by: Roger Catlin
Women populate Natalie Merchant's new video, Wonder, but it wasn't exactly her idea. It came from her director, a man.
"It's a song about a woman who is severely handicapped but overcomes the physical disability to live this incredible life," Merchant explains over the phone from Cincinnati, on a tour that brings her to the Meadows Music Theatre in Hartford Saturday.
"It's a song that represents the strength of the self, but he kept hearing in my voice, and in references to fate and destiny, the form of female characters," she says.
Maybe it is the repeated notion of a mother lifting a child from a cradle, but the director saw the beauty and strength of women, Merchant says, and the video was shot within three days.
Merchant also made a point to feature women on her solo venture, her first since she departed from her longtime band, 10,000 Maniacs. She hired guitarist Jennifer Turner as well as a female sound technician and two lighting directors for the tour. Moreover, Merchant notes, the president of her label, Elektra, is a woman, "and in the record companies, it's rare to find a woman in any position of power still."
Not that Merchant is on a mission.
"What I'm searching for is a balance of some sort, because there are so few woman in the industry," she says. "I've worked primarly among men. This feels more like a family setting than being in the Army or something. But even the Army is more balanced now."
Merchant was seeking a balance, too, when she drew up the set list for her live shows. Besides playing most of the songs from her solo album Tigerlily, she knew she had to throw in some old Maniacs favorites. The ones that pop up, though, tend to have been radically retooled.
That's because, Merchant says, her band wasn't familiar with the Maniacs' originals.
"No one in the band listened to the Maniacs," she says, "so we decided it would be best if I taught them some songs on piano, and they would decide what to do with them."
It began with drummer Peter Yanowitz, who found alternate rhythms for each song. Eat for Two took on a Far Eastern air; These Are the Days assumed a beatnik tone.
For Merchant, the new approaches are a relief. "I'd played so many of them for years," she says. It was during the Maniacs' final project, MTV Unplugged, that she first learned she could fiddle with the arrangements.
"The audiences like them, too," Merchant says. "It's always a big surprise because they hear one, and it sounds familiar, but they don't know what song it is until they hear the words."
Merchant, 32, doesn't feel old. But she points out that when she began singing with the Maniacs at 18, her current guitar player was 9.
Likewise, "there are a lot of people coming to the shows who weren't even alive when we put out our first record," she says.
Being solo, she can reinvent herself anytime she wants.
"I can choose the direction I want to go into and work with anybody I want to," Merchant says. "I can make an album with all string arrangements and no drums, and that's OK. Or if I want to make an album with Booker T and the MGs, I could, which would be great."
Merchant provided one of the few spontaneous moments during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inaugural Concert in September by dancing on stage to Booker T's Green Onions.
Asked whose career she would like to most emulate, she mentions Joni Mitchell. Merchant was one of a select few -- including Chryssie Hynde and Carly Simon -- who caught Mitchell playing a surprise set in a New York City nightclub last month.
"She has good music, is a much better musician, an incredible poet," Merchant says. "And when she was unhappy with the circumstances around her success, I respect the fact that she stepped back. It never seemed like she was bitter that her newer music was never as popular as her music in the '70s had been. And she's still adventuresome."
Mitchell is also the author of the only thing close to a Christmas song that Merchant and her band have been performing, River. (Merchant's own song with the same title is about the late actor River Phoenix).
Mitchell's River may be the single most depressing recording involving Christmas. But Merchant isn't about to do carols. "We have Jewish people in the band, too."