by: David Bauder (Associated Press)
On one end of the phone line: a couple of morning show disc jockeys, in caffeine overdrive, thrilled to be talking to a celebrity.
On the other end: Natalie Merchant, a bit groggy after just waking up and naturally wary about talking on live radio with guys she doesn't know while thousands of people listen in.
She knew the question was coming, and the radio guys didn't disappoint: Why, they wanted to know, are you so darn serious all the time? Lighten up, Natalie.
Sigh.
"Maybe I should have gone and done a stint on a situation comedy and people would take me less seriously," she says in an interview afterward.
Or maybe tarting up the packaging of her latest CD with pictures of herself in various poses will do the trick. There's Natalie the circus performer, Natalie the vamp in a slinky evening dress, Natalie the tramp with a cigarette dangling from her lips.
Then again, not all of the photos seem like much of a stretch: Natalie in a Girl Scout uniform, Natalie the nun, Natalie the street urchin, and Natalie the tweed-wearing librarian.
It's a clever way of poking fun at one-dimensional images; few lives can comfortably be capsulized in a picture or paragraph.
Merchant, the former lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs, believes the notion of Serious Natalie is the result of years of explaining her songs to reporters. Themes of alcoholism, child abuse, and the economic woes of postindustrial upstate New York usually aren't worth a lot of laughs, either in her songs or when she's asked to discuss those topics in interviews.
"I also tell people, 'Fine, I have the reputation of having a serious side,'" she says. "And what's so bad about that?"
Not so bad at all, judging by her career. Merchant seamlessly made the transition from band member to solo artist, and has established herself at a time singers seem to come and go. Her first solo disc, Tigerlily, sold 3.3 million copies, and Ophelia, released in May, is chugging along at 822,000.
She was the queen of Lilith Fair with Sarah McLachlan last summer and is on a tour that brings her to the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan for two shows, Saturday and Sunday. She's also releasing a video about Ophelia.
Merchant is trying to make her songwriting simpler and more concise at the same time as her music is becoming lusher and more complex.
The studio was her palette on Ophelia. Merchant's desire to experiment with several musicians made her a combination travel agent and director. Among her guests: Tibetan devotional singer Yunchen Llamo, former Brand New Heavies singer N'Dea Davenport, acoustic guitarist Lokua Kanza from Zaire, jazz trumpeter Chris Botti and guitarist Daniel Lanois.
"I got bored with the band approach," she says. "The band approach was just a security blanket for me, because I'd been in a band for 12 years. When I decided to make my first record away from 10,000 Maniacs, it was too daunting a project to try and find the dream musicians, so I sort of just chose people that I knew and friends of friends and kept it very intimate and very small."
Musicians often tell one another how they'd love to work together someday; it's the profession's equivalent of "let's do lunch." So Merchant worked up the courage to get on the phone.
"I'm pretty shy and calling Daniel Lanois and asking him if I could send a tape of my songs is pretty intimidating,'' she says. "I was afraid of rejection, wondering if he wouldn't like it or didn't have the time."
Her departure from 10,000 Maniacs wasn't abrupt. She gave her fellow band members two years' notice and committed to a final record and tour in order to give everyone a chance to adjust. 10,000 Maniacs have continued with a new singer.
"My main frustration was that I wanted to write, and I was co-writing most of the material," she says. "I was given a couple of token songs on each record that I could do the writing myself. Art by committee didn't work for me anymore. I just needed to make my own decisions. It was pretty simple."
Merchant has dozens of song ideas stored in her computer most of the time, usually triggered by personal experiences or observations. Although she uses a computer, she likes to have paper in front of her when she sits at her piano, so she can cross out, erase, and write as she goes along.
She wants to be a more economical writer. "Some of my songs were torrents of words and I'm trying to make my phrases more concise."
Her two best new songs are almost inspirational. Life Is Sweet is precisely what the title suggests, a song that urges young people not to give in to cynicism about life. Kind and Generous is, in part, a song of encouragement to a friend who had a grueling job working with troubled children.
Merchant quietly does her part to help children. She has contributed to agencies that help youngsters near her home in New York's Hudson Valley and her childhood home in Jamestown, in western New York. She usually does her own research to determine how the organizations will use the money.
Merchant's single, working mother relied on these groups for after-school activities when her daughter was growing up.
"It's my hometown," she says. "Even though I can't live there anymore because of my work and my goals in life.. I don't want to forsake the community."