by: Steve Morse (Boston Globe) page: 4D
Normally when a singer leaves a band for a solo career, the reason is to seek more fame and fortune. In Natalie Merchant's case, it was just the opposite. It was to cut back and find simplicity. A celebrated '90s flower-child-activist, Merchant left the band 10,000 Maniacs to find herself. Pure and simple.
"I think I was trying to rediscover a lot of the things that made me want to be involved in music from the start - maybe some things I had lost through the years doing it," Merchant said this week. "Sometimes you don't realize how much you appreciate something until it's gone. The simplicity was something that I was really missing."
In short, her experience with the Maniacs was getting too maniacal. Members of the socially conscious upstate New York band were riding high from the hits Eat for Two (about teen-age pregnancy), Don't Talk and Like the Weather, but they were also on a music-biz treadmill that comes from being stars.
"We were getting to the point of taking five to six months to make a record in the studio, then playing in front of 15,000 to 25,000 people. I felt like I wanted to scale things down," said Merchant.
"I'm really happy I'm doing a small-theater tour. I can keep ticket prices down and I can keep my overhead down because I'm not traveling with a huge production," said Merchant, who on Saturday performed a tribute to Dinah Washington with Booker T & the MGs at the concert celebrating the opening of Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
Her beguiling, inner-directed new album, Tigerlily, is a lyrical work that is more adult-sounding than her Maniacs material. It's more piano-etched and more demanding, recalling the subtle side of Van Morrison.
"It's also very sensual - and that's something that I don't think the Maniacs were," Merchant said during an interview from Manhattan, though she now lives in the country near Woodstock, N.Y.
"I think a lot of Maniacs songs were very angular and poppish or kind of dirge-ish, but it didn't feel like we had a lilt the way that these songs do. I loved a lot of the Maniacs songs and there was an energy to them that was really great. But I wanted to slow things down and let the notes play out longer and I wanted a lot more room for my voice. ... I was able to sing a lot softer and have a lot more subtlety in my voice. And it comes across live, too."
The Morrison comparison also resonates. "I'm definitely a fan. [His] Moondance is one of my favorite records of all time. And a song like Into the Mystic is a really subtle, beautiful, voluptuous song. So yes, I guess you could say he influenced me."
Merchant's break from the Maniacs was long in coming. The group, launched in her home region of Jamestown, N.Y., had become a touring machine in the last decade. But the fun was ebbing for Merchant, who was so stressed out that a few years ago she retreated to a lakeside upstate New York log cabin with no electricity and no plumbing. Clearly, this is not a singer who dreams of living in Beverly Hills.
"The band had two years to prepare for [my leaving]," she said. "I just didn't walk into the studio one day and say, 'That's it. I'm out of here.' I said, 'I'm frustrated and there are things I'd like to do that I can't do in this configuration musically and in my life because I'm confined to the schedule of 10,000 Maniacs.' So I told them I'd finish writing [the album] Our Time in Eden, that I would record it and tour for one year, but that whole process took two years. ... So there was plenty of time and I think it was done in a humane fashion. And they seem to be doing OK without me and I seem to be doing fine without them."
The Maniacs have soldiered on with a new singer, Mary Ramsey, who also played violin and viola on the last two Maniacs' albums. Merchant has not seen the new band ("It would be awkward") and she doesn't sling any arrows in its direction other than to say, "Everyone had a hand in the songwriting, but I felt sometimes there was an eclecticism more than a consistency because so many people were contributing."
Merchant says she grew tired of this collective process. "It's difficult to get five people to decide where they're going to have dinner, let alone what they're going to do for a six-month period of time," she explains. Nor did it help that she had left Jamestown several years earlier for the Woodstock region: "I had to commute 400 miles each way when we'd prepare for a show or a record."
For her new album, Merchant set up a communal environment in her home, throwing futons on the floor and inviting musicians to stay over. She gathered a few friends together to form a new group - Jennifer Turner (electric and acoustic guitar), Peter Yanowitz (drums, percussion) and Barrie Maguire (bass). The last two had been the rhythm section for the Wallflowers, a band led by Bob Dylan's son, Jacob. The Wallflowers had opened a tour for the Maniacs (and have since continued with a different lineup).
Then came the new songs - the recent hit Carnival (with a video shot in Coney Island), River (a tribute to her friend River Phoenix and the outrage she felt over the media's handling of his death), I May Know the World (a mystical search for deliverance), Beloved Wife (a tender ode to her grandfather's widower status) and the new single Wonder, which is a celebration of women, not a self-absorbed boast, as some critics have said. "I use first person as a device in my writing quite often, but some people have a misconception that it's all confessional poetry," she said.
At the Fox show, Merchant will feature her new songs, but also a few Maniacs numbers that she'll play on solo piano. "I think I'll do it that way because my new band isn't extremely keen on being a Maniacs cover band," she says.
Meanwhile, Merchant is becoming a star on "Triple A" radio, which stands for "adult album alternative." But, she jokes, "To let you know about my level of savvy in radio, I still don't know what 'Triple A' means. I just know that whatever it is, they like my record. And that's nice to hear."