by: Colin Irwin (pages 54-55)

Today she's happy. She laughs, she smiles, she jokes, she hugs. Natalie Merchant: professional singer, permanent enigma. She who leaps around the stage like a demented dervish at the front of 10,000 Maniacs while singing songs that reach into the darker recesses of her and your soul. She who insists that her record sleeves are on recycled paper and frets about the contradictions of a lifestyle that involves roaming about the countryside polluting a beautiful world in a big, ugly truck. She who writes like a dream and sings like a goddess but wants above all else to be an organic farmer. Life can be a bitch when you worry as much as Natalie Merchant.

But today she's happy, positively, high-spirited even. Shattered after constant touring on the back of the Blind Man's Zoo album, 10,000 Maniacs took a couple of years out to contemplate their navels and try to be normal human beings. They bought houses, had babies, watched TV and got a handle on sanity again. But as we all know, normality is grossly over-rated and gradually they filtered back into the comfortingly abnormal world of 10,000 Maniacdom. A new album, Our Time In Eden, (with a sleeve printed on recycled paper) is testament to the success of their return and after rigorous self-examination and re-assessment, today Natalie Merchant is happy.

She laughs uproariously at the fact that Madonna always seems to time excursions into the headlines to coincide with a new Maniacs album (they share the same record label and little else) and tells me about shaving her legs. A small step for Bic but a huge step for Merchantkind.

"It felt so good. I never shaved my legs. I did it once when I was 13 and after that I never shaved my legs. I did it about a month ago and it felt so good, made me feel quite different. After years of saying I wouldn't do it and then doing it - it felt great. Same as cutting my hair off after it was all down my back. Just a cosmetic change like that makes all the difference. It's ridiculous, but too much of my personal definition got tied up in silly things like that. Like I never thought I could live in New York City, but now I maintain a residence there and I spend a lot of time now. Now I don't even like going back to Jamestown…. it's like I know I've changed so much I can't go back."

Natalie, you see, has an aversion to stagnation. She says she knew at the age of 15 that she'd be involved in music for the rest of her life but she couldn't have known that the little garage band she'd thrown herself into then would explode from its strictly three chord beginnings into such a richly sophisticated animal. An animal that came to give us albums of such dark quality and durable fascination as The Wishing Chair and Blind Man's Zoo, and led 10,000 Maniacs into a rarely explored netherworld of social and emotional concerns spinning crazily around an elusively traditional root. Sometimes that tradition was in American rock, sometimes it was in African music, sometimes it was in punk and sometimes it seemed to come from Uranus, but it usually struck a chord. And when Natalie Merchant got into English folk music, recorded a blistering version of Just As the Tide Was Flowing and sang the praises of June Tabor, then 10.000 Maniacs became the domain - and the pride and joy - of these pages.

She remains an ardent June Tabor fan, but these days she counters the terminal depression of the world she sees around her, by listening to the music that uplifts and represents the human spirit in positive mode -- gospel and soul.

"This is music from people who've experienced more pain and depression than I could ever imagine, yet gospel music is so uplifting. It has such a restorative power and that's why I've turned to it. It examines the soul and sings about growth and change and the opportunities that are presented for that.

So yeah, things are different now for 10,000 Maniacs with Our Time In Eden. After the intensity of their work schedule during the '80s and what Natalie concedes was a hugely depressing last album, Blind Man's Zoo, they all basically caved in, scarcely caring if they ever set foot on a stage again or not.

When they did finally reconvene they spent a lot of time talking. Natalie, Robert Buck, Steven Gustafson, Jerry Augustyniak and Dennis Drew... they just sat around getting to know each other again, discussing music they'd heard, what they liked and what they wanted to do now.

"Bands are like families. When you're together every single day sometimes the conversation is less than stimulating. But people were now much happier in their personal lives with babies and marriages and homes and stuff and we learned a lot about one another and how we'd changed."

What did you learn?

"We learned that most of us liked pop music, which was a bit of an admission for me because I was getting to be rather snob. I was the one who hated pop music, never listened to it; but now I was."

Pop music. What, Madonna? She's almost violently sick at this point...

"No. I won't listen to that garbage. What I mean is if I listen to pop music it's pop music from Argentina or Pakistan or somewhere. I wasn't going to listen to American pop music but I began to realise that I did like the occasional Morrissey song and I did like The Sundays and maybe I did I like the Cocteau Twins. And then I started to look back to when I was discovering rock music when I was 14 and started buying records by Roxy Music and David Bowie. I liked glitter rock a lot when I was a teenager!"

To Natalie's surprise, this open house on musical opinion led to an intense interrogation about her own songwriting. With previous albums she'd just kind of turn up with a bunch of lyrics and let the others get on with the job of sticking some chords around them. She sat in a corner drawing while all this was going on, returning to the fray only when the others were ready for her to sing the damn thing. She didn't question their musical judgment and they didn't quiz her about the lyrical content, which might be about child abuse, or alcoholism, or madness, or... anything. Nobody queried it. Now they did.

They started asking awkward questions. Like how come Natalie's songs were always so damn depressing. "They wanted to know why I wrote miserable songs all the time. Why didn't I write happy, uplifting songs? Why did I have to bog everything down with misery and discontent? It isn't always true, of course, but I hadn't even noticed that the songs were miserable until they said it."

So now you're writing about shiny happy people?

"Oh no!"

She laughs loudly again.

"No, I just can't do that. But things have changed. I'm much more involved in the musical side now. I had a little piano set up when we were rehearsing and I felt a lot more involved in the discussions about music. And I tried to have an emotional rather than an intellectual response to the music, but sometimes while my intellectual response is 'oh that's a really happy song, but I'm not happy right now and I'm not gonna write anything funny!'"

