by: Allison Stewart
The first time Natalie Merchant met Liz Phair, before the start of last year's Lilith Fair tour, she was sure they wouldn't get along. "I thought, 'Oh, Liz isn't gonna like me,'" Merchant remembers. "But the nice thing about Lilith Fair was, everyone could get away from the misconceived notions that we all have about each other from the press that we've been given over the years. It was hard, coming into a room and meeting a musician that I've [never met] and trying to get their videos and interviews out of my head and just meet the woman. And when I did meet Liz, I thought, 'Oh, she's just a kooky mom.' And Liz said that I was a 'lion-tamer.'"
Five years and two platinum-plus solo records after her departure from 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant may not be a lion-tamer, exactly, but in person and onstage she demonstrates a newfound self-assurance vastly removed from the waifish and tremulous Merchant of the early 1990s. During innumerable recent TV appearances on everything from The Tonight Show to VH1 Storytellers to the girltalk fest The View --all to promote her latest album, Ophelia -- she's looked downright luminous. "I don't get nervous at all now," she says. "The first time I was on television, I suppose on some level I remember doing [the old Maniacs hit] Don't Talk, but I don't remember actually doing it. I'm so glad I'm over the phase of being so nervous that I do the song in a blackout. I think starting to have a solo career has made me a lot more confident, because I make my own decisions and I'm writing my own material and putting together a band of people that I really enjoy being with. My life has changed a lot since 1993."
Now 35 years old, Merchant began performing with 10,000 Maniacs in Jamestown, New York when she was 17, released the first Maniacs record a short time later, and has been growing up in public ever since. After Merchant's 1993 departure, the remaining band members replaced her with Mary Ramsey, the Maniacs' occasional string player. "She's done a great job," Merchant says graciously. "She's an incredible string player with a real great voice. I just saw her this fall on Lilith Fair."
Merchant's relationship with her other former bandmates, who have seen their post-'93 sales drop as precipitously as hers have surged, is virtually nonexistent. "I moved away from Jamestown 10 years ago, and the only time we were really seeing each other was when we were rehearsing or working on an album, so it's not really that unusual. I was a lot younger than everybody else and the only female, and I just kind of drifted away."
Merchant's successful solo career and burgeoning self-possession have done little to shake the public perception that she is overly serious and perennially disapproving, the pop star as hall monitor. In person, Merchant is polite, almost sweet, really, and utterly without irony, which doesn't help matters.
But she claims to spend little time worrying what people think of her, anyway. "It's sort of narcissistic for me to be thinking about what [my image is]," she reasons. "It depends. If people have been watching me over the past five years, if they come to my concerts, they would probably have a different image than if they only listened to the Maniacs. I think they would think I'm a writer of substance, which I appreciate, and that musically, I've written a lot lately that's optimistic and hopeful."
Merchant made a short film to accompany the release of Ophelia that might be the first (albeit unconscious) step in lightening up her persona. In the film, now out on video, she portrays different characters from the record (including a Mafia moll, a suffragette, and a human cannonball) and speaks seven different languages. The experience has also bolstered her resolve to launch a film career. "I'm actually having a meeting with a director tonight. Until the last few years I didn't think that I had the comfort level that I needed to be in front of the camera for that length of time," she divulges. "The only acting I've ever done is in community theater. It's not exactly a strong foundation."
Any movie plans remain in the distant future, however. Merchant will tour until June '99, after which she plans to begin writing songs for her next record. "When I write, it's more a period of full creativity," she says. "I stop what I'm doing, I stop answering the phone, and then I paint and I dance and I draw and I garden, and out of that whole period of life comes the songs."
She's unsure what direction her next record might take, but figures it will be closer to the intricate Ophelia (which featured 35 musicians, including Tibetan devotional singers, string sections, and N'Dea Davenport of the Brand New Heavies) than to her stripped-down 1995 solo debut, Tigerlily.
"I know I liked collaborating with a lot of people like I did with Ophelia, but I love this band that I have now," she enthuses. "I could see augmenting them in the studio with other musicians. I'm not sure yet."
Merchant's warm blanket of a singing voice means she can do little more than chide gently about various societal ills; that true rage may be the one emotion beyond the ever-delicate Merchant's grasp remains an intermittent source of frustration. "Sometimes I've lamented that, because I've written songs that were angry but I could never sound as angry as I felt," Merchant laments. "But at other times I feel really happy that I have this voice, because it seems to soothe people and draw them close to me. Children really love my voice. I've been noticing a lot of really young kids at the show -- like, 12 and under -- lately, and I'm really excited. Because if I were 12 years old, going to a concert, it would be a choice between either the Backstreet Boys or me. I'm just glad it's me."