by: Adrian Thrills (page 19)
Natalie Merchant looks out of a London window and thinks of Uncle Sam and the stripes of old glory. As the singer of the finest American band to cross the Atlantic in years - the truly wonderful 10,000 Maniacs - is there any way in which she ever feels patriotic? A thoughtful pause precedes an emphatic answer.
"No ... not in any way. I don't understand what America is. To me, the place doesn't have a very strong identity. I feel more empathy with the Labour movement than I do with America.
"I feel as if Jamestown is my home and there is a lot of beautiful land there. But just because I was born there doesn't make me feel particularly American. I don't see any reason to feel particularly superior because of it."
The sane American is just as likely to feel a sense of alienation, a stranger on home ground. Natalie Merchant often feels such a sense of otherness. Her songs reflect it and her experiences traveling from state to state have confirmed it.
"When I drive around the country, I sometimes despair at what it has become. You wonder who designed the buildings, who put up the billboards and why people are sleeping in the street. Why is it that only 15 percent of the people really have any wealth?
"At the same time, I've met some wonderful people in every American city. I've met people that share a lot of my feelings. People that cry when they see a polluted river. People that want to do something about the situation where women cannot walk at night for the fear of being raped.
"I get confused because it is such a huge, vast place. But there is a subversive consciousness in America. Maybe one day that tide will rise up, although the barriers keeping it in check are pretty overwhelming."
God save the youth of America. The mood of which Natalie Merchant is speaking might exist on the outposts of American society. It also exists, and indeed thrives, on the farflung fringes of the American music business monolith.
It has been a very good year for the outsider in American pop. Away from the sanitized grunge rock that fills the stadiums and the increasingly tired extremes of hardcore, inventive and intuitive new American music has been emerged with refreshing regularity.
Respecting certain musical traditions - folk, country, punk, the independent ethic and the pop guitar- forward, the likes of Throwing Muses, Michelle Shocked, Firehose and The Pixies have all produced memorable LPs in the past 12 months. The sounds might be different, but the spirit is the same - that of the outsider.
Though they are not on an independent label and have the benefit of a considerably higher recording budget, the same applies to 10,000 Maniacs. Their second Elektra album In My Tribe, was released in the autumn to mixed reviews. It now stands acknowledged - and not just in my book - as one of the records of the year.
Produced by Peter Asher, the veteran behind James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, In My Tribe is a classic American pop LP, a record to rank alongside Parallel Lines or More Songs About Buildings And Food. It thrills and excites yet also chills and stimulates, one moment dark and melancholy, the next bright and exuberant.
Natalie Merchant sings with emotive quiver in her lip, her voice rich and tremulous and tinged with a dash of country-folk phrasing. Behind her, heavily reverbed guitars ring, chime and shimmer like raindrops on a window pain. The four male Maniacs - guitarist Robert Buck, keyboardist Dennis Drew, bassist Steven Gustafson and drummer Jerome Augustyniak - skillfully chip out a taut, dynamic frame for their singer's soaring vocals.
In the past 10,000 Maniacs have often revelled in a feisty eclecticism that confused as much as it charmed. With In My Tribe, however, the emphasis is firmly on directness and communication. It is easily the most focused, coherent record the group have ever made, a point that guitarist Rob readily acknowledges.
"We decided that we wanted to make a more concise, straightforward record. It was the way we were going, It was our decision to use Peter Asher. The artists that he had worked with in the'70s were basically folk artists, but they had become very successful in a pop sense. We didn't want to make a folk album. We wanted to make a pop record."
A pop record that embraces state-of-the-art hi-tech without the synthesizers. Though it sacrifices nothing in subtlety, In My Tribe sounds positively colossal at points, the Herculean sound mixes of Asher and engineer George Massenburgh transforming the organic, naturally-constructed songs of the Maniacs into towering, expansive edifices of pioneer pop.
"I think the producers decided beforehand that they were going to make their pop masterpiece out of us," smiles Natalie. "I think they wanted to make the perfectly recorded pop record, something that would sound brilliant on CD. There is some wild stuff on that LP, banks of computer programmes, digital recorders, experimental microphones that pick up every breath..."
Rather than jangle with the resonant, reflective songs of the Maniacs, the pristine production is a perfect platform for their sometimes joyful, sometimes sad observations. Natalie Merchant writes with startling sensitivity and an acute, narrative eye about everyday people and places. Her songs tackle 'uncomfortable' subjects such as child abuse, militarism, illiteracy, alcoholism and the need for conservation, but place these 'social' topics in a personal, close-to-home setting.
