by: Nigel Williamson
She writes pop songs about dying, hates the trappings of rock'n'roll and thinks performing live is like "cutting yourself open". Nigel Williamson advises Natalie Merchant to lighten up and have some fun "I don't buy the idea that I am just here to entertain and that I shouldn't use my songs to make serious observations"
Natalie Merchant is sitting on her tour bus idly flicking through a magazine. We are on our way to the Shoreline Ampitheatre, San Francisco, for another stop on the three month-long Lilith Fair extravaganza. The all-woman tour, featuring the likes of Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Sinead O'Connor and Lisa Loeb, has been the biggest box office draw in America this summer. Suddenly she jumps up, leans her head out of the window, and in an act of sisterly solidarity, shouts "WOO-MAN" at the top of her voice to the astonished crowds. A few minutes later, the huge, silver 16-wheeler pulls up backstage. Merchant, whose first solo album, 1995's Tigerlily, sold four million copies in America alone, jumps off to search out some vitamin C for an ailing colleague.
This is more like the Natalie we know. If Merchant, whose reputation for earnestness was cultivated by her years in the student-friendly American band 10,000 Maniacs, had not been a singer she would have made a very good living as a social worker.
Born in New York State, 34-year-old Merchant joined 10,000 Maniacs in 1981, while studying at the Jamestown Community College in New York. They broke out of the indie underground scene into the mainstream with the 1989 album Blind Man's Zoo. Since splitting the band in 1992, Merchant has found more satisfaction as a solo artist, as seen on her stunning current album, Ophelia. [note from the @Natalie webmaster: Natalie left 10,000 Maniacs in 1993, not 1992]
When she announced her plans to go it alone, she declared that being in a band was "like having five husbands". Then she promptly dropped out of music altogether for six months. "I felt I wasn't a member of any community," she says. "I had moved from a small town to New York City and it was really dehumanising. I felt powerless and frustrated by what I saw on the streets. You can give someone $20 and it buys them something to eat for the moment, but it doesn't really help. I had time on my hands so I went to work in a homeless people's shelter." [note from the @Natalie webmaster: the timing here is incorrect. Natalie first moved to New York City and worked in a homeless shelter between the 10,000 Maniacs albums Blind Man's Zoo and Our Time in Eden not after she left 10,000 Maniacs]
The experience allowed her "to stay connected to people" and she still does voluntary work with the homeless. Merchant, who has an apartment in Manhattan but spends most of her time at her house in Jamestown, says "I would resent it if my popularity made it impossible for me to take the subway or go to the laundromat. My neighbour on one side is an electrician and on the other is a nurse. I'd regret losing that. What would I write about? Seclusion and my isolation? Look at John Lennon. It got to the point where that was all he knew and so he sang about it. I pick up hitchhikers and they ask me what I do for a living. I say I sing and I'm disappointed when they recognise me."
Some performers, such as Tori Amos, roundly denounced Lilith Fair for its lack of testosterone, but Merchant's right-on politics made her a natural co-headliner, alongside the show's founder, the Canadian artist Sarah McLachlan.
Like Merchant, the Lilith legions pride themselves on caring. The arena was home to groups representing Planned Parenthood and the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, an Amnesty International display on women's rights around the world and even a stall promoting the 1999 women's football World Cup.
On September 23, the Lilith experience arrives in Britain for the first time, temporarily without Merchant, who is reported to be resting, for a one-off date at the Albert Hall as a prelude to a full-scale tour here next year. The tour coincides with the release of Ophelia. Laden with gloriously layered harmonies, strings and brass, the album is Merchant's magnum opus. It is accompanied by an extraordinary short film in which she plays seven of the characters from the album. The film, which she calls "a one-woman piece of performance art", could have been horribly overblown, but her boldness carries it off.
"I don't buy the idea that I am just here to entertain and that I shouldn't use my songs to make serious observations about the world I live in," she says. "I was just listening to Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit, which is one of the most powerful songs ever written, so there is a strong precedent for it. Songs can protest at hypocrisy or pass on good advice. I love the fact that I write music that is useful." From anyone other than Merchant the sentiment would provoke hilarity, but she is so disarmingly honest it is hard not to believe her.
In Britain, Merchant has yet to shift albums in the millions she does in America. Although she has a small army of devoted followers from her 10,000 Maniacs days, and despite the fact that her first solo album sold 40,000 copies in Britain and she packed out the Shepherds Bush Empire in April, 1996, her particular brand of agit-pop doesn't always impress the notoriously cynical Brits. Live dates, however, are planned for later this year. "I can't complain because I haven't invested the energy in Britain, that's why I'm coming back."
Somehow though, the sparse, often sombre songs of Tigerlily (one was about the death of her close friend River Phoenix and another about her grandfather, who died of a broken heart after seeing his wife's coffin) touched a chord in those who bought it. Another, Wonder, which was inspired by a severely physically-handicapped woman who was not expected to live, but who went on to gain a college degree and raise a family, has achieved an almost totemistic power. When she sang it in Portland a man whose arm had been amputated sat in the front row pointing at himself as if to suggest the song was about him.
This kind of thing might make some feel distinctly queasy, but it brought Merchant to the verge of tears. "Doctors have told me about kids who have terminal illnesses and listen to the song all day. I know of parents who have had premature babies they were told wouldn't live who have tacked the lyrics up above the crib."
That a pop song can produce such a reaction seems remarkable. "People tell me the music I write improves the quality of their lives, which I find very humbling," she says. "I punish myself if I don't feel I've given everything on stage," she adds, her voice trailing off with emotion. "I feel I don't deserve the platform and people deserve more. They wait two or three years for me to come to their town and then I am mediocre." A good live performance, she says, "should be like cutting yourself open."
Despite Merchant's oft-voiced concern for her fellow human beings, she is not without a pronounced sense of self. It is this that has made her keep the stylists and image-makers at bay. "Early on, because I was young, inexperienced and female, they tried to put me in an attractive outfit and create an image for a video. I was pretty furious about it," she recalls. "I had my cheap dresses from the thrift store and my own style, the depression chic look. People from the record company would come to the shows and tell me that I sang well but looked abysmal. But I could not have worn the black Spandex they wanted me to wear. It would have looked ridiculous."
To her, the trappings and history of rock'n'roll are irrelevant. "I have a friend whose parents are cancer-research scientists. I went out to dinner with them and they were so distanced from popular music it was so refreshing. They didn't know the difference between the King (Elvis) and Prince. I told them 'you don't need to know, it's not important. There are not enough hours in the day to learn everything.'"
Little wonder then, when asked if there is a place for the Spice Girls on the Lilith bill, she says she cannot comment because she has never heard them. Indeed, she smiles, until Geri left the group and she saw a picture of her in the New York Post, she had never even heard of them.
It might be difficult to believe, but often Merchant's conversation is punctuated with laughter, and it annoys her that she has been saddled with such a dour reputation. "Journalists always want to talk about my lyrics. If I have written a song about illiteracy or homelessness I'm not going to trivialise that, so we have a serious discussion. Then they go away and write that I am humourless."
But honestly, Natalie, what do you expect when you end your interviews with such homilies as "people are trying to find something that is real. The arts have always been a place for expressing irony but you can also be a channel for the beauty in the world and create an awareness of that beauty." When Michael Jackson comes out with such guff you want Jarvis Cocker to strangle him. When Merchant says it, you just want to tell her to hang out of more tour buses shouting at people. It would do her the world of good.
Ophelia is out now, the single, Kind and Generous, will be released soon, both on Elektra records. A tour is planned for later this autumn.