Natalie Merchant: When indie queens go trad
Best known for her work with 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant is in Ireland this week to play gigs with Lúnasa, writes .
Natalie Merchant doesn’t dye her hair. The prolific singer/songwriter prefers to wear her silver mane with pride.
“Most artists my age are trying to maintain their youthful identity and looks,” she says. “What I’m trying to say with my appearance is, ‘this is what 55 looks like.’
"I can’t be 25 or 35 or 45 anymore. I can’t hide all those layers of my life, and I wouldn’t want to.”
This is hardly surprising: in almost 40 years, throughout both her solo career and her 12-year stint with alt-rock band 10,000 Maniacs, Merchant built herself a reputation as a musician who doggedly charted her own creative course, never bowing to the commodifying pressures of an industry that chewed up and spat out many young women.
At 17, the precocious Merchant joined 10,000 Maniacs, penning many of their songs throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s and enjoying numerous not insignificant US chart successes, including a triple platinum MTV Unplugged album, released just after she departed the band to launch her solo career.
As a Maniac, she dated Michael Stipe briefly, toured incessantly, wore demure vintage clothing, spun around on stage like a dervish and, most importantly, sang in that magnificently expressive, velvety, nuanced voice of hers, a voice she has also found time to lend to innumerable political causes down through the years.
In short, she always set her own course and never became a pop product. How did she manage it, was it stubbornness?
Stubbornness, yes, she says, but also naiveté, and impatience: an impatience to create her own vision that blinds her to trends and hype.
“I’m caught up in the life that’s happening in my immediate surroundings, so I never really sought out a lot of media,” she says. “I stay informed of current events, but that’s about as far as I go.”
It’s not that she can’t feel a certain level of sympathy with what she calls our obsession with youth culture: “It’s an incredible, developmental time, late adolescence ‘til thirty, and part of it is that we’re so open to sensation; it’s the first time people experience sex, or travel, or education: the world is open and everything is new, so people get very nostalgic for that. But I didn’t really feel like I began to settle in my career until I was 30.”
Following several successful solo albums with a growing focus on folk music, Merchant announced a career hiatus in 2003: at forty, she became a mother to her only child, Lucia.
Retreating to her home in upstate New York, she withdrew from the music industry for several years.
“In rural New York, you almost create your own world,” she says. “Especially after I had my daughter, there were so many things I wanted to protect her from that I built an even larger wall.
"It was kind of a time of retreat, of scholarship and research, but also of a quiet life of home and family that was denied me because I’d been living on a tour bus for 20 years.”
It wasn’t just Merchant’s priorities that had changed. By the early 2000s, the digital age had ensured the music industry was in flux.
“The whole collapse in structure of the music industry was something I needed to step away from. I couldn’t really interact with the industry because it was being ruled by fear and panic.
"There was all this consolidation, which is a nice way of saying that hundreds of people were losing their jobs and budgets were being slashed.”
Now, she’s acclimatised herself to the “paradigm shift” in how the music industry works.
Currently combining a UK tour with Irish dates with trad legends and occasional collaborators Lúnasa, she’s been relishing both the intimate venues and the reception she’s received.
“Being able to have a substantive conversation after a gig with people who have listened to your music is not something you get to do when you’re doing a two-bus, two-truck tour and playing for 10,000 people a night in cities of millions of people,” she says.
Lúnasa’s latest album, Cas, has been released to coincide with the band’s 20th anniversary tour.
It’s their first album to feature vocals, and Merchant is one of several singers to have contributed, with a slow and appropriately mournful rendition of The Bonny Light Horseman.
At the live dates they’ll play together, they’ll also perform songs they’ve worked on in past collaborations on albums of hers.
“I feel like a bit of an impostor, because I haven’t got a drop of Irish blood in me, but Irish music really speaks to my soul, and is at the root of so much American folk music,” she says.
“I just respond to the historical elements of the music and the fact that the songs have been lovingly handed down from generation to generation: they’re a little like a well-worn stone that’s been in a river for centuries.”
Another thing the music world’s paradigm shift has created is a slew of so-called “legacy acts” reforming and going back on tour.
10,000 Maniacs continued after she left, in a different incarnation: Would she consider a reunion? A swift no.
In the first place, their original guitarist Rob Buck died tragically young, in 2000, and she says it wouldn’t be the same without him.
These days, when Queen can tour with a stand-in for Freddie Mercury, even that wouldn’t be seen as much of a barrier, but Merchant is adamant: “Listen, are your parents divorced or married? Mine were divorced, and the idea of going back to 10,000 Maniacs seems as ludicrous as saying my parents could remarry: a band is like a marriage, in a way.
"They run their course, and everyone benefits and suffers from that union. You make your children, which are your albums. And when the marriage is over, you can’t go back.”
For all that, it was 10,000 Maniacs that set her on her course.
“They saved me from this kind of provincial prison of my childhood,” she says.
“We were self-made: we bought a little van and made a little album and just took to the road.
"I grew up on stage, traveling and being an artist, and I’ll always be grateful for that.”
