by: Richard Chon (page 74)

When Natalie Merchant was 12, her mother had the family TV disconnected. She laughs, recalling the moment. "We were all having D.T.'s. It was so strange; she'd leave the house and we'd get the TV out. But it worked eventually." At that time, the singer's family lived in a farm house located two miles from their nearest neighbors. "It was pretty easy to be alone. My brothers and sisters and I spent all our time in the woods. That was our big entertainment, which I thought was a wonderful way to grow up. We never got bored."

That might sound like cultural deprivation to you, but for 10,000 Maniacs, it has meant escape from the clutches of the mass media whose chief function is, as Robert Warshow put it, "to relieve one of the necessity of experiencing one's life directly." Happy result: The Wishing Chair, the six-member group's major-label debut, an album so fresh in vision it seems like a privately-bound book of poetry lost among a glossy stack of mass-market paperbacks.

The Maniacs' aural signature is all their own, You can hear it in the unique synthesized guitar textures of Robert Buck, which clearly originate from the future, and is certainly manifest in the lyrics and beguiling presence of Natalie Merchant, whose emergence on stage is like the unfolding of some rare and exotic hot house flower.

"I think we're all pretty proud of the fact that our music has that timeless quality," says guitarist John Lombardo. "You can't listen to it and say,'Oh, that sounds like a garage band revival or a country-punk revival.' So much of the music, even that I like, is locked into a compartment by choice. That's a losing battle, because all you can ever expect to be is as good as who you're molded after."

Merchant's lyrics are the key to that time-less quality. Much of her imagery comes from real places located in her hometown, but she has a talent for coaxing universal truths out of specific settings. All is not sweetness and light, anxiety lurks beneath the sunniest surfaces of the band's music, a recognition of the brutality that lies just beyond the pastoral idealism in which Merchant finds her occasional moments of solace. Like Irish folk music or the blues, much of this music is born of oppression, which it seeks to transcend through poetry.

It's a vision that ultimately points toward some sort of political consciousness, though the 20-year-old Merchant would be the first to suggest that answers aren't that easy to come by. "I'm too young to have any established political views," she says. "I can't go around preaching to people about ethics if I don't even know myself. I change my mind constantly about what I think is right." Clearly, Merchant is still taking stock of the world and forming her opinions, but as long as they're couched in the gentle burr and wash of 10,000 Maniacs' music, there should be a lot of people willing to hear her out.