by: Dan Craft
In an industry where bands usually break apart with the utmost acrimony, Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs would seem to be the odd players out.
In fact, Merchant calls her exit from the Maniacs after more than a decade together "probably the most polite departure that anyone could make from a rock band."
Period.
How polite was it?
In an interview with The Pantagraph, the 32-year-old singer says she gave the Maniacs two years' notice so she could stick around long enough to produce two more records (a live MTV Unplugged set and a greatest hits package) before setting sail on her own solo voyage. [webmaster's note: The Maniacs have never released a greatest hits album although the Unplugged record was similar to a greatest hits album (just live). The last two albums Natalie made with the Maniacs were Our Time in Eden and MTV Unplugged]
No harsh words, no bitter legal disputes, no publicly voiced regrets from either side.
"I think they felt that way, too," she says of her fellow Maniacs - the four older guys who hired her at the tender age of 17 as their lead singer (she has since been replaced by a new member, Mary Ramsey).
Polite or no, Merchant admits she was feeling creatively trapped in a musical context that had spanned her entire creative life.
She told another interviewer that near the end of her Maniacs tenure, "I was a bitch a lot of the time - I was like the snotty little sister. I spent most of the last tour in the back of the bus with the door shut. That was no way to live."
Her departure has been as successful as it was necessary: Her critically hailed 1995 solo debut album, Tigerlily, has been a bigger commercial success than anything the Maniacs ever recorded. And a string of singles (Carnival, Wonder, Jealousy) has kept her new status continually visible on radio play lists since late last summer.
Her solo concert tour, coming to Illinois State University's Braden Auditorium tonight for a rescheduled date, also has been attracting large audiences in her freshman year - a year when many first-time solo artists have to be content opening for bigger names.
"The scale of the success is pretty surprising," she admits. "The scope of the record is such that it seems to be played by every radio format available, which means a really broad range. The Maniacs had a pretty broad audience, but this has widened it even more."
On the subject of radio formats in the '90s, Merchant doesn't mince words.
"I feel personally like radio is a communal forum for music, but I know it's not the real world, where radio is a way of marketing and advertising," she says.
Merchant thinks that college and public stations are "a bit more maverick - but the disturbing trend is to play only 1970s music, or only easy listening. Then the music has to go through a kind of gate to get past."
The singer with the uncannily clear voice is pleasing enough to ears that her music goes down well with most radio formats, from alternative to adult contemporary. However, a close listen to her lyrics reveals a subtle poet who can express indignation and angst every bit as incisively as some of her more vocally tortured counterparts, from Alanis Morissette to Joan Osborne.
For longtime 10,000 Maniacs fans, it's clear that Merchant's solo technique hasn't changed dramatically from the style she employed with the group.
"I can't change the way I sing," she says. "There's definitely a thread that connects the two of us. I work with the same configuration of instruments as the Maniacs. I didn't want to make a big leap."
For Tigerlily and her current solo tour, Merchant assembled a small group of backup musicians designed to "get to the essential instruments of a rock combo."
Testing the waters, "we played some small club dates before playing on the record - like we would if we had been a young and undiscovered band. It was exciting, and I got to feel a lot of things I didn't ever get to feel with the Maniacs."
But Merchant has no regrets that she entered the music business with the Maniacs at such a young and inexperienced age.
Born in Jamestown, N.Y., of working class Sicilian stock, Merchant grew up with a fascination for history, especially the Depression years. Her path crossed with her future 10,000 Maniacs bandmates on the Jamestown college club scene in the mid-'80s. Within four years, the band was signed by a major record label. [webmaster's note: that would be the early 1980s]
In the following decade, the group's relatively low-key sound found a critical and cult following, but never any chart-shattering commercial success.
"I'm glad it all happened at 17 and that I didn't find the bulk of my success at the beginning," she says. "That would have been the kiss of death."
As the group's lead singer and prolific lyricist (70-odd songs), "I became frozen into this character that the press had designed for me. I was cast as the ingenue, the shy singer-poet-recluse, and then, later, as the social activist."
But that was then, this is now.
"The truth is, I'm not so shy anymore," she says. "I was at 17, but I've changed a lot. I think in this industry to be allowed to change as I have and still be accepted is quite a balancing act. A lot of people feel they have to completely re-define themselves for every record to survive, where I've been able to gradually evolve and become more mature."
As part of that maturing process, Merchant decided to forego working with a record producer for Tigerlily. Instead, she linked up with veteran engineer John Holbrook, who has worked with the likes of The Band, Peter Tosh and the Isley Brothers.
"I wanted to find someone who's not an engineer of the moment with a sound that everyone's trying to copy," says Merchant. "I wanted the technology of '70s-sounding records, with a warmth and depth to it - pre-digital. The digital age is really cold. It's sad to see that vinyl has become extinct."
Along with the creative freedom granted by going solo, Merchant also had to learn to take control of the business side of her career.
"There is a natural lifespan for all pop musicians," she says. "I'm not going to bet against the odds. I will last another five years. In five more years I will have reached my peak artistically."
After that?
"If I don't have children or return to school, I see myself becoming involved full time in humanitarian work," she says.
Certainly her social consciousness won't need any raising should that occur. For most of her career, Merchant has been actively involved in a number of social and environmental causes, from, pro-choice benefits to anti-nuke rallies.
"I'm not a political analyst; I'm a poet and a singer and I'm not privy to any special information. It's nothing that anyone can't find out for themselves," she says. "But the one thing I do have to my advantage is the ability to gather large groups of people together and put the information into their hands. That information doesn't just sprout spontaneously in my head - it comes from people who have been working years to gather it together."
In the end, she says, "I just call myself a decoy."