by: Thor Christensen
Natalie Merchant plants 'Tigerlily' at the start of a solid solo career
During her 12 years as lead singer for 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant was the poster child for intellectual folk-rock.
Whirling onstage like a Deadhead in a thrift-store dress while she sang about subjects ranging from illiteracy to African colonialism, she was part hippie peace-nik, part social science professor - to most fans, she was the only Maniac that mattered.
But when Ms. Merchant went solo last year, she had a sinking feeling she would flop. "The road is littered with the bodies of front people who decided to leave their bands and didn't succeed," Ms. Merchant says. [webmaster's note: Natalie left 10kM in 1993, not 1994]
The lady has a point. At last check, ex-Van Halen singer David Lee Roth was telling cornball jokes in second-tier Las Vegas nightclubs and former New Bohemians leader Edie Brickell was a candidate to show up on a milk carton.
But Ms. Merchant has fared much better. Her debut solo album, Tigerlily, has sold more than a million copies and spawned the biggest song of her career, the Latin-flavored Carnival. She'll play tunes from the album Wednesday night at Southern Methodist University's McFarlin Auditorium (the show, originally slated for Saturday night, has been delayed because tour dates had to be juggled at the last minute).
The singer chalks up Tigerlily's success, in part, to the fact that she began writing songs for the album two days after she quit the Maniacs.
"I understand what a fleeting thing the success of a pop singer can be," she says, speaking by phone from her country home outside Woodstock, N.Y., "and I thought if I took too much time away, people would forget who I was."
So instead going to back to college to study history, as she'd originally planned, she quickly put together a group of young, little-known musicians and cut Tigerlily before her record company even knew she was in the studio. The disc turned out "slower and more seductive" than the Maniacs' albums, she says, partly because she was influenced by the album Dummy by the English trip-hop band Portishead. But the album's languid style also reflects her simple desire for change, Ms. Merchant says.
"I'm 32 now, and I think I should be given a little room to grow," she says. "People still base a lot of their ideas about me on a persona I had when I was 19 or 20 years old. They perceive me as a bit mousy and submissive. Or they write about me as 'the shy girl.' Well, that's not me anymore. The shy girl has grown up."
Her image is so out-of-whack with who she really is "that somebody even wrote on the Internet recently they thought I was a virgin," she says, laughing. "They must not know how old I am."
It's true, however, that Ms. Merchant is a virtual anti-Madonna when it comes to using her sexuality to sell records. And while her peers pen songs about sex, love and more sex, Ms. Merchant tends to write about such serious topics as teen pregnancy (Eat For Two), alcoholism (Don't Talk) or the way TV panders to the lowest common denominator (Candy Everybody Wants). She tackles the media again on River, a new song about the "vulture's candor" of tabloid journalists who covered the death of actor River Phoenix.
Being profiled on the next Hard Copy is obviously not at the top of Natalie Merchant's wish list.
"I try to hide from the media," she says. "I do want people to be aware that I have a record out and know when I'm on tour, but I really don't have this burning desire to be famous and be recognized. So I just don't go to events where there's lots of press. I don't live in a media center and I don't interact with a lot of people who are media conscious.
"The people I respect are the ones who live the same way, like Meryl Streep. I get the impression she has a very sane life. Or Joni Mitchell. How often do you see her going out of the way to draw attention to herself?"
Ms. Merchant rarely gets the urge to sip Dom Perignon with Kate Moss in the V.I.P. section of some chic Manhattan nightspot.
"You know what I've discovered over the years? When you meet people who are, quote, really famous, they're usually not any more interesting - and often less interesting - than people I meet who work for nonprofit organizations or people who write for newspapers or free-lance photographers who've traveled to war-torn countries.
"A half hour after I perform on Saturday Night Live, I'm no more fabulous and no more exciting than I was a half-hour before. I just sang in front of a TV camera. That's all."
At this very moment, Ms. Merchant's life is anything but fabulous: As she talks to a reporter, she's busy doing laundry, repairing a rug and putting a broken door back on its hinges.
And she couldn't sound happier.
"Simple home repair," she says, "is something I take great pride in being able to do."