In the early nineteen-eighties, an unusual band emerged out of Jamestown, New York. They called themselves 10,000 Maniacs, and played a brand of folk-pop. Their lead singer and songwriter, Natalie Merchant, was a sixteen-year-old who wrote lyrics about Jack Kerouac’s mother, struggling parents in the Depression, and imperialism in Africa. Critics were eager to categorize her, but found it difficult to do so. Was she a swirling alt-rock dervish? An earnest polemicist? A bluesy balladeer with strong opinions about issues that shouldn’t concern her? But labels never mattered much to Merchant’s fans, nor to the singer herself. At the height of 10,000 Maniacs’ fame, she left the band, citing a lack of creative control, and began working on a solo album. The result, “Tigerlily” (1995), sold more than five million copies.
Since then, Merchant has been described by Vogue as “perhaps the most successful and enduring alternative artist to emerge from the eighties—intact and uncompromised.” She has released seven albums since “Tigerlily,” each suffused with the same off-kilter virtues: a stress on eclectic instrumentation, an interest in old American forms, and lyrics that probe the ills of the planet and its people. Merchant is clear-eyed about why she never became a pop star—“I was a sober vegetarian with a habit of doing benefit concerts and charity albums,” she told me recently—but she never sought that level of fame. She’d rather work on her own terms, and her first full-length album in nine years, “Keep Your Courage,” will come out later this month, followed by a thirty-seven-city tour. Merchant describes the record as “a song cycle that maps the journey of a courageous heart.”
Now fifty-nine, the singer has lived in upstate New York for more than three decades. Recently, during a nearly two-hour phone call, she gave me a rare interview. We talked about how she’s nurtured her creative urges, whether by taking a retreat from touring, as she did from 2003 to 2009, to raise her now nineteen-year-old daughter; by volunteering a few days a week at a Hudson Valley Head Start, a childhood-development program for low-income families; or by continuing to comment, in song, on issues that don’t quite lend themselves to mainstream hits. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You were recently nominated by Senator Chuck Schumer to be on the board of the American Folklife Center, at the Library of Congress. What exactly is your job?
It’s a six-year term, and we promote the work of the institution. The Folklife Center is involved with community arts organizations nationwide, keeping traditional arts alive—storytelling, dance, crafts, and music. The center’s archive conserves millions of items through the AIDS Memorial Quilt archive, the Veterans History Project, StoryCorps, and so on. I’d known it as the home of the ethnographic field recordings of John and Alan Lomax, who were father and son. That collection has been a holy grail for me.
On my last visit to D.C., I was shown the actual recording equipment that the Lomaxes hauled around the country during the late nineteen-thirties. It’s the size of a dishwasher. I’ve read about how they had to lift this heavy machine out of the back of their car over and over. I’m entranced by the voices of the people they recorded and the raw, honest music they made. Those scratchy wax-cylinder and acetate recordings are a magic portal to a lost America.
There are songs on your new album that could be from the early twentieth century. They sound almost like traditionals, both lyrically and musically.
When I sit down at the piano, I don’t set out to write in a particular style of music. I’m usually just searching for patterns—melodic, chordal, rhythmic—that reflect whatever mood I’m in. There’s a massive song bank in my brain. It’s a jumble of traditional folk music—American, Irish, Scottish, and British—as well as jazz standards, vintage musicals, and rhythm and blues. It’s crowded in there. Most of the songs on “Keep Your Courage” could be categorized as “chamber pop” or “folkish,” and the album was made predominantly with acoustic instruments: piano, upright bass, drum kit, strings, woodwinds, brass. I’ve been heavily influenced by American “roots” music. It’s detectable in occasional vocal inflections, the use of colloquial expressions in the lyrics, or the combinations of instruments. The ghost of it is in there if you look.
When did you first become aware of this kind of music? As a child?
When I was sixteen, I borrowed Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” from the library in my home town of Jamestown, New York. It was a tattered, red, clothbound boxed set of LPs, mostly recordings made in the twenties and drawn from Smith’s esoteric collection—the songs of sharecroppers, miners, sailors, factory hands, cowboys; the sermons of rural preachers; the chants of Indigenous tribes; everyone that had any knowledge of preindustrial music. It’s so invaluable to us now. It’s difficult to describe how the music made me feel. “Transported,” I suppose, is the best word. I was taken by those albums to an America that had pretty much vanished. The pop songs that I’d grown up listening to in the sixties and seventies had traces of this music, but there was something at the core of it that time and progress had wiped out. Yet there it was, captured like a creature in amber.
