Today we are wishing a very happy 60th birthday to one of my favourite singers - Natalie Anne Merchant - born on this day 1963, in Jamestown New York.
Born in upstate New York in an Italian family - Merchant's paternal grandfather was a Mercante who hailed from Sicily - she was the third of four children, brought up by her mother on classical music, show tunes, jazz and pop.
In a New Yorker interview, she tells of her early encounter with folk music. "When I was 16, I borrowed Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk from the library in my hometown of Jamestown... the songs of sharecroppers, miners, sailors, factory hands, cowboys; the sermons of rural preachers; the chants of Indigenous Tribes.... It's difficult to describe how the music made me feel."
A Maniac!
In 1981, now at Jamestown Community College, she joined the band Still Life, at that time consisting of musicians, Dennis Drew (keyboards), Steve Gustafson (bass), Robert Buck (guitar), Chet Cardinale (drums) and Terrie Newhouse (Buck's ex-wife) on vocals. Newhouse left, making way for the young Natalie, with John Lombardo also joining on guitar from another local band, The Mills. Cardinale also left, with a succession of drummers filling his boots until a more permanent replacement could be found.
Burns Victims was considered as a name (thankfully not for long) before the group finally became 10,000 Maniacs (referencing the 1964 low budget movie, Two Thousand Maniacs). Their first gig was on 7 September 1981, with Tim Edberg being the drummer on this occasion.
They settled into a routine, with Merchant writing the lyrics and Lombardo much of the music. They managed to cobble together an EP, Human Conflict #5, in March 1982, largely financed by Drew's mum. The following year a permanent drummer was finally uncovered with the arrival of Jerome Augustyniak (from local punk band, The Stains).
Debut album Secrets Of The I Ching was issued by their own Christian Burial Music, but pressed by Mark Records - getting picked up by illustrious late night BBC DJ John Peel. By the end of 1984, Englishman (and future band manager) Peter Leak had helped them sign to Elektra Records, for whom they recorded follow up album, The Wishing Chair, with legendary folk producer Joe Boyd (Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake) in 1985.
Lombardo left the band in 1986. Peter Asher (half of 60s duo Peter & Gordon, and brother of Jane) took over in the producer's chair for third album, In My Tribe, which got the band into the US Top40 (the album peaking at #37). He was also there for 1989's Blind Man's Zoo, which hit the heady heights of #13.
As the 90s dawned, things were changing. Merchant had started working with a homeless youth group in Harlem - and also decided that being in a group was too restricting. Realising the impact this would have on her bandmates, she gave them two years notice. This was enough time for them to record and tour one last album, Our Time In Eden. They got a second invite to the MTV Unplugged series, which was released as an album in 1993 as a kind of code to Merchant's time in the band.
Going solo:
Her solo debut album, Tigerlily, outdid anything she had managed with the Maniacs. It eventually shipped five million copies, and spawned three Top40 singles, including Carnival, which made the Top10. It did not go down well with many critics, Rolling Stone were particularly scathing calling it "music for the prozac generation." But it was done with a new set of musicians in a very low-key way and without a producer, so its eventual success is quite staggering. Merchant recalled, "That album was intentionally understated. When I got responses like 'shallow production', I wanted to yell, 'there was no production, there was no producer!'"
Follow up Ophelia had a much lusher arrangement than its predecessor. Merchant got a call from Sarah McLachlan to join the new Lilith Fair US tour for female artists, which further increased her exposure. The mature Motherland came out in 2001, before House Carpenter's Daughter was put out on her own Myth America label in 2003.
She married Daniel de la Calle in 2003 (whom she was with until around 2011) and had a daughter, Lucia. With motherhood, her musical output became sparser. There was not much music until 2010s poetry based Leave Your Sleep, the eponymous Natalie Merchant in 2014, a few other contributions and re-workings, before this years new work - Keep Your Courage. No Depression were happy to see her return to work:
Simply put the album is marvellous. To go a little deeper than that, Merchant's latest is full of ambitious musical passages, thoughtful lyrics and fantastic vocal performances centred on the need for love and meaningful human connection.
