Leader Natalie Merchant Copes with Illness, Touring Woes
by: Manuel Mendoza
"I'm terrible," Natalie Merchant says calmly in response to the typical icebreaker.
She's a bit flustered, but still in control of her emotions.
"I just created the most ridiculous situation of my life," the 29-year-old vocalist and chief songwriter for 10,000 Maniacs continues. "Imagine this is you: You're in a foreign country. You have a concert to play tomorrow night back in your own country. But you have no money, no identification, no passport and no plane ticket.
"What do you do? Panic -- that's what I've been doing since 8 o'clock this morning."
Travel setbacks are not the only woes facing the misleadingly named Maniacs, a folk-pop group from Jamestown in western New York. Even before Ms. Merchant -- who will perform with her band Saturday at SMU's Moody Coliseum -- accidentally packed her personal effects and the plane tickets of several of her band members in a suitcase headed by bus from Toronto to Detroit with the group's crew, the Maniacs had been having problems.
Ms. Merchant has Lyme disease for the second time and an upper respiratory infection, both of which she is treating with antibiotics. A recent show at Rutgers University in New Jersey had to be canceled when she lost her voice. And arthritis symptoms from the Lyme disease have affected her piano playing and her trademark spin-dancing.
Other members of 10,000 Maniacs have had the flu, colds and bronchitis since the tour began four weeks ago. And drummer Jerome Augustyniak broke his collarbone just before some warm-up dates. The band was fortunate that former Bruce Springsteen drummer Max Weinberg volunteered to fill in while Mr. Augustyniak recovered.
Despite the streak of bad luck, Ms. Merchant looks on the bright side. Before our phone conversation ends, she gets word that a crew member is going to fly back to Toronto with her passport, wallet and the plane tickets.
She says the group learned a lot from Mr. Weinberg and his E Street Band work ethic.
"Max pushed us to be more rocking, I guess. It kind of woke us up. We tend to mill around stage and drink tea and chat -- all except play another song. And he used to be, 'One, two, three, four.' It was good for us."
Ms. Merchant also says 10,000 Maniacs has been playing some of the best and most fun shows of its career. She credits the group's long layoff for helping create anticipation and excitement on stage and in the audience.
After the band's last album, Blind Man's Zoo, came out in 1989, the members toured for a year and then took a year off "to find something to write about" before starting work on the new Our Time in Eden, their fifth album. Ms. Merchant moved from Jamestown to Manhattan's Upper West Side, and other group members got married, bought houses and had babies.
The new record has a natural link to the last one. Though neither is a concept album per se, themes connect them. Musically, the group has continued to build on its electric-folk roots, with guitarist Rob Buck stretching out on sitar, banjo, pedal and lap steel and mandocello. (The quintet also includes keyboardist Dennis Drew and bassist Steve Gustafson.)
Outside musicians also were brought in for Our Time in Eden, the most startling addition being the JB Horns on two cuts.
"It wasn't like we all jammed together," Ms. Merchant says of the horn section that used to back soul legend James Brown. "It would have been embarrassing for us. They've been together as long as I've been alive. They invented the way that they play, and people have been imitating them ever since."
Blind Man's Zoo, the second 10,000 Maniacs album to be produced by Peter Asher, of Linda Ronstadt fame, was built around global issues such as poverty, racism and the environment. On earlier albums, Ms. Merchant, who writes all the song lyrics, sometimes fell into the oblique poetry of adolescents who have read too much romantic literature. But her words on Blind Man's Zoo were specific and descriptive, even when they concerned more general topics like manipulation and dependency.
The biblical imagery that has always suffused her lyrics comes to the forefront on Our Time in Eden, which was produced by Paul Fox, who has worked with XTC, The Sugarcubes and Robyn Hitchcock. Instead of dealing directly with individual social or political problems, the album raises disturbing questions about human nature and people's abilities to change and improve the world.
"It seems like I'm asking more spiritual questions," Ms. Merchant says. "Why are people as they are? At the same time, there's still a broad range of approaches to the writing of the music and the lyrics. But that's the way our records have always been. We've always been able to write records with a song like My Sister Rose and then My Mother the War. My Sister Rose is a very light and energetic, joyous, celebratory type of song. And My Mother the War is just a manic, fierce, loud condemnation of militarism."
Ms. Merchant's vocal style also has evolved. Her singing is deeper and more forceful, yet more controlled. She also has lost some of the affectation that came from years of listening to British folk music and that first distinguished 10,000 Maniacs.
Like many other left-leaning pop performers, Ms. Merchant is happy about the presidential election results and the fact that more women have been elected to Congress. But like the point of view she puts across on Our Time in Eden, she is skeptical as well as hopeful. But not, she says, pessimistic.
"I think that the record asks a lot of questions -- and I'm asking a lot of questions of myself -- and one of the biggest questions is: 'Can we change, and can we change quickly enough to have impact on a personal level and also on a much larger level?'" Ms. Merchant says. "Because our lives are brief. Songs like Few and Far Between and How You've Grown and Eden and even These Are Days and Jezebel say 'honesty, change, growth, movement.'
"Even though there's a lot of pain attached, especially in a song like Jezebel -- a woman who's disillusioned with her marriage and feels like a failure of sorts -- it is saying, 'I have to be honest. I can't pretend anymore that I'm a hollow person.' I think that's a good thing, to look at things in a harsh light and realize that they're not quite right and that they can be changed. That's optimism to me."