You know, something that I’m worried about—and, as a board member, I’ve already started talking about this with other members and the staff—is that we have millions of artifacts in these collections, but they’ll languish underground without a population that has a desire to hear them. Even if they’re digitized and made accessible, they might vanish from our daily lives.
How does one avoid that?
We need to teach these songs and games to children. I think getting musicians into the classroom, or into any other building where kids gather, would be helpful. When I volunteered with Head Start, before the pandemic, I did classroom visits three days a week with a guitar player and a fiddler. The kids were just electrified by the simple ring games and songs we taught them. They realized that everything they needed was right there in that little circle.
Are there any specific old songs that changed your life after you discovered them?
There were several Anglo-Celtic ballads that helped me understand that many circ*mstances of life have changed little over the centuries. There’s a brutal song that I heard when I was a teen-ager. The chorus was [singing] “Beat your drum slowly and play the pipes lowly, / Sound your death march as you bear me along. / Into my grave, throw a handful of roses, / Say there goes the bloomin’ girl to her last home.” I believe it was originally written about a soldier who had died of venereal disease. But the lyrics were changed to be about a young girl who had died tragically from a self-abortion.
The girl’s mother finds her body and she tells her [singing], “Daughter, oh, daughter, why hadn’t you told me? / Why hadn’t you told me, we’d have took it in stride. / I might have found salt or pills of white mercury, / Now you are a young girl, cut down in your prime.” Maybe saltpeter or pills of white mercury were methods of abortion two hundred years ago? Instead of asking her mother for a solution, the girl ends an unwanted pregnancy alone and dies. I think the song was called “A Young Girl Cut Down in Her Prime.”
Have you ever sung that live?
No, I haven’t sung that song since I was a teen-ager, probably seventeen or so.
And you remember the melody and lyrics in toto?
I recorded it on a cassette when it played on a public-radio show, “The Thistle & Shamrock,” which I listened to every Sunday night, in the early eighties. I probably listened to it several times, and it’s just stayed with me. I can remember songs I was taught when I was four years old.
I have a very clear memory of two sweet hippie girls with long hair and wraparound skirts, smelling of patchouli, teaching us folk songs at our public library in the summer. They gave me a rowdy sea chantey that went [singing], “They blew us up like a tinderbox from keel to the highest sail, / And I alone am left to tell this eerie pirate tale, / This eerie pirate tale.” I haven’t sung that one, either, since I was a kid, but these songs must have shaped me musically.
It’s not even a photographic memory so much as a perfect aural memory.
It’s a curse and a charm. My daughter has the same affliction. She hears a song twice, and, like in a steel trap, it’s caught.
It seems that when it comes to budget cuts in public schools, the first programs to go are always the arts, or any funding for libraries.
We’re killing our culture. I believe early childhood and elementary school are the most deeply rooted, character-forming experiences. And it’s not just what the children are learning; it’s what teachers can learn about the children, through watching them be creative. All of that is lost when the arts are removed from the daily lives of children. There’s been so much subtle damage as a result of the digital revolution. All those hours of daily screen time! If we continue to neglect the public sector of this country, if we don’t nourish it, many parts of us will die. In fact, they are dying.
Were you allowed television as a child? I’ve found that artists who grew up in the seventies either watched zero TV or were inundated with it.
Television was allowed until my mother came home after a night with her girlfriends, I think in [in the seventies], and caught all four of her children—ages five, ten, eleven, and twelve—watching the movie “Lenny” [the bio-pic of the comedian Lenny Bruce, starring Dustin Hoffman]. She walked into the living room just as Lenny was dying of a drug overdose, totally nude, on a bathroom floor. She literally ripped the cable out of the wall—plaster went flying—and put the TV in her bedroom closet.
For a couple weeks, my brother would sneak it out, and we would try to watch anything—just anything. And my mom would come home and feel the back of the set, to see if the tubes had been lit while she was out. One day, after the tube test proved we’d been watching, she screamed, “That’s it! The God-damned TV! It’s out of the house!” She couldn’t stand us watching it—or having to watch us watch it. She said we looked like zombies. “Get out of the God-damned house! Go play outside! You’re kids, for Christ’s sake!”