Songwriting by democracy, though, can't be much fun. You can't possibly get a consensus on everything!

"No, and that's when I get annoyed! Because I do write all the lyrics and I do the packaging and I do most of the interviews. Yes, it is a democracy, but a democracy doesn't exist without a president, and I'm the president of 10,000 Maniacs! Everyone's OK with that.

"It is hard to accept because we started as teenagers when I was 16 and everyone acted very protective towards me, like big brothers, and over the years I've had to slug my way out of that wall of protection around me. That's all part of growing and changing. If you use the family as a metaphor, children become teenagers and then they start going away to college and you have to change. The dynamic of this band had to change."

President Merchant declares her adoration of Nina Simone and tries to take an objective view of Our Time In Eden. Happy or not, Shiny Happy People it isn't. In fact the songs seem as desperate and melancholy as I they ever were. She re-wrote one song, Tolerance, four times before settling it into an analysis of the Los Angeles riots.

"I was trying to assess why there's racial prejudice and I reached the conclusion that it's a fear of what is different. That, and the idea that if you're somehow distanced from it you feel safe. Like in New York, I'm aware of what's happening in the Bronx, but while it's not happening in the Upper Westside it does seep in and feeds distrust, misunderstanding and suspicion. I feel it myself. I'm terrified of rape. Many of my friends have been raped. I can see a man on a dark street at night and I'll just run across the street away from him. He might just be going out to get some milk for his daughter, but he becomes a symbol."

These, then, are the frightened, random, spacey thought patterns that provoke her extraordinarily individual songwriting...

"Well I do think this is a very thoughtful album lyrically. I spend a lot of time thinking about human beings and what we're doing to each other and the spiritual bankruptcy. If people loved themselves more they'd accept each other and be more generous. Then the brutality in the world might be less than it is.

"I just look at the way people live their lives and how disconnected they are. Even with their own bodies. You just have to see the things people put in their own bodies - alcohol, nicotine, fried foods, food with so many additives and preservatives. I can't believe what people do to themselves. They let their jobs take over their lives and wind up so stressed they develop ulcers and chronic headaches.

"It's a sign of self-disrespect to do things that are damaging to yourself. I think there's a lot of disrespectful behavior towards other. In New York people are dishing out brutality to each other daily. I don't mean the kind of brutality that's going on in Bosnia, which is unspeakable, but I'm talking about people stepping over homeless people in the street or begging on street corners because they have AIDS. Not standing up on public transportation for the aged and handicapped, it just seems like a disintegration of humanity."

Any minute now she's gonna hit on religion...

"I was thinking how important music has always been to the history of man to celebrate life and encourage people to approach something larger than themsleves. When I listen to music by the great composers, so much of it was composed in the church for the worship of God... for some higher power. The most transcending music I've ever heard has been religious or spiritual music."

Bingo!

"On our album many of the songs are actually a celebration of life. When I was young we had to go to church on Sundays and the best part of the service for me was the music. Coloured lights and sound, incense burning, pews of light. Just like on stage, really. Some of the earliest music I ever listened to was when we were gathered together to hear the Lord's blessing."

She was raised as a Catholic and is happy about it. "The teachings of Jesus Christ certainly appealed to me as a child - He loved everyone and taught us to be respectful to each other. I hear all these stories now about how difficult the nuns were and how Catholics' lives were dominated by guilt and I understand that now, but I didn't even think about it then. It was all this wonderful fairy story and I'm so happy I had that as a child. I always thought it very strange that the Catholics chose the crucifix a symbol of torture - a symbol of their worship. As a child I hated seeing Jesus tortured because I loved Him so much."

"Now I feel the spiritual teachers I've been looking for aren't necessarily bishops or priests. I'd like to continue some sort of spiritual teaching - there's so much to be learned right now - but you don't necessarily learn it in the conventional church."

All of which invited the amateur psychologist in you to wonder about her own psyche. Today she's in excellent humor, but all that weight of the world on your shoulders, all those heavy songs dealing in tragedy and despair. Come on President Merchant, are you a manic depressive or what?

She smiles tolerantly. "I do see human kindness and that encourages me. It's difficult for me to sit here and drink water out of a plastic bottle. I grew up in a rural setting where we had a well to get the water and we'd recycle all our food scraps. Everything was put to use. When they went to the store my grandparents wouldn't buy something if they knew there was waste involved. This wasn't because they were hip or ecologically sound or informed people, it was common sense."

The conflicts this mentally produces in her own lifestyle are glaringly obvious. She still feels slightly surreal about living in a tenth floor flat in New York and having to squint downwards to see if people were holding umbrellas to know whether it was raining or not.

"It is a conflict. Sitting on a tour bus, all the plastic, petrol, chemicals…. it's so different to me sitting playing my piano in my bedroom. On stage we have mega-watts of power and I drive around the States in a diesel-powered vehicle that's huge. The fumes from my bus are horrific...

"I guess everyone has to live with their contradictions, but I do wonder if maybe I've been cast in the wrong part. I want to be an organic farmer so badly and live in a house without electricity, let alone a recording studio. Some day I'll do it. I'll end up living on a self-sufficient farm. I have some friends who do just that and when I visit them I know that's where I belong. I can't deal with the fact that when I'm on the road everything I need and depend on is out of my control.

"I honestly don't know for how much longer I can live a lie like I'm doing. In the end, though, at least I believe in the music and I feel I'm bringing something into people's lives that's pure and honest..."