Volunteering:
In 2013, Merchant had directed a short video, Shelter: A Concert Film To Benefit Victims Of Domestic Violence, about women in the mid-Hudson region. She continues to volunteer three days a week for Head Start, a music programme in Troy, NY, for children from deprived backgrounds. Thirty years ago she was volunteering at a homeless programme in Harlem, where many of the locals assumed she was just a student at nearby Colombia University.
She has also been active on environmental issues - such as getting involved with anti-fracking campaigns in her home state in the 2010s (a cause Yoko Ono was also involved in).
In 2019, she was the sixth recipient of the John Lennon Real Love Award for her activism. She said, "To have any connection to John Lennon, especially with activism, is quite prestigious and meaningful to me because he was one of the main artists who inspired me when I was growing up to think about the wider world and my impact on it."
She was also nominated by Senator Chuck Schumer to be on the board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. This is a six year term for a group that is committed to working with community arts organisations across the US, in an effort to keep alive traditional arts and crafts.
Natalie and Michael:
The depth of her relationship with REM frontman Michael Stipe was a frequent source of gossip in the mid-80s. They have been friends since the early 80s, were intimate for a while, and clearly retain a huge amount of respect for each other. Merchant remembered their second meeting, at a 1983 REM gig in Buffalo - "I felt that Michael had began to understand why I'd sought him out, and he must have thought I was pretty cute, because we went on to become lovers." Stipe said of her, in that same interview in The Independent, "Natalie was really the reason my work became politicised in the late 80s. The work she was doing was real and important - all about the human condition. It was a very accurate reflection of the power and greed of the time, and I was impressed by her understanding."
Merchant recounted their early meeting in an interview with Steve Baltin in Forbes in 2019. "I was writing a song called Among The Americans, about the ghosts of Native Americans and all the places I would go on tour.... So I told him I was writing this song and I challenged him to write a song. And he wrote Green Grow The Rushes [on 1985s Fables Of The Reconstruction]. And I met Billy Bragg around the same time and I remember that in combination with Billy, really pushed me to become more overtly political maybe."
Natalie the singer-songwriter:
As she is in her fifth decade of making music, she has frequently defied being pigeonholed - or at least not caring much about what critics tried to label her as. While Stipe his behind cryptic, often mumbled lyrics, Merchant was always clear on what was bugging her in the world, what she was reading and who inspired her.
Vogue once described Natalie Merchant as, "perhaps the most successful and enduring alternative artist to emerge from the eighties - intact and uncompromising."
The New Yorker summed her up - "Critics were eager to categorise her, but found it difficult to do so. Was she a swirly 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."
Stipe talked of her credentials in that 1998 Independent interview. "In the press she's often portrayed as a bit of a saddo - this flighty, hippy girl who preaches from on high. I think she's been pigeonholed as a certain kind of female performer, but she's very smart and funny and doesn't need to prove herself to anybody."
Natalie Merchant: A Mini Playlist
Here are five great tracks from across the last four decades, for you.
My Mother The War (The Wishing Chair) - a little heavier and more 'out there' than some of the other folk-rock fare on the album. This version is from Channel 4's The Tube - and features that whirling dervish Natalie in one of the band's earliest tb appearances.
Don't Talk (In My Tribe) - a beautiful and powerful moment from what was probably 10,000 Maniacs strongest record. Here they are on UK tv that year.
Stockton Gala Days (Our Time In Eden) - a cartwheel through a hazy summer meadow - this was a fine swansong from her time with the Maniacs. This is the MTV Unplugged version.
Wonder (Tigerlily) - a joyous introduction to life as a solo artist - this version comes from her appearance on David Letterman.
Tower Of Babel (Keep Your Courage) - a bit of punchy brass and soulful R&B.
Happy Birthday Natalie