A couple of years later, she married this crazy bohemian type, who’d built his house in the middle of the forest, surrounded by acres of woodland. Without the distraction of TV, my siblings and I would spend all our time in the forest, damming streams to make swimming holes, building forts, playing fox and rabbit in the thigh-deep snow. I planted my first vegetable garden at twelve, started writing poetry, keeping a journal, drawing, painting. My mother gave us the gift of a powerful connection to nature. At times, mine was mystical.
That sort of creativity made a comeback for so many of us—artists or not—during COVID. I wonder if we’ll look back at this strange, peculiar time and come to recognize common themes in art and music and movies.
Well, definitely. Everyone experienced an interruption of “normal life.” And, for a lot of people, that kind of put them in a tailspin. There was a lot of depression. I love my solitude, but give me five days alone in my house, in the country, with no contact with other people, and I start going batty. We’re social creatures.
We’re becoming such a contactless society. Yesterday, I walked to a supermarket in Washington, D.C., and I’d say every person under the age of forty was using the self-checkout. I actually like talking to my checkout person. These days, nobody wants to talk to you. They want to read their e-mails, text threads, and news feeds. I’ve had some life-changing conversations with people on public transportation. I recently talked to a woman on a flight home from Italy, for the entire eight-hour trip. She was my mother’s age, a painter, and she had moved to Venice decades earlier. She was great company, so funny and irreverent. The time went by so quickly. She said, “When I saw you sit down, I thought, Thank God.”
That may be the case. But was she aware that you could potentially write a song about her heard by millions?
Several years ago, I sat down next to a woman on the train who looked very distraught. Her eyes were red; I could tell she had been crying. It turned out her mother had died, and she was on her way to the funeral. And I thought, How awful for her to have to sit here carrying that. So she talked, and I listened. Through our conversation, she realized who I was and said, “You are one of my mom’s favorite artists.” She was convinced that her mother had a hand in our coming together for that journey.
Then again, I was recently talking to a man in New York City, being my friendly, just-down-from-the-country self. I guess he recognized that, because he reached in and took everything out of my wallet.
Natalie Merchant was mugged?
Robbed. This is a great New York story. I was in the city to receive the John Lennon Real Love Award [which recognizes artists for their activism]. I came out of Penn Station and was walking toward the line of cabs, and this guy approaches me, saying, “I’ll help you, I’ll help you.” I was, like, “O.K., I’ll give him a couple bucks.” He gets my stuff in the trunk, I open my wallet—and he just reaches in, grabs anything green, and runs down the street. The cabdriver started chasing him, and I yelled, “It’s not worth it!” I was thinking, That was the most gentle mugging I could imagine. It was a very loving robbery.
That brings us to the theme of your new album. The opener, “Big Girls,” is about how love can be deceiving. But by the last song, “The Feast of Saint Valentine,” you claim love will conquer all. That’s a big difference.
Love is definitely the theme of the album. During the pandemic, I was home with the person I love more than anyone, my daughter, but I had no male companion. So there was a craving for that after a couple of years.
I also think a lot of us had a deep period of retrospection. I unboxed sixty journals that I’d never read, that I wrote between 1981 and 2003. I did a lot of looking back on my life, and had a horrible health crisis, where I found myself signing the sort of papers that read, “If you die, who do you want to raise your child?” There was a lot of looking back at my relations to other people and my past. I suppose all that went into the music.
Let’s talk about “Song of Himself,” the album’s penultimate song. I’m a huge admirer of Walt Whitman’s work, but he isn’t a common subject for contemporary songwriters.
There aren’t a lot of people writing love songs to Walt Whitman. During my last trip to D.C., I met the head of the manuscripts department at the Library of Congress. She asked me if there was anything I’d like to see, and I said, “Please show me anything Walt Whitman touched.” She laid out an entire table of artifacts—his spectacles, a cast of his hand, his pocket diaries, a walking cane that had been carved for him by [the American conservationist and nature essayist] John Burroughs, with a silver tip and an engraved inscription. Let the others have their private jets, their Grammy after-parties. That, to me, was the most sublime perk I could have received.
