Natalie Merchant’s music has always been marked with the air of a performer wise beyond her years, even when she was in her teens and twenties and fronting 1980s alt-rock staples 10,000 Maniacs. So after also creating the layered, literate, and omnipresent solo hits that fill our ears every time we step into the supermarket, can she go any deeper into the well? The answer, as evidenced by Natalie Merchant (Nonesuch Records), her sixth and newest studio album since leaving 10,000 Maniacs in 1994, is apparently this: Yes, much. On the eponymous, self-produced release—her first all-originals set since 2001’s Motherland (Elektra Records)—Merchant imbues songs like the powerfully inward-looking “Ladybird” and “Giving Up Everything” with newfound awareness and an assured, direct approach steeped in the lessons of life. A life lived by an artist examining not only herself, but the world around her as well. Below, she answers a few questions from the road about the new record, her work as a social activist, and other topics. Natalie Merchant will perform at the Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston on July 3 at 8pm. Simi Stone will open. Tickets are $55 and $75. (845) 339-6088; Bardavon.org.
Natalie Merchant is your first album of all-original material in 13 years, which is quite a while. How far back do these songs date?
The songs on this album are drawn from 14 years of songwriting. During this period of time I recorded American and British folk music (2003’s The House Carpenter’s Daughter; Myth America Records) and adapted dozens of poems to music (2010’s Leave Your Sleep; Nonesuch). All the while that I was working on these projects, I was quietly and consistently writing original material, incorporating all the lessons that traditional ballads and classic poems offered.
Your last release, Leave Your Sleep, is a double album of music you set to the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, E. E. Cummings, and other writers. Although you’d been famously known for your renditions of other artists’s lyrics prior to making that album, was immersing yourself in the words of others to such a degree a powerful learning experience for you as a lyricist? How did the process of making of Leave Your Sleep inspire/inform the songs on the new album?
I think the influence that these experiments with poetry had upon my writing was very subtle but my appreciation for simple and direct language has grown deeper. And I tend to make greater use of idiomatic expressions. They are packed full of meaning and that can be useful in lyric writing, which demands strict economy. I’ve always used personal narrative as a means of delivering messages and these new songs are full of testimony and portraiture. I like creating characters and then dialoging with them inside the songs. The five-year process of making Leave Your Sleep left me longing for a more direct form of self-expression, to speak for myself again in my own words.
You recently toured with a children’s concert program based on Leave Your Sleep, which included a date at Carnegie Hall. Can you describe the program? Is it something you plan to revisit or develop further?
The orchestral concert for children that I’ve developed over the past two years is a magical thing. It involves a 12-piece chamber ensemble and projected images from the picture book based on the songs from Leave Your Sleep illustrated by Barbara McClintock. We have done the show in other American cities with other orchestras. My favorite was in Las Vegas in February, the Smith Center bussed 3,000 inner-city school children in first through fourth grades. It was the first time most of the children had ever been inside a concert hall or seen an orchestral show. They were so well behaved, attentive, and visibly enchanted by the music and images. Exposure to the arts during these formative years is so important. I honestly think it can change lives. It changed mine.
You’ve long been known as an activist involved in various social and environmental causes. How has that side of your life impacted your art itself?
I’m convinced that I would have been involved in community organizing on some level, whether or not I had become a public figure. I don’t know where the impulse to pitch in comes from, but it’s been there for years. I don’t think every artist needs to feel or do the same. I just see that my skill set includes the ability to draw large groups of people together and focus their attention for brief periods of time. I like to do this for the good people I meet who are too deep in the trenches fighting the good fight to organize big public events or publicity alone. The community advocates that I’ve met and helped here in the Hudson Valley are such phenomenal people. It’s been a pleasure to know them and be included in some small way in their important work. Regarding the impact on my creativity: With both the Shelter and Dear Governor Cuomo [documentary film] projects, I’ve found a new form of expression that combines music and message in a powerful way that moves, informs, and causes people to act.
For those who haven’t seen Shelter or Dear Governor Cuomo, what are they about and why was it important to you personally to be involved in them?
Dear Governor Cuomo is a film that Jon Bowermaster and Alex Gibney made to help draw more people into the debate over hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in New York State. I helped organize a concert and rally in Albany with a coalition of 100 grass-roots anti-fracking organizations on the eve of their consolidation into one large umbrella group, New Yorkers Against Fracking (May 15, 2012). The program included a succession of speeches by scientists, environmentalists, activists, musicians, actors, and victims of contamination interwoven with relevant music. The film has now been seen by hundreds of thousands in not just New York but worldwide through the Internet. Shelter is an event film that was made a year later on the same model, but this time the topic was domestic violence. The making of this film caused profound changes in the way that I view the Hudson Valley. We have an insidious crisis here that manages to remain hidden in the shadows. We gathered staggering statistics to demonstrate the scale and scope of it: In 2012, there were 4,928 domestic incident reports filed in Dutchess County resulting in 1,236 arrests. In Ulster County, there were 3,180 incident reports with 567 arrests. In the past 15 years there have been 40 homicides in our two counties.
You’ve played at other Hudson Valley venues before and since you became a local resident. But UPAC seems to be your “home venue,” as you’ve played there many times, the last occasion being 2011’s Shelter from the Storm benefit for victims of Hurricane Irene. What can the audience expect this time out, in terms of the song selection and presentation?
I will have a nine-piece band including string quintet, piano, drums, and guitar. We’ll be playing new songs and a variety of songs from various past albums. My problem these days is that I have waaaaay too many songs. I just played last night here in London for three hours and had left plenty songs untouched.
This article appears in June 2014.
