When She Was With 10,000 Maniacs, Many Dismissed Her As A Po-Faced Puritan, But Her Solo Career Shows There Is Another Side To Natalie Merchant, Says Tom Lappin
NATALIE Merchant looks like she just stepped off The Mayflower. From the tightly tied-back hair to the slightly rustic East Coast American accent, she gives the impression of being Puritan stock through and through. It's an image critics have used to dismiss her, throwing aspersions at the folk-rock anthems she performed for a decade or so before her group 10,000 Maniacs split last year. [webmaster's note: Natalie left the Maniacs in 1993 and the band did not split up] Songs like What's the Matter Here? (about violence against children), Dustbowl (struggling single-parent mothers) and Poison In The Well (pollution) saddled her with an image as a po-faced exponent of social commentary, one that was unlikely to endear her to a British music industry caught up in laddish hedonism.
There is another side to Natalie Merchant which emerges fully- formed on her new solo album Tigerlily, a collection of more personal, subtler songs that seem infinitely more intricate than the work she did with 10,000 Maniacs.
"In the Maniacs, because the songwriting was shared by so many different people, often I would come in and just put a vocal over an existing arrangement," she says. "I think the records sound like that at times, like the voice is just incidental.
With this record you see a song like The Letter or Beloved Wife or Cowboy Romance; it's keyboard based and you could strip that song down to just vocal and piano and it would exist really comfortably.
The song takes a position of greater importance than the arrangement. The Maniacs tended to put every idea into a piece of machinery which emerged at the other end as a Maniacs song."
The new songs have an emotional directness that the previous group only occasionally achieved.
Merchant is proud that Beloved Wife, a song about a man unable to face living after the death of his wife, has provoked outbreaks of weeping at preview parties where normally tears are only forthcoming when the free bar runs dry.
"That's the kind of response you can't hide," she says. "It's very honest. I like it when I go to a film and I identify enough with the characters in the film that I cry. I'm not embarrassed about it, I'm thankful for it. There's a lot of times in my day to day life that I want to cry but something prevents me. Music, even pop music, is powerful. I don't think people should deny that.
"I just write stories about people and look at them in different ways," she says. "A lot of the songs are first person but they aren't necessarily autobiographical. I don't like to pick out for people which songs are about me and which ones aren't because I think it spoils the mystery of it. Basically the direction I've been going in since the Blind Man's Zoo album is more personal writing, trying to touch on topics that are universal rather than specific, trying to write emotional music on topics people can identify with."
Naturally, though, it's the specifics that prove most intriguing, notably on the song River, a tribute to the late actor River Phoenix and an angry denunciation of the media treatment of his death.
"I wrote it at the time when I found out he was gone and I was very angry at the time because I felt that the press were dealing with his death as if it were a media event instead of a tragedy in the life of him and his family and friends.
That line of privacy was crossed so many times. Because it was someone I knew I felt I was being violated at the same time as his family and he himself. Photographing his body in the morgue, somebody should have been arrested for doing that."
Such outbursts of righteousness, however justified, aren't the stuff of cool pop star images, but Merchant is oblivious to all that. Steering clear of a business in which she claims to have only two close friends (Michael Stipe and Billy Bragg), she lives quietly in upstate New York, refuses to be packaged and makes quietly beautiful and very serious records. Natalie Merchant doesn't do gags.
Or does she? At a showcase gig last week she performed a playful cover version of The Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil.
Natalie Merchant, diminutive, God-fearing devotee of all that is worthy, recast as Satan? You had to laugh.
Tigerlily is released on Elektra Records.