by: Bruce Westbrook
Singers often leave bands to go solo because they hunger for bigger bucks and bigger ego strokes.
Natalie Merchant is a sensitive, soft-spoken woman who left 10,000 Maniacs "to scale down." But the strokes and bucks have come anyway.
The singer/songwriter, whose Tuesday night concert at Jones Hall is a sellout, is touring behind her debut solo album, Tigerlily, which already has sold 1 million copies, spawning the hit Carnival and the rising single Wonder.
Yet 10,000 Maniacs looked like the better bet when Merchant told the band that, after 12 years and six albums, she wanted out.
The folk-pop band was on an upswing at the time, scoring its biggest hit with a 1993 cover of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen's Because the Night, from its MTV Unplugged concert and album.
But Merchant, 32, felt she'd have greater musical freedom outside a group of men 6 to 12 years older than she. (The band now has a new singer in Mary Ramsey.)
"The biggest difference is, now I can make ultimate creative decisions," Merchant said during a tour break while resting at her home in upstate New York. "When you collaborate, what you do is diluted by compromise."
Merchant handpicked musicians for her new album, and they're touring with her. "This isn't my band," she said. "It's the band that worked on this project. The next album could have completely different personnel - maybe a cellist, for instance."
Her lead guitarist is Jennifer Turner.
"My rhythm section already was male, and I wanted a small band, Merchant said. "I auditioned 12 female guitar players, and I liked her style."
Besides giving her the "freedom of versatility," leaving 10,000 Maniacs enabled Merchant to "scale down, to simplify." It also freed her to speak her mind more in her music, as in River, about her late friend River Phoenix, and Wonder, about a child who overcomes handicaps through inner strength.
"I met a girl who just had a liver transplant, and she said listening to that song (Wonder) helped give her strength," Merchant said.
Merchant herself has been inspired by women singers such as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson.
"The folk tradition also was a big inspiration as a teenager," said Merchant, who said she listened to many of the old Library of Congress recordings by Alan Lomax, a musicologist who recorded American folk music, especially in the deep South.
"It completely changed the way I thought about music. I'd grown up listening to pop music that was written and produced to be sold, and this was from an older tradition of people just entertaining themselves."
She also grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. But she's basically sworn off writing protest songs like theirs.
"After the Gulf War, I felt the songs I wrote, especially anti-war and anti-violence songs, were so impotent in light of what was happening," she said. "I felt the best way for an artist to affect people is to make them look within themselves.
"If everyone were taught a sense of self-respect and respect of others and love of others and themselves, there would be no violence."
Though Merchant is now a solo artist, she'll play four Maniacs songs at her Houston show, which will be opened by Innocence Mission.
But she won't play Because the Night. And she says it's sheer coincidence that she's now managed by Jon Landau, longtime manager of that song's co-writer, Springsteen.
Merchant will perform covers of her beloved '60s R&B, though she won't reveal which. "I want some surprises," she said.
One surprise, she feels, will be "how danceable some of these (new) songs are when you hear them live. I think people expect a more subdued rendering of the record, but we rock out at times."
The group will tour until just before Christmas, then play Europe in February before resuming U.S. dates. By next summer, Merchant hopes to be writing her next album.
"I can't really read music," she said. "I sit down at my piano and play whatever's on my mind. But lately I feel I can express myself better. The lyrics are more personal now."