Interwiew to Natalie (english).

Natalie Merchant 

The 10,000 Maniacs singer talks Spanish knife fights, how the Hunger Games ruined her album title and the inspiration behind the song.

SOURCE ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE

In the thirteen years since her last album of original songs, Natalie Merchant got married, had a daughter and got divorced. So maybe it's not surprising that the lead single from Natalie Merchant, "Ladybird," has lyrics directed at a woman wondering whether she can fly away from her domestic life. A lilting lullaby for happier times, the song is vintage Merchant, who rose to fame in the Eighties as the lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs. We caught up with Merchant for a conversation about her music and her fondness for the utopian communities of upstate New York.

Why is the album self-titled?

I couldn't come up with a single word or short phrase that summed it up. The only thing that summed up the record was my singing and writing. Also, I had always wanted to call this album The Hunger Banquet, and then The Hunger Games happened. It's not fair! I've had that title for twenty years.

Why make this album now after all these years?

I was compelled. It felt overdue. I made Motherland in 2001, and in order to make Motherland, I had to shelve half the material that I had written. Then I made The House Carpenter's Daughter, which meant that all the songs I wrote in the subsequent two years I shelved. And then I wrote fifty adaptations of poems that all had a thematic thread, which was childhood, so I worked on that record [Leave Your Sleep] for five years, and all the while, just kept writing, writing, writing. I was anxious to get these songs down on – we can't say tape anymore, can we? I don't even know how to talk about music anymore. I do still believe in the album: I hereby swear that I believe in a body of work that represents a period of time, like a novel or a show that a painter might launch after three years of seclusion and painting. So I'll keep calling it an album.

Was it hard to winnow down that stockpile of songs?

It was and wasn't – those songs all seem to have a certain potency to them, and when I would hold up any other song that was lighter, it didn't fit. In the days of the big record company boardroom meeting, I'm sure someone would have asked, "Where's the single?" But I felt like these songs belonged together and this album needed to be made.

What was the spark behind "Ladybird"?

When I create the characters, they're usually composites, and either I inhabit the character or I dialogue with the character – "Ladybird" is definitely one of the dialogues. I was able to understand the situation that the woman was in because I had grown into being married and having a child, and now I've grown into being divorced with a child. It's a painful, difficult thing to do, to accept that a marriage is unsatisfying. It slowly dies. Or you have to murder it.

What's your greatest vice?

It's embarrassing, because my vice is in some respects a virtue: my compulsive organizational impulse. Sometimes I wish I could let things be in chaos – I cannot go to bed with dishes in the sink. I sacrifice spontaneity because of that: Is this going to cause a mess?

A young child is a force of anarchy, though.

My daughter saved me. I'd be so much worse if I didn't have a little cyclone, constantly bringing tiny things to the living room. She has an ample room with lots of closets and drawers and plenty of space for all her little things, but she's just constantly migrating them into the living room.

Do you feel like you're settled in your home now?

Well, I've lived in the Hudson Valley for half my life, always lived in rural New York. So it does feel very comfortable. The Hudson Valley is great: there's a huge community of artists up there, a big locavore movement, lots of young people moving up from the city who want to farm. You go to the co-op and everyone's talking about their chickens and their compost and their worms. Last year, my sun porch had 45 tomato plants, and I have a communal garden with a couple of my neighbors. It's great except for the five months of the years when you can't go outside and you curse your very existence.

From Natalie Merchant, a Literary Tour.

A few weeks ago Natalie Merchant was pondering what the promotional sticker should say on the package of her new album, “Leave Your Sleep.” She was worried that “the P-word,” as she put it, might deter potential listeners.

The P-word? What unseemly term could Ms. Merchant, one of pop’s most kindly and conscientious voices for nearly three decades, possibly need to hide behind an initial? “Poetry,” she said, in an interview at her home in the Hudson Valley.

The word does not appear on the sticker. Yet poetry is inseparable from “Leave Your Sleep,” Ms. Merchant’s first album since 2003, which was released on Nonesuch last week. In the 1980s and ’90s, when she was the lead singer for 10,000 Maniacs and released solo albums, Ms. Merchant wrote her own lyrics — about topics like utopian communes, faith healing and the daze of materialism — on albums of thoughtful yet somehow million-selling folk-pop. But for “Leave Your Sleep,” Ms. Merchant decided to set other people’s poetry to music: poems from Victorian England and Jazz Age America, from E. E. Cummings and Mother Goose. (The album title is also from a Mother Goose rhyme.)

