by: G. Brown
Her distinctive voice and waif/activist image put 10,000 Maniacs on the map.
And then, at the folk-pop group's peak, Natalie Merchant quit.
"It was a hard thing to do," Merchant said prior to a sold-out concert at the Paramount Theatre on Tuesday night.
"There are very few artists, especially women artists, who have been able to leave their bands and make successful records on their own. The odds were against me."
But Merchant has made the most of it. Her solo debut Tigerlily has gone platinum, and she's scored a Top 10 single with Carnival.
Merchant, 32, said her decision was a long time coming.
"I joined the Maniacs when I was 17. It would have been lazy for me to stay in a situation where I was secure but creatively unchallenged. That's what the Maniacs had become.
"We had a following - we could put out a record, and we had a good feeling we could sell around a million - and that was very comforting in this business. With all the interesting and creative musicians I know who are waiting on tables for a living, it was a scary thing to leave."
In the fall of 1993, Merchant bought a house, began writing songs and assembled a band of young players to make Tigerlily. The album's appeal is in its subtlety - there's a sensuousness that her Maniacs' work lacked.
And that's admirable, knowing that Merchant was pressured to make a record with a seasoned producer and studio musicians to guarantee radio air play.
"I wanted to make a very natural-sounding record, as little production as possible," Merchant explained.
"I borrowed money and paid for this record by myself. I worked with people like Jennifer (Turner, guitars and vocals), who's only 22 and had only been playing for a year and had never even walked into a recording studio before. I took a lot of risks.
"It was all to preserve the innocence of the process, to prevent it from becoming too synthetic and contrived. I wanted to rediscover what it was like to put a band together and play in clubs. I did all that, and there was something very charming about it."
Merchant's first-ever headlining tour continued at the Paramount, and her salient lyrics and confident vocals captivated fans.
Yet the politically correct ingenue of Maniac days was more mature and relaxed. She'd planned a few surprises for Halloween - wearing a witch's hat, she sang the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil and passed out candy to the front rows. She turned 10,000 Maniacs' These Are Days into a world-beat dance number.
From Tigerlily, San Andreas Fault, Wonder, Jealousy and the hit Carnival defined Merchant's talent.
But her best new song was the ballad Beloved Wife, about a heartbroken old widower contemplating whether to follow his wife of 50 years to the grave:
Would it be wrong if I should/Surrender all the joy in my life/Go with her tonight?
It made some people cry.
"I was very close to my grandparents," Merchant said. "They were very old-world - they'd come over from Italy together, they were devout Roman Catholics. They just seemed like my connection to the past and another group of traditions - the great patriarch and matriarch, very fierce about keeping us together.
"My grandmother fell into a coma in 1983, and my grandfather would sit with her for hours and hours. She passed away, and three days later he did too. He willed himself to go with her.
"Since they left, the fabric of our family has come unwoven."
Merchant earnestly cares about causes, but she's breaking away from her socially conscious reputation.
"I always thought it was more subversive and subtle than that, except in a few cases - and they were probably my least successful songs," she said, laughing.
"Most of the people who enjoyed 10,000 Maniacs find this to be a very natural evolution, and they're looking forward to what I do next. This isn't the defining record of my solo career. It's just what I did in the year after I left 10,000 Maniacs. There's a lot of room for experimentation, and I hope I'm versatile enough to make records different from this one.
"I think I am."