She was the lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs but that was way back then. Jonathan Van Meter pays a visit to Natalie Merchant now.
by: Jonathan Van Meter
This is my moment to bitch," says Natalie Merchant. Why, she wants to know, are so many designers "so afraid of color?" It's ten o'clock in the morning, and Merchant - she of the big brown eyes and full red lips - is sitting in an empty macrobiotic restaurant a block from her apartment in the West Village looking as though she just woke up. She's wearing a shirt the color of an overripe tomato. "I go to Barneys, and it's either gray, black, or white, with maybe a little red. Or they'll choose a color that's safe, like aubergine. You can buy aubergine this month, but that's it."
Fashion is not a topic one associates with Merchant, but she's just finished a five-night run at the Neil Simon Theater, for which she designed all of her own costumes, including a spooky black-widow dress complete with veil, a kicky orange-and-pink twenties-inspired number with bell sleeves, and a blue and red linen baby-doll dress with hand-embroidered appliqués that she wore while tossing flowers into the crowd as she swayed back and forth on a giant rope swing. "I get a very specific emotional response when I see violet or pale blue or intense red, and I wanted to use that onstage," she says. "The costumes were very controversial: People either loved them or hated them."
She probably needn't worry. As the lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs until the early nineties and a solo artist for the past five years, she's always been a canny, powerful live performer. Aside from R.E.M., Merchant is perhaps the most successful and enduring alternative artist to emerge from the eighties - intact and uncompromised. In fact, she is one of the most unlikely pop stars of our time. Merchant manages to telegraph vulnerability, sentimentality, and earnestness, and a deep sense of the historical and the political, all the while remaining a viable Top 40 artist - no easy feat in today's goodtime, teen-crazed market. Next month, there's her new CD, Natalie Merchant Live in Concert, a DVD package of the Broadway show, and a Lifetime special.
"One of the most successful records that 10,000 Maniacs ever had was MTV Unplugged," she says, "and it was one of the records I'm most happy with because it was live. It wasn't a project that we fussed over. People always tell me that my live shows differ greatly from my albums, which are a little more meticulous and subdued. People come see me live, and I'm cracking jokes and dancing around like a savage, and it's truly unpredictable. There should be a record of that."
When I ask her if she's ever surprised by her success, Merchant - who claims to have her "cynical moments" but clearly knows she's a pill - says she is sometimes "shocked" by it. She says, "I get played on Top 40 radio, alternative radio - even jazz radio will play me. I get played on every format. That makes me a pretty unusual artist. I'll tell you the most shocking experience: I was performing at a function up in Boston for a Top 40 station. And it was mayhem: Britney Spears, one of the guys from the Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Elton John. All I could think was, Where do I fit in here? It was just so insane. All these screaming teenage girls. We did Senior Don Gato as our first song, and I got the whole crowd to sing the 'Meow, meow, meows.' By the end of our set I jumped upon top of the piano, and I was singing Life Is Sweet, and it was just so funny because Britney Spears had just been out there singing to backing tracks with a microphone strapped on her head doing her dance routines, and I was just like, 'Where do I fit into this?' [Pause.] But I do somehow fit. [Another pause.] But at the same time ... I was one of the performers in the Tibet House benefit at Carnegie Hall with Philip Glass. I can take a thirteenth-century Latin liturgical poem and put it to a piece of Philip Glass's piano music and perform it in a black gown at Carnegie Hall." A great big smile spreads across her face. "I can do that."