Ms. Merchant, 46, was sitting at her computer in her neat, sunny home office, where a Tibetan thangka painting of Tara, the goddess of compassion, hung over a bed. A small keyboard and a microphone sat on a table. Ms. Merchant composed most of the album there, using her computer’s elementary recording program, GarageBand.

Bookshelves and containers held the other makings of “Leave Your Sleep.” There were proofs of the album package; Ms. Merchant chose a book designer, David Pearson, rather than a CD art director. There were poetry books along with biographies, literary criticism and histories, some with tabs attached to pages Ms. Merchant might want to revisit. As she talked about the poets, bubbling over with biographical details, she pulled out old editions for show and tell.

Poetry isn’t the only thing that makes “Leave Your Sleep” difficult to sum up on a sticker. So does music that leaps around more than a dozen idioms, from Appalachian to orchestral to jazz. “Leave Your Sleep” is also an album about childhood, but not a children’s album. The project had its beginnings in the poems Ms. Merchant read to her daughter, Lúcia, whose birth in 2003 led to what Ms. Merchant has called a “maternity leave” from her pop career.

She didn’t stop working. She spent a year archiving and indexing her lyrics, videos and memorabilia for her extensive Web site, nataliemerchant.com. She wrote and recorded some 20 songs of her own, in versions polished enough for an album, and she wrote music to 50 poems for what started as a lullaby album and grew into “Leave Your Sleep.”

“I was breast-feeding six hours a day, and I felt this burst of creative energy,” she recalled. “In my mind I had all these visions of projects I wanted to do and things I wanted to make, but I couldn’t leave my chair, and I had my hands full. So I just put a tape recorder next to the chair where I was nursing, and I would start singing into it, and that’s where the first songs came from. I didn’t really have time to focus on writing lyrics.”

The poems she chose encompass lullaby, elegy, fantasy, nonsense and tall tales, often with plucky heroines like “Griselda,” a ravenous girl whose story is set to jovial Memphis soul, or Isabel in Ogden Nash’s “Adventures of Isabel,” who overpowers a witch and a giant to a Cajun tune.

“I narrowed the field to poetry that related to motherhood or childhood, because that’s the world I was living in,” Ms. Merchant said. “Some people see that as a valid place of exploration and others just think it’s trivial — oh, another female artist has gone off and had a kid and wants to tell us about it. But it’s about being human to me.”

Luckily, “Leave Your Sleep” is not the kind of perky singalong, lullaby collection or instructional ditties that are generally classified as a children’s album. Its songs touch on somber topics, like war and death, as well as more whimsical ones. Through the years Ms. Merchant has generally stayed serious and thoughtful, but “Leave Your Sleep” often has a twinkle in its eye.

It also has melodies that often sound as natural as folk songs, while the poetry led Ms. Merchant far afield musically. “With some of the music I really contradicted the subject matter or the time that the poet wrote,” she said. “Other times I tried to align myself with what they had written and who they were.” That led, for instance, to having a Chinese traditional ensemble accompany the Chinoiserie of “The King of China’s Daughter,” but also to setting a Victorian English fancy, “Topsyturvey-World,” to reggae. Other songs dip into bluegrass, klezmer, Baroque, R&B, American Indian chant and Celtic music.

Instead of having one band try to approximate them all, Ms. Merchant called on specialists: the Klezmatics; the Irish band Lunasa; Wynton Marsalis; the Fairfield Four gospel singers; the jazz-funk jam band Medeski, Martin & Wood; and members of the New York Philharmonic. The project eventually involved more than 100 musicians and ended up as a 26-song double album. (There’s also a one-CD version.)Andres Levin, who produced the album with Ms. Merchant, cheerfully described it as “this monstrous vision, this bigger-than-life project.”

The musicians and Ms. Merchant performed as a live group in the studio, under tight time constraints. Some had heard the songs in advance; some had not. “We had each set of players and musicians for 24 hours, sometimes less,” Mr. Levin said. “An Irish band would show up, and we’d have one full day to not only bring to life this idea that was demoed, but also get a take and make a swift decision about whether it’s working or not.”

In an era of dwindling album sales and budgets to match, the mere existence of “Leave Your Sleep” is as far-fetched as some of the fantasies Ms. Merchant sings. The album would have been an anomaly even in the flush bygone days of the recording business, since the music barely grazes current radio formats. Now it’s almost unimaginable for an independent musician to work on that scale.

