One of the many nice surprises on Tigerlily, the superb solo debut from former 10,000 Maniacs vocalist Natalie Merchant, is guitarist Jennifer Turner. Just listen as she weaves limber guitar lines around Merchant's incandescent voice, and as her guitar slowly builds to a smoldering climax on the outro fade of the hit single, Wonder.
"Music is like sex," says Turner. "They're two of the greatest things going. And they're both all about rhythm and freedom."
New Jersey born, Jennifer bought her first guitar from a headbanger she'd befriended in her high-school homeroom. After six months of college, she dropped out and hitchhiked around America with a conga drum: "I'd just go around looking for drumming circles -- at Allman Brothers shows, Phish concerts, in parking lots, wherever," says Turner. "After a while, I decided I wanted to start playing guitar again. So I hitchhiked with a conga and a guitar."
Turner wound up in New York City, playing with a space-funk band called Marmalade. The group moved out of the city to Woodstock, falling in with the crowd at Bearsville Studios. An engineer recommended the guitarist to Merchant, who was assembling her post-Maniacs band. Merchant, Turner, bassist Barrie Maguire and drummer Peter Yanowitz moved into the singer's upstate house, where they worked on the songs that would become Tigerlily.
Was Merchant specifically looking to have another woman in the group?
"I think so," says Turner. "That's very important to her. She has a woman lawyer and a woman manager. If the band's guitar player didn't turn out to be a woman, the bass player or the drummer might have."
Turner is of two minds about the "women in rock" issue: "Usually, it's something I don't even think about. But every once in a while, some guy will say something like 'Oh, a guitar! You know how to tune one of those?' And I feel like saying, 'Yeah. Do you know how to eat one? 'Cause that's what your're gonna be doing in a minute, pal.'"