Lilith Fair co-headliner Natalie Merchant may never want to go on the road on her own again.
By: Jane Stevenson (Toronto Sun)
Calling from a stop in Boston this week -- prior to the first of two sold-out Lilith shows at the Molson Amphitheatre starting tonight -- Merchant sounds besotted with the entire experience.
"It's like travelling in a hermetically sealed bubble," says Merchant, who is playing all 57 North American Lilith dates in support of her new album, Ophelia. [note from the @Natalie webmaster: this is incorrect, Natalie played 51 of the 57 Lilith dates].
"It's kind of utopian -- this utopian little bubble. Whenever I'm alone, like if we're at a hotel and I have to walk down some suburban strip mall street to find something at the supermarket and I'm getting catcalls from battered pickup trucks, I'm kind of like, 'That doesn't happen backstage at the Lilith Fair.' They do make life very comfortable for the musicians."
The nurturing vibe of the female-performers-only event, which features Lilith founder Sarah McLachlan, Merchant, Paula Cole, Emmylou Harris (Chantal Kreviazuk tomorrow night) and Liz Phair in Toronto, includes fruit smoothies and organic carrot juice, special soaps and shampoos, candles and tapestries in the dressing rooms and a massage therapist and chiropractor backstage.
No wonder Merchant, who has been co-headlining Lilith since its launch on June 19 in Portland, Ore., isn't sounding the least bit burned out.
"What's been really great is there's a lot of friendship, a lot of openness backstage," says Merchant. "The women tend to be much more friendly than guys, nobody's focusing on how cool they are, you know?"
The other plus, says Merchant, is just getting to hear and collaborate with the other performers. So far she's seen Sinead O'Connor 12 times and Me'Shell NdegeOcello nine times.
"There's been nice exchanges between people," says Merchant. "People talking about their experiences as artists and as mothers and musicians and business women, a lot of the conversations I can't have with my friends who aren't musicians. Especially you can't have those conversations with male musicians, because a lot of the challenges just aren't there for them. You know, the patronizing behavior that we sometimes get to witness in the industry that the guys might not."
When asked whether or not she wavered on taking part in Lilith -- given other high-profile artists like Tori Amos and Bjork have passed for different reasons -- Merchant says no.
"It's just two and half months of my life and it's really broadened me and it's made me think really differently about the way that I perform and the way that I write because I've been able to see how other people do it.
"And being part of it, I've been responsible for some of the ticket sales, which translates into a lot of dollars for charity. We've given well over a million dollars to charity, so that's another reason why I'm glad I did it."
Another good reason for Merchant to get on board was that Ophelia came out just one month before Lilith was launched.
And speaking of Ophelia, what's with those liner notes featuring Merchant dressed up as different characters? There's everyone from a Sicilian casino owner's wife to a Mexican nun to a blond German phys-ed fanatic to a Russian human cannonball.
"What I was trying to do was broaden the perception that people have of me as an artist and as a person by not having the moody portrait on the album cover that says, 'Here I am baring my soul again,'" says Merchant. "I wanted to have a little more fun with my image, so I decided to take the song Ophelia and develop characters."
In the companion film of the same name -- due for video release in October -- the character Ophelia imagines herself to be all these other characters.
"It's like a piece of performance art more than anything," says Merchant. "And I guess if somebody wanted to describe it differently they might say a very clever promotional film. But that's what most people would title anything that an artist does outside of making their records."