But during her 17 years on a major label, Elektra, Ms. Merchant had multimillion-selling albums — her 1995 “Tigerlily” is certified as quintuple platinum — and she toured diligently. Her final studio album for Elektra, the 2001 “Motherland,” sold a relatively disappointing half a million copies, and her experience at the label left her demoralized, she said, by the time her contract expired in 2002. Constant touring had also worn her down. “I didn’t intend to make records anymore,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do anymore.”

In 2003, the year she turned 40, Ms. Merchant married Daniel de la Calle, a Spanish documentary filmmaker. Shortly before their daughter was born, she started her own label, Myth America, to release “The House Carpenter’s Daughter,” an album of folk songs she had played on a summer tour in 2000. It came from four days of live-in-the-studio sessions she held to document her road-tested band. But she didn’t want to run a label; Myth America, she said, now “exists only on paper.” As late as 2008, when she re-emerged with a handful of performances, she wasn’t sure what she would do with her poetry project.

“There really is not a record label in the world that would have listened to me, listened to those demos and said, ‘All right, we’ll give you $700,000, Natalie,’ ” she said with a laugh. “There was a budget, and then we just exceeded it, and there was another budget, and we exceeded it. It ended up just being astronomical.”

In the end she financed “Leave Your Sleep” herself and brought the completed songs to Nonesuch Records, where she now has a two-album contract.

“It’s a pretty rare project,” said Robert Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch, in a telephone interview. “I can’t think of anything quite like it. In a world where there’s 25,000 to 50,000 records coming out each year, that’s a pretty big accomplishment in itself.”

Mr. Hurwitz added that the packaging for the album — a hardbound 80-page book with photographs and poetry texts, extensively researched and annotated — was “like making a couple of records in itself.”

“It’s against the grain of what’s going on in the record business, with prices being pushed down at a rapid pace,” he said. “But there’s still an audience for a project that’s a little more handcrafted.”

Ms. Merchant showed a visitor large prints of the poets’ photographs that appear in the album book. She lovingly pointed out details like the “aerodynamic facial hair” of Charles E. Carryl — the stockbroker behind two songs, “The Sleepy Giant” and “The Walloping Window Blind” — and the carnation in the mouth of a rakish Jack Prelutsky, who was a Greenwich Village folkie in the ’60s and was named the Children’s Poet Laureate of 2006.

“Once I picked the poems, I wanted to know more about these people, because I had never collaborated with dead people or strangers,” Ms. Merchant said. “I’ve spent so much time looking at these photographs. Who are you people?”

She’s well acquainted with them now: a child prodigy (Nathalia Crane, who was described in 1925 as “the baby Browning of Brooklyn”), a 19th-century crusader for American Indian rights (Lydia Huntley Sigourney), a preacher and secret bigamist whose two families met at his funeral (William Brighty Rands) and an Englishwoman who turned down being named a dame of the British Empire (Eleanor Farjeon), saying, “I do not want to become different from the milkman.” Ms. Merchant and researchers tracked down rights to the poems, racking up huge legal fees.

Ms. Merchant also drew dozens of illustrations of characters in the poems. “For me there’s a narrative that flows through it,” she said. “The secret agenda of this project — which I will now make public — is that it’s supposed to be a multimedia theater production.”

Ms. Merchant has other aspirations. The songs she has been writing since 2001 await release in some form. And she has found a cloistered convent in the south of Spain where she could stay and write music for liturgical texts. “I wanted to live inside the walls,” she said. “It’s definitely a way of life that will pass from the earth. I imagine it must be like being in the company of people from another century.”

In the meantime she’s touring again: shows at theaters in the United States and Europe, and dates with literary pedigrees, like the PEN World Voices Festival (on May 1 at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village) and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Those audiences, she can be sure, won’t be daunted by the P-word.

                                                                                           Source by the New York Times.

Natalie Merchant, Accidental Prophet

PROTEST singer is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Natalie Merchant. Best known for her diffidently seductive vocals and Earth Mother persona as the lead singer of the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs, Ms. Merchant is today a million-selling solo act writing and singing for the most part about love, both its passion and pain.

Her left-of-center politics, while hardly a secret, had rarely figured in her music before ''Motherland,'' her most recent CD, which was released last fall. It is not a relentlessly political album -- a handful of its songs address familiar Merchant subjects. But the rest speak with a fiercely confrontational voice.

