic headphones that look like you're wearing earmuffs on your head, and I would listen to the beginning of The Lion and the Bark at night trying not to disturb my sister in the corner of the room listening to God knows what. And we lived in a house out in the middle of the forest and we had no neighbors except for Mr. Tucker who sold brown eggs. He didn't sell anything but brown eggs. If we wanted to pick blackberries we were welcome - we were in a really rural area. This was before I moved into Jamestown, and so I didn't have friends. The nearest town was like three miles away if I wanted to get on my bike and drive there, I could try to find something to do. So Eno's music became really important."

Have vou ever considered Eno as a producer? "Brian Eno is such a strong artist that I think his imprint would be indelible on anything. Like when he worked with U2, you could definitely hear his influence. He's very keyboard oriented, and that would be a little frightening. But we considered David Byrne for a while for some reason. We even had a communication, a letter saying that he was very interested in working with us, and that he started working on a film, True Stories. The thing about Peter Asher (producer of the band's last two albums) was that he was more of a craftsman and he could take instruments and integrate them and record them very well, and I don't think he has such an individual stand.

"It's strange that for the first record we chose an American expatriate living in London (Joe Boyd), and for the second we used a British expat living in America."

What was Boyd like? "We were really enthralled, at the time, with the work that he'd done, and so we went into it as fans of Joe Boyd. I asked him on the first day if he knew anything about the studio, and he said 'No, not really, technically no.' I said, 'Are you a musician?' and he said 'No, I can't play an instrument; I can't sing.' And I said 'Well, what exactly is your role? We're embarking upon recording this album and I don't know what your purpose is here.' And he said 'I'm here to create an environment that'll make you comfortable to record in.' And that's what he did. Most of the time he read the newspaper, listened out of the corner of his ear. And he would always say 'it's your record, you make the decisions.' Maybe that wasn't the best thing because we'd never been in a studio before, seriously. But it gave us a chance to just ... experiment.

"We'd done two records before that, but they were recorded in less than a week, each one. For the first time $500, the second for $1,000, recorded by students."

These two records were the five-track EP, Human Conflict No. Five and a full-length LP, Secrets of the I Ching, both released on the band's own Christian Burial label. British DJ John Peel picked up on the latter and boosted one of its tracks, My Mother the War, into one of his Top 50 songs of the year (as voted by listeners). That song later was re-recorded for The Wishing Chair. These discs are currently difficult to find. "There was someone who was pressing them illegally," she says. "Actually, I found a couple of copies in Tower Records." Does she still like them? "Well, we're talking about objectivity coming in time. I listen to those records and I realize that I wrote some of those songs when I was 16 or 17 Years old and I can say where we were at the time - how many years I'd been aware of the world around me and all that. We'd just picked up our instruments and learned to play, and I think that they have moments, those records, they're really charming. And the fact that they were recorded in less than a week meant that they captured the spirit of the live performance. I think they're valuable. We wiill re-release them. We were thinking of releasing them between In My Tribe and Blind Man's Zoo, but we didn't want people to think that it was the new record and be confused. That would have been really embarrassing."

As previously noted, the English thread runs right through the Maniacs' career. In addition to influences and producers, there's the early support of John Peel.

"I think that John Peel playing our records made it possible for us to play over here," she says, "and the British press, the benevolent British press, was able to spread our thang worldwide and we thank them duly. And so many people in America thought we were a British band because they were reading about us in the British press and never in the American press. Now things have changed and it feels good to be accepted by our own country, finally. It's such a large place. It's almost like England acts as this media magnet because it's so small and London has so much press that's just devoted to music that so many American stores and radio stations and (the) general record-buying public look to the British press to tell them what's happening.

"There have been attempts in America with Trouser Press and Spin Magazine to try and make an equivalent in America, but it's really hard because it's such a massive place. You can try to control L.A. or New York, but so many people buy records in Houston or Oklahoma City or Boston. But they're being reached by MTV now, which may or may not be the best thing.

"In the place where we lived, we couldn't buy records by bands that were becoming popular in cities. There was no music press; there was no way for us to know what was happening outside of Jamestown unless we went to the nearest city, found the record shop and investigated. For a short while we had a radio station on campus, and we received mailings of latest releases, and that was a little mainline tap for a little while for us, but only for about a year-and-a-half and then the station folded and that was it. But maybe that's not the worst thing that could happen."

Growing up in a vacuum? "I think that refers to the isolation from our contemporaries in music. It certainly wasn't a vacuum as far as human experience. In some ways it was such a more human way of living, to be near our families and all that was so much more important, and to have friendships with people who had nothing to do with what was happening in London. I have friendships with elderly women, and small children and people who don't even know what music video is.

"When I go to New York City I find that I have to circulate among people who are just so aware of what's happening and the latest trends, that sometimes I just wanna talk about crop rotation or something - 'Tell me something I don't know, and tell me something I'm interested in.'"

What 10,000 Maniacs are interested in is made manifestly clear by their lyrics. Merchant's lyrics have ranged from the horrors of child beating to the ghastly fallout from pollution and atomic explosion. The lyrics of her songs are direct and right in your face - if you listen to this band at all, then you get the message.

"I just think that so many people have to share the same thoughts, not necessarily my opinions on these topics that I'm writing about, but I think they definitely have to give these things thought. And people seek out what interests them. Why do people read books? Why do people pick up the newspapers? Something in them is curious. Maybe the only thing that I expect is that people will be curious about what 10,000 Maniacs are doing. I'm beginning to think maybe I'm putting too much importance on what's in the lyrics; maybe I should just back off a bit."

Does she see herself being typecast? "I do. The thing that encourages me is when I look at what's available in pop music, I look at the charts and I see how much of the music that I wouldn't even give three minutes of my time to listen to. There's so much soulless music, and to me, music is the soul speaking. I don't want to sound like a hippie suddenly, but if it doesn't move me, make me extremely joyful or extremely contemplative, I'm not interested in it and I don't listen to it. There's just so much synthesizer music, and compound that with the vacant lyrics, and I think it's the antithesis of what music has always been to me.

"I'm making strong stands against pontification," she says rather surprisingly. "I don't want people to feel like it is another lecture from Natalie. I want people to say 'Thank God someone's talking about it finally, I've been thinking about it.' l don't think music should be escapism, I don't think music should be just another form of entertainment like watching situation comedies on television. People should have to look at music as such a powerful form of communication that it just shouldn't be ignored. It should be used."

Who does Merchant admire among her contemporaries? "I go to Tower Records and I first go to the classical section, straight to the ancient music and anthologies. After I pillage that section, I go straight to the gospel music section; I pillage that for a while and then I always seem to find myself wandering in the female vocal jazz section, and then I'll go and look in the international section and see if there's anything from another country, usually of a more traditional base that is interesting. But I never find myself on the first floor in the rock section. And I feel like, when I first heard Tracy Chapman over a year ago, I said to myself, this woman is incredible, this woman I feel is writing with the same motivation that I am. I was so excited to finally find someone who was. And there have been times when I thought the same about Elvis Costello, R.E.M. at times. But music varies so much. Even the Pixies - I can understand what they're trying to do and they're trying to make some sort of shocking statement with their music and their lyrics. But I feel like we and the Pixies are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Same with Throwing Muses; I think I understand what they're doing, and at times I like it and appreciate it. People say things like 'Kristin Hersch and Natalie Merchant, the new women in rock,' but we have a completely different approach. Kristin seems like she's about to combust and she's an iconoclast. She's just trying to destroy the whole pop music structure and the pop music lyrical structure, while I work within it. That's where we differ. I have to be honest and say that the records I collect are not viewed as contemporary."