by: Salvatore Caputo
Natalie Merchant felt more like the focus of attention when she was in 10,000 Maniacs than she does leading her own band.
"I feel like Jennifer (Turner, her guitarist) deflects a lot of attention, which I'm grateful for," Merchant says from a tour stop in Milwaukee. "She's a very dynamic performer and a really great musician. In the Maniacs, I felt like -- being the only female and being the front person -- in a live performance, I got almost all the attention, and the men behind me were like more of a support band than the one I'm in now, which is strange."
Merchant says her energy has been renewed since leaving 10,000 Maniacs to embark on a solo career. The tour to support her debut album, Tigerlily, brings her to Mesa on Saturday.
"As a group, I think we (10,000 Maniacs) were burning out on touring at the time that I left," she says. "The performers that I'm with now are much younger than the Maniacs, in some cases a decade younger, or more even. And so there's a vitality that I find really exciting. No one else in my band has really toured at this level and for this duration."
Besides Merchant and Turner, the band features drummer Peter Yanowitz and bassist Barrie Maguire, all of whom were the core musicians on Tigerlily. [webmaster's note: Barrie Maguire did not participate in the Tigerlily tour]
Merchant worked with 10,000 Maniacs for six albums and left after the release of 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged. Propelled by the band's acoustic remake of the 1978 Patti Smith hit, Because the Night, her swan song with the band became one of its biggest hits.
"When we did Because the Night, we weren't putting a lot of emphasis on it," she says. "I just always liked the song and thought it would be interesting to do it acoustically because it's such a powerful song electric."
Since most of the other songs the group did on Unplugged had been singles for the band, Because the Night seemed the logical choice to be that album's single.
"I was actually kind of shocked by how much airplay it got," Merchant says with a laugh.
The Unplugged project's relatively spontaneous nature gave her the impetus to leave 10,000 Maniacs. [webmaster's note: according to the author, Natalie told him this. But it is contradicted by a hundred other interviews she & the members of 10,000 Maniacs have given that all say she decided to leave the band in 1991 - not after making the Unplugged record in 1993. What she probably meant was that the spontaneous nature of the Unplugged record gave her the idea to record her solo album in a very stripped-down fashion (see the following quote).]
"I was looking for imperfection," she says. "I felt that with the Maniacs, we had oftentimes in the studio labored over the recording and removed all its flaws so that it just didn't have the kind of character that I was looking for."
That's why she took a stripped-down approach on Tigerlily. "It was just old style, just set up the microphones and perform. If you are a passionate performer and the songs are good, then it's as perfect as it can be at that moment. You could always do another version tomorrow, but it would just be another version. If you're at the level that you're ready to perform and put it on tape, then the song is ready. You lose a little something every time you play the song over and over in the studio."
Merchant has been a music fan since she was very young.
"As young as 4 or 5 years old, I could recognize a favorite artist. When my mother would play a Beatles record, I definitely knew it was a Beatles record, and I knew every word to every song."
Later on, her mother took her to the symphony regularly, and in her teens - while working in community theater in western New York where she grew up - she heard the likes of the Clash, Gang of Four, reggae and world music, and began building a record collection that was heavy on blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues. That's one reason she's happy that her first single, Carnival, has enjoyed airplay on a wide range of radio formats.
"The Maniacs never really enjoyed that broad spectrum of an audience," she says.
"So I'm finding that some of the people that are coming to my concerts are like 13 years old, and they're telling me, 'This is the first concert I've ever been to,' and then there's people in their 40s and 50s saying, 'I haven't been to a concert in 10 years, but I had to come out and see this because I bought your record and I really like it.'
"I'm really excited about how eclectic the audience is. I'm not an elitist in any sense, and it's just exciting to see that the music touches people of all different ages and backgrounds."