Walt Whitman got me through the pandemic. He saw Americans at their very worst, when they were killing each other by the millions, and he still believed in the potential of this country. When he was in the war hospitals, he would visit the Confederate and the Union soldiers, and he wrecked his health taking care of them. He was looking after their souls. He read to them, talked with them, wrote letters home for them, and then wrote letters of condolence to their family, after they died. He brought them writing paper, oranges, jars of preserves and crackers—little acts of kindness. He went every day for three years.
There’s another song, “Tower of Babel,” which describes America as a house “broken in two.” Do you think that we’re capable of ever coming together?
Well, I always look at individuals rather than systems, because I think most of our systems are broken. Like our dependence on fossil fuel—that’s not sustainable. There’s nothing “sustainable” about our society; there’s only damage control. But, as far as “coming together” is concerned, life is short, and when you’re on your deathbed the only thing you’re going to be thinking about is love. I just wish we would give it more thought in the years leading up to that moment. We need to love each other more.
In 1995, in the Times, you said, “A lot of people say, if we’re going down, we should go down screaming. But I think if we’re going down maybe we should comfort each other.”
That’s what I’ve tried to do with music, for the most part—bring people comfort. If I had to sum up the mission of the past forty years, I’d say that’s it.
You tackled so many social issues early in your career, but few of them have been resolved or even addressed. I’m thinking, in particular, of 1989’s “Poison in the Well,” a song about toxic chemicals being dumped into the Love Canal, in western New York, in the forties and fifties, by the Hooker Chemical Company. A listener can’t help but compare that tragedy to the disaster now taking place in East Palestine, Ohio.
Or the municipal water supply in Flint? Or the thousands of people with PFOA-contaminated water sources? It may seem prescient now, but I was just paying attention to Lois Gibbs and all the other mothers in that poisoned neighborhood, who were sounding the alarm. Love Canal was a formative issue for me.
This is a revelation that I had recently: this is all I’ve ever done. I joined a band when I was sixteen, and other than being the granola girl at a co-op, and a student assistant at a print shop, this is the only job I’ve ever had. I’ve been able to observe and report my findings, through music, for several decades now.
I always found it odd when critics called you pretentious or self-serious. I thought it was refreshing, especially in the nineties, when we were surrounded by so much irony and snark.
“Preachy.” “Cause-y.” I got that for many years. I was young, but I took my role as a public person very seriously. I was writing songs about some weighty topics—teen-age pregnancy, nuclear proliferation, the Trail of Tears, Agent Orange, adult illiteracy, poverty, homelessness, inequity, alcoholism, colonialism. None of these were pop-song themes. I can understand how it confused or frustrated critics.
Everyone is reduced to a catchphrase, right? And there are far worse things than being “too serious.” But there were other songs, which were more personal than soapbox speeches.
I found one particularly nasty review from Rolling Stone, from 1995. The critic describes “Tigerlily” as having “blindly self-obsessed lyrics and lulling lite-rock arrangements.”
Who raised that man? If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. And who was right? The five million people who bought the record, or the guy who wrote that it provided the “perfect soundtrack for the Prozac nation?”
I left 10,000 Maniacs at the height of our popularity. The machine was primed to churn me into a formulaic superstar. Instead, I recorded “Tigerlily” with a band of not-so-experienced musicians, without a producer, and with my own money. I put a black-and-white photograph of myself on the cover. I don’t think I was even wearing makeup, and the video for my first single was just me wandering the streets of New York, taking pictures of other people. That album was intentionally understated. When I got responses like “shallow production,” I wanted to yell, “There was no production. There was no producer!”
To me, that’s what still makes the album so listenable. Thank God for the lack of nineties production.
It’s a very sweet record, and I really am proud of it. I rerecorded it, because I saw the flaws. [Merchant released “Paradise Is There: The New Tigerlily Recordings,” in 2015.] There’s something tyrannical about the one performance of a song that ends up on a record. Songs have such long lives—years, sometimes, before they’re recorded, and then you live with them for another thirty years after. I’ve played “Carnival” a thousand times, and every time it’s different. But most people only hear the time we captured it in the studio.
I was surprised to read that “Tigerlily” was a favorite of Aileen Wuornos, the nineties serial killer who led such a sad and violent life. She wanted “Carnival” played at her funeral. The album was such a beacon of hope for so many.