''Soon come the day this tinderbox is gonna blow in your face,'' Ms. Merchant sings on the album's first cut, ''This House Is on Fire!'' an apocalyptic song delivered over a snaking Arabic string arrangement. ''There's a wildfire catching in the whip of the wind that could start a conflagration like there has never been.''

These lyrics sound as if they were written in response to the events of Sept. 11. In fact, the recording sessions for ''Motherland'' were completed days before. ''I had already sequenced the album,'' Ms. Merchant, 38, said recently over tea at a Greenwich Village cafe. '' 'This House Is on Fire!' had already been mastered.''

The song has been a mainstay of her world tour to promote the album, which ends on Saturday at Jones Beach on Long Island. Its seeming prescience continues to unnerve her, though.

''The Cassandra syndrome?'' Ms. Merchant asked rhetorically. ''Oh, yeah. The album was supposed to be about oppression. I wasn't trying to evoke a particular conflict-ridden region of the world. Basically I didn't want the song to sound like a straight reggae tune. Now it just sounds like the soundtrack to the towers coming down.''

The album's title song sounds similarly prophetic but far more consoling. ''Take one last look behind,'' Ms. Merchant sings. ''Commit this to memory and mind. / Don't miss this wasteland, this terrible place,/ When you leave,/ Keep your heart off your sleeve.''

''A lot of people told me that song made them cry in the weeks after the attack,'' Ms. Merchant said. ''I don't know. I figure the warning signs were there -- there was an inevitability about events. Maybe not on that scale, but something was bound to happen. I guess I was just more receptive.''

Her original concept for the photograph on the album cover was a picture of children in a field wearing oxygen masks. ''We shot these kids in upstate New York on Sept 10,'' she recalled. ''And then we were going to reshoot on the 11th. Of course we canceled the session. The day I brought the pictures into the city, there were articles on the run here for Cipro and gas masks. I was getting pressure, anyway, from the record label, friends even, that the image was too controversial. So finally I gave in.'' A photograph of a demure-looking Ms. Merchant was used instead.

Brian Cohen, a senior vice president for marketing at Elektra Entertainment Group, said the decision to tone down the cover ''was not a confrontation, just a discussion.''

''The music was never a concern,'' he continued. ''We gave her our input and she made her decision.''

''Motherland'' began to sell immediately after its release in November, going gold (500,000 copies) in a matter of weeks. While many of Ms. Merchant's previous records had sold in the millions, sales of ''Motherland'' have been, as Mr. Cohen put it, ''in this environment, a great performance.''

Ms. Merchant, who was born and still lives in upstate New York, was, in her own words, ''a child of the peacenik generation.'' She has her own explanation for the album's success. ''I think a lot of people have been insulted by how quickly the media has reverted to business as usual since 9/11,'' she said. ''I think many were expecting a revolution in the way people behave. They're craving authenticity and seriousness and genuine emotion.''

But she sometimes wonders what audiences are actually hearing. The album's third song, ''Saint Judas,'' is an evocation of Southern lynchings.

''When I go through a list of states where lynching occurred the most, people at concerts down South will cheer,'' she said. ''I'm rattling off states that performed atrocities, and when I get to theirs, they go, 'Woo-woo!' ''

From Bob Dylan's ''Blowin' in the Wind'' to Andy Razaf and Fats Waller's ''Black and Blue,'' political protest has a time-honored place in American popular music, touching nerves and selling records by saying in song things that many Americans have perhaps not wanted to hear.

Ms. Merchant suggests that 9/11 has changed all that, at least for the moment. ''It sure doesn't feel safe to be critical anymore,'' she said. ''Unpatriotic? The most patriotic act I can perform is to be outspoken. Maybe we are in a situation where those rights have to be temporarily suspended. I've never been in a country like that, though.''

Mr. Cohen is more sanguine. ''I don't know that the subject is forbidden at all,'' he said. ''I definitely think there's room for it in pop music; in fact, I hope I'm not just being nostalgic when I say it's coming back.''

So is there anything Ms. Merchant would change about her album if she could?

''I'd take out one song, 'Not in This Life,' '' she said, referring to a midtempo meditation on love, ''because it seems frivolous to me now. And I'd put back a song called 'The End,' which probably would have gotten me in trouble. Part of the lyric goes: 'That'll be the end of war/ the end of the law of Bible, of Koran, Torah.' I really wanted to put it on the record, but I felt there was so much serious material already that I chose something lighter, for balance.

''I don't like to put out albums that don't have hope. But the omission of that song is my only major regret.''

                                                                                                                                            Natalie Merchant.