By Tom Harrison
Just when everyone thought they had Natalie Merchant pegged, she went and made an album and a short film to make everyone think again.
The album, Ophelia, has the former singer for 10,000 Maniacs collaborating with musicians as diverse as Tibet's Yungchen Lhamo, English composer Gavin Bryars and Canadian producer/guitarist Dan Lanois. The graphic art depicts Natalie assuming different roles -- femme fatale, politician, nun, harridan, mad woman and circus woman -- just like the film.
"In 10,000 Maniacs I was typecast as the Emily Dickenson of pop-rock," she explains. "It was fun to play with people's expectations.
"Most artists today are expected to be multimedia savvy," Merchant continues. "With Ophelia I thought I would like to make a film that allowed me to demonstrate my different interests and aspects of my character. People had put me in a box and I thought I would widen the box a little bit. Now they tell me, 'Oh, I had no idea you were so funny.'"
Merchant would appear to be the demure opposite of Shania Twain, who is down the road from Merchant's concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday but anyone who attended 10,000 Maniacs' Orpheum show (on her last tour with the band) will remember her ingratiating informality and confident composure which ultimately radiated an understated but real sexuality.
"It took me years to be able to look at an audience and read them -- and not feel intimidated," the singer confesses. "The connection with an audience is powerful and it can make me cry. I don't want to sound like some kind of new-age speaker but music can be that powerful. To be an artist is the greatest privilege I can have so I am appreciative of my audience.
"I like to take it to an ecstatic point of ecstacy," she says, laughing at her redundancy.
Merchant has been touring with her current band since she played the first dates of last year's Lilith Fair. In addition to experimenting with the arrangements for the songs from her two solo albums (the first was Tigerlily), she has been known to play further with expectations by tossing in a song by David Bowie or Jeff Buckley, the Mac Davis-written Elvis hit, In the Ghetto, or most tantalizing of all, the Fairport Convention arrangement of the traditional murder ballad Matty Groves.
"I love doing covers," says Merchant. "There is no baggage attached to them and I try to remain faithful to the song and respectful of why I loved the song in the first place."
Her happiness with the tour and the band may result in a live recording. The shows are being recorded with that goal in mind.