interview with Natalie Merchant:

JAMESTOWN

It's where I was born. It's where my room is. My room is cluttered so I have to make small paths through it and clear it out twice a year.

FIRST MEMORY

My grandmother's big back yard. She would wash her sheets and hang them out then both my brother and I would run through them.

SLEEPING OUTSIDE

On our first tour we took a tent and slept outside Athens, GA. It rained and in the morning I took my raft that I'd been sleeping on and went to the middle of a lake. These two snakes followed me through the water.

BATS

The other day I was cooking my breakfast when this bat flew in and I was terrified. They have claws and teeth that birds don't have. I hate them

LITERATURE

I'm a slow reader, a frustrated reader. I'm reading James Baldwin's "Another Country" at the moment. I don't read much poetry because I think I need someone to guide me through it. Poetry is a good art to be performed.

LYRICS

I don't use words that are very familiar and I pronounce words to suit me rather than a dictionary. I'll put accents in strange places or pause in the middle of a word if it seems right.

CITIES

I like them because I don't in live in them. New York is my favourite city in America because you give up so many things when you move there like fresh air and privacy. It's very exciting culturally but I could never live there forever, I was brought up in the country.

WALKING BAREFOOT BY THE RAILWAY TRACKS

It would be very painful because of gravel and bits of broken glass. I always wear my shoes when I walk on a railway.

PUNK ROCK

Something that happened a while ago. I was shocked by it, it frightened me. I wasn't aware of that subculture, I didn't quite understand it. I don't know if I do now. Jamestown didn't need it, so it took it calmly like it does everything else.

COVER VERSIONS

We once did a song called The Castro Twist by a lounge lizard from Bermuda called Ross Calvert. It went "Castro, Castro, let's twist boy/You're the Caribbean big killjoy". I'm fascinated by the early Forties big band era.

THE ATOMIC BOMB

You can still find pamphlets in little stores telling you how to survive a nuclear bomb and they say things like "Pull the brim of your hat down over your eyes to protect you from the flak". I got a book out of the library about second and third generation survivors of Hiroshima. There was this woman who was 40 and if you hadn't read the caption you'd think she was five or six.

RED INDIANS

We use some Cherokee Indian words on the album because when I was at school I was always so infuriated at how little we were taught about the Indians. I was worried that it might sound really trite in the context of a three minute pop song but I'm past caring what critics think. It just felt right.

DREAMERS

We need more people with an optimistic attitude and great vision.

HEROES

I can admire some of the simplest people, like the chambermaid at the hotel who heard me singing while I was washing my clothes and said my voice was a gift from God and that I should use it properly. Or a man who is working on a cure for cancer that doesn't involve testing with chemicals.

GHOSTS

I got trapped in the attic of a house that was suppose to be haunted. It was the most frightening experience you could imagine. That was only last year.

OLD AGE

Yesterday there was an old woman at the market and she was looking at the apples but she couldn't see properly. They were all bruised but she was telling me how beautiful they were. I used to think I didn't want to live past 25 but now I'd like to be the old aunt with all the clutter and the candy.