Yes. The only reason I knew that is because Nick Broomfield, the director of the documentary about her [2003’s “Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer”], wrote to my manager asking to include my music. My answer was “No, under no circ*mstances. Why would I want my music in a film about a serial killer?” But eventually he explained that “Tigerlily” was the album Aileen listened to obsessively. It gave her comfort when she was on death row. So I gave permission, though I’ve never been able to watch the film. I’m just too sensitive to that kind of subject matter.
I’ve always looked at my songs like little messages in bottles. There’s interview footage [in 2015’s “Paradise Is There—A Memoir by Natalie Merchant”] with an Iraq War veteran talking about how his sister sent him “Tigerlily,” and how my voice helped him survive the hell he was living through. You can’t predict who your songs will find after they leave your hands.
When fans tell you how much your music has meant to them, how do you react?
I’ll usually deflect and say, “And tell me about yourself.” Still, I’ve had that experience with music myself. When I lived in the hinterlands of western New York, Talking Heads was a band that landed like a meteor in an open field. I remember a group of friends and I drove a hundred and twenty miles, to and from Buffalo, to buy a copy of “Remain in Light.” We brought it home and danced barefoot on the floor of an old warehouse until dawn. I danced until my feet bled.
That band told me that there was an intellectual and creative life out there, somewhere, that I could be a part of. Eventually, I met David Byrne, and even recorded with him, but I still remember the excitement of discovering his music.
Life can be a slog, but, if you’re lucky, you might just be able to find your people.
I think the big corporate record companies always felt that the five million people [who bought “Tigerlily”] were my people. And I always felt that maybe that was an anomaly. Maybe the four hundred thousand people who have remained interested over the years are my people. They’re the crowd willing to take the whole journey.
That’s a very alternative aesthetic: putting out what you want, how you want to, regardless of possible sales. You’ve done this several times, including with 2010’s “Leave Your Sleep,” a record inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British poetry.
That was a complete passion project. I spent seven hundred thousand dollars making that record. The music industry was imploding, but I still wanted to work with a hundred and thirty-five musicians, and take a full year to record, and hire research assistants, and license photographs from archives, and create a beautiful package with an eighty-page book with an award-winning designer. It took ten years to recoup the expense, but I never regretted it. When I went solo, I decided that I had to become my own patroness to maintain creative autonomy.
In 2012, you told the Huffington Post that female pop musicians aren’t allowed to age gracefully. Do you still believe that?
Yeah, but luckily I’m not a pop musician. Nobody wants to age. It’s painful and diminishing. I hate not being able to do something physical without hurting the next day. I don’t enjoy seeing the laugh lines around my mouth and the crow’s-feet around my eyes. I am ninety per cent gray now. But you have to accept it with grace. You can inject Botox and silicone into your face, but in the end it all catches up. Your face is the map of your life. It reveals where you’ve been.
I’m happier and more comfortable than ever, and I have a quiet confidence that was lacking during my youth. Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be twenty again.
Do you see your influence on any of today’s bands or young songwriters?
I don’t see it, but when I meet them I hear about it, and I’m surprised and touched. It comes from unexpected places, like Allison Russell and Valerie June and Brandi Carlile, three women I’ve met in the last six months, who told me that my music was really important to them growing up. Imagine Brandi Carlile as an eighteen-year-old kid at Lilith Fair. [Lilith Fair was a music festival in the nineties, which featured solely female artists.] She told me, “You and Sarah McLachlan were an inspiration to me, seeing all those women sharing the same stage and being mutually supportive. That’s what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be.”
The first half of my career, I was always the youngest person in the room. And now, for the second half, I’m becoming the oldest person in the room. My daughter brought four friends home from college this weekend, and we were sitting around the kitchen table, talking. I mentioned something about the smell of a library card catalogue, and they admitted they’d never heard of such a thing. I explained what a card catalogue was, then moved on to the Dewey decimal system. I realized that these have become relics to my daughter’s generation. I could have been talking to them about the rigors of stagecoach travel or the best way to bone your corset.
I feel like it’s the responsibility of artists to say, “Hey, wait. We can’t lose everything in this rush to make everything so fast and efficient.” We’re sacrificing our privacy, our connection, our patience and process. This album was made in that spirit, and I hope it’s taken to heart by people who are looking for something that comes from a quiet, thoughtful place. I’ve been sharing it privately with friends, but it’s not the same as knowing that it’s going to be received by people all over the world. It’s wonderful to make music alone, but to share music together—that’s a special kind of communion. I miss it. I can’t wait to feel it.♦
