Full Name: Natalie Anne Merchant
-Natalie Merchant Online
Aliases: NAM, NM, Miss Merchant and Nat
Born: October 26, 1963
Residence: Upstate New York
Ethnic Background: Italian and Irish
Former Band: 10,000 Maniacs
First TV Performance: The Tube (England,1985)
Favorite Food: Corn ("It's extremely versatile: cornbread, corn on the cob, corn muffins, cornmeal mush, corn flakes...I just like it." -Natalie Merchant)
Favorite Song She Has Written: Dust Bowl
Just as rock journalism tends to mythologize male artists' exploits, it tends to do the same to female artists' emotions. Most writers tend to praise women for their lyrics, and if the music is mentioned, it is because of mood, not melody.
Natalie Merchant has seen both sides of this leaving train. She arrived on it, garnering praise for her lyric-writing and creation of a feel for 10,000 Maniacs. Her vocals and words allowed her to create worlds and say things that would otherwise have been denied her. But there is a trap to this- one which she
realized might lead her in a different direction from the Maniacs. As with many bands, it is what you are loved for most that you most try to escape.
In 1981, a band that had been variously known as Still Life and the Burn Victims, but was then known as 10,000 Maniacs (altered from a B-movie title, 2000 Maniacs), was playing gigs around
Jamestown, NY. Jamestown was a small city a few hours south of Buffalo, whose major feature might have been the Community College. It was the radio station at that college that drew the 16-year-old Merchant, in high school but taking college classes there, to the rest of the band. After attending a number of gigs
where Steve Gustafson, Jerry Augustyniak, John Lombardo, and Robert Buck played as 10,000 Maniacs, Merchant was invited up on stage to sing.
The band was impressed. In school, she was timid. She felt like an adult among children; most of her friends were teachers. But on stage, she danced barefoot. She had an interesting voice, almost resistant to simple physical location, and could improvise lyrics. She used the latter talent to write poetry
as well. After she joined the band, most of these poems became songs. The band released an EP within a year: Human Conflict Number Five, on their own Christian Burial Music label.
But Merchant was only 16 in 1981- and her mother hated the band. Steve Gustafson told Anthony DeCurtis that "she thought we were having all these orgies and selling drugs." Merchant would sneak out to perform. Her mother would then "come down and drag her out... and yell at her and make her go home."
Their first song was "Tension," which was based on an English paper Natalie had written describing the objects in her grandparents' home. Decades of life togther had produced a number of artifacts and coincidental arrangements. In the song, she finds objects as indices: a wedding chalice, photographs, a
crucifix. "A thought mistaken for a memory clear the dust from smiles in boxes, pass a patterned wall
recall their voices..."
By 1983, the band was locally popular and had released another album, Secrets of the I Ching, which, like the first, was produced thanks to a sound-engineering school at SUNY Fredonia. These albums were collected in 1990 as Hope Chest. One cut got the attention of the influential British DJ John Peel, who
made "My Mother the War" the Maniacs' breakthrough song in Britain. They toured there, and got a taste of popular success.
Their local popularity led to their signing by Elektra Records, for whom they recorded The Wishing Chair in 1986. Elektra tried to restyle the band, according to Robert Buck, but was pretty unsuccessful. The stylist brought in wanted to "make us look like the Human League,"Buck told Anthony DeCurtis, but gave up. "He was really nice about it. He's going, 'I'm sorry. There's obviously nothing I can do for you. You people are hicks. The best thing you can do is accentuate the fact that you're hicks.'"
The upstate origins influenced more than just the band's look. Coming from a depressed ex-factory town, Merchant and the band
noticed with pain the destruction of people and environment that our post-industrial economy was causing. Her songs had always been socially conscious ("My Mother the War" was a war protest song), but often in the mid to late-eighties they
began to take on a very direct subject matter. Exploitation of human and natural resources was a common theme in these years, as evidenced by the song "A