After a three-year disappearance, the 10,000 Maniacs return with a confident attitude
by: Christopher Jones (page 14)
For a while it looked like there might not be another 10,000 Maniacs album. In 1989, after what seemed like years of endless touring, singer Natalie Merchant went to her bandmates and spelled it out. "I have nothing to write about," she told, them. And that was that.
She moved from upstate New York to the Big Apple, with extended stays in London and Los Angeles. And she traveled, taking several trips to Italy, with detours to Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Holland and Brazil.
Merchant was in recharge mode. Big time.
"We'd been so concerned with putting out and not taking anything in," she recalls. "I didn't want to start writing songs about being on the road and living in hotel rooms. That's so irrelevant to most people's lives. I wanted to live and be away from being part of 10,000 Maniacs for a while.
"And it's obvious when you listen to the record," she adds, "that it was beneficial to take that time off."
Our Time in Eden, the Maniacs' return to the land of the public living, is a major departure for the group that became darling of the college circuit in the 1980s on the strength of its bright, mostly acoustic pop sound and astute political observations.
Produced by Paul Fox (XTC, Robyn Hitchcock, Sugarcubes), the recently released Eden is a lush collection in spite of its dark lyrical concerns. Organ, piano, accordion, cello and horns prop up the melodically rich offerings and Merchant's exquisite singing.
Sitting in a Toronto hotel suite, Merchant smiles when it's suggested that Eden bears more than a passing resemblance to the latest R.E.M. album, Automatic for the People. The two records sound so much alike, in fact, that they could almost be companion pieces by the same band with different singers.
"Well, they worked at the same studio we did, at the same time of year," offers Merchant, "so there's that similarity. They've been together the exact same amount of time we have, 11 years, and we share the same tastes in music - we have a lot of the same influences.
"We've been like R.E.M.'s little sister for years. Even though we started at the same time, they've had massive commercial and critical success and we've always been hopping along behind. They took us on our first major tours and for years they've been telling us, 'Don't compromise, do everything on your own terms.' They've been like big brothers giving us lots of advice.
"The fact that we took time off between Blind Man's Zoo and this record improved our attitude toward each other and toward what we do, which is make music. We were beginning to wonder why we did it and that's probably because we toured so much. And again there's an R.E.M. comparison - they toured so much they just stopped and they haven't done it for a long time."
But that's where the comparisons stop for Merchant, who says she's genuinely anxious to, get back out on the road, to perform in front of "the people who like out music."
"We were just burned out, wondering why we did it, wondering whether we even wanted to continue doing it. And now, looking back, that's just absurd because after being away from it for a couple of years I really crave it, I really want to perform. It seems hard for me to imagine standing on stage and feeling really disappointed in myself that I didn't feel like singing. But that's how I felt."
Merchant is a disarming interview subject. She greets her questioner with a polite handshake then sits, arms crossed, almost sullen looking. Everything about her body language suggests, "You're not getting anything out of me, buddy."
But as the conversation unfolds, so does the singer, offering remarkably candid, unguarded observations about her life, her feelings, her family.
She notes that her sister was recently divorced and talks about how it influenced her to write Jezebel for Our Time in Eden. She talks about being the third of four children and what it was like to he raised by her "encouraging, liberated" secretary mom after her parents split up when she was small.
Perhaps growing up near the university campus, where her mother worked, helped to forge Merchant's fierce political perspective. Her diatribes against poverty, racism and environmental destruction overflowed on Blind Man's Zoo, the Maniacs' 1989 opus.
Yet there is precious little political comment on Eden, an album that concerns itself almost exclusively with human passages and foibles. Ironically, Merchant says her turning away from political concerns was the dirct result of the most hostile political event of recent times, the Gulf War.
"I just felt completely helpless," she recalls, "not as a songwriter but just as a person, a citizen. I felt like such a tiny voice and I was appalled by the enormous violence and the atrocities that were being committed.
"The rage and confusion that I felt during the Gulf War was heightened by the fact that there were 40 wars going on around the world and we didn't intervene in any of those. It seemed so obvious to me that it was about fossil fuels and economics, never mind that thousands of people might die.
"How could I possibly write songs about that? The rage that I felt couldn't possibly be contained in a three-minute pop song. It was ridiculous."