Unlike the puzzle-loving poetry and 'drapery language' of previous Maniacs records, these words tingle and tumble with a classic simplicity that connects with the listener on first hearing and loses little of its power with repeated play. Directness is again a strength.
"I think I strive for unusual topics," says Natalie. "There are so many tired subjects covered in pop songs over and over again. I'd be bored if I had to write songs like that. A song like Cherry Tree, which is about illiteracy, came from watching a television documentary. There was a 65 year-old who had just learned to read her first word, 'bird', and she was saying how miraculous it felt to be able to look at the lines and circles on the page and get an image in her head for the first time."
A Merchant song is often reinforced by vivid biblical and elemental images. Such symbolism mirrors the singer's own background, a Roman Catholic upbringing in the upstate New York backwater of Jamestown, a country town closer to Canada and The Great Lakes than the bustling metropolis of Manhattan. Is she a country girl at heart?
"I think we need to regain some appreciation for the natural world, because the unnatural world has disillusioned so many people. I like to try and put natural images in people's heads, particularly people who live in an urban environment and aren't exposed to those real things as much.'
And the religious imagery?
"A lot of that language is very beautiful and I still love all the iconography of the church. I don't try to resist it. My whole apartment at home is full of images of Jesus and Mary. It's almost frightening! Some people are scared by it, but I find it very comforting. It reminds me of my grandparents.
"A lot of it is also very twisted, like the fact that the crucifix is a symbol of torture. But that image still lives today. There are so many people in the world being martyred in the same way that Jesus Christ was, a lot of people with pure spirits. Most of the population of Central America is being martyred by a corrupt and vicious regime."
The same thing could be said about the innocent victims of child battering, a subject that inspired the opening track on In My Tribe. The final lyrical twist of What's The Matter Here?, however, finds the song's concerned protagonist wondering whether to take any direct action over the abuse she is witness to.
"I don't always know what sort of judgment to make about everything," says Natalie. "But I will question things. I'll question anyone's role. Is it the role of the parent to be the tyrant or the disciplinarian? When is someone disciplining a child and when is someone tormenting a child?
"That song raises the whole issue of ownership of a child. It's a difficult question, particularly in a world where you now have surrogate mothers, women who will have children for money."
The Maniacs' hometown of Jamestown looms prominently in their story. Once a thriving furniture-producing centre, it has experienced hard times under the Reaganomic hammer and now stands not far above the poverty line. A six-hour drive from New York City, its Allegheny mountain hinterland is hardly urban and the music that the band listened to during their formative years reflects a more 'rootsy' cultural environment.
"There always seemed to be a lot of country and gospel music around," remembers Rob. "My grandmother wrote gospel songs and I started playing guitar in church when I was about seven. I didn't really hear any rock music until I was about 12 and things like Creedence Clearwater Revival were getting played on the radio.
"When the band first started playing, we tended to stick around Jamestown. We would play biker bars and fish bars at weekends in front of about 200 of our friends. It was usually quite a scene. Even when we started traveling further afield, it was quite some time before we ventured seriously into New York City. It was almost a conscious thing to avoid it and concentrate on the other places along the east coast."
The shimmering splendor of their last LP aside, 10,000 Maniacs are in their element an stage. Last month they completed their second successful British tour of the year with sell-out shows at The Town And Country Club in London and The International in Manchester.
The contrasts between the two shows are remarkable. The first was a tight, slightly nervous performance underpinned with an almost harrowing intensity, the second a loose, ambling affair probably as ramshackle and ad-libbed as the gigs they were playing five years ago in the biker bars of Jamestown.
Such a pronounced dichotomy is typical of this group of bright sparks with tear-stained hearts: their songs are undeniably realistic, but there remains an underlying streak of romance; the band are undoubtedly concerned about the world around them, but they can still afford to lose themselves in a moment of dreamy wonder; their music and attitude is certainly 'mature', but they retain the innocence and naiveté of all great pop.
"I think we have to take responsibility for the way we behave," concludes Natalie. "We have such irresponsible jobs that I do feel a duty not to take on all the usual trappings of the rock band. Sometimes we'll get to a club and hear stories of the band who were there the previous night... Winnie And The Poohs drank all the beer and then smashed up the dressing room, that sort or thing.
"That particular image has never appealed to me. We are provided with an environment to act childishly in, but I think we are responsible enough, as individuals, not to take on that whole thing."
Natalie Merchant embraces the contradictions and juxtapositions that imbue almost everything that 10,000 Maniacs do. It sometimes looks like she is spinning on a tightrope above a pit of vipers, an indication of the sense of adventure with this very special band. Their spirit borders on the reckless. Maybe that is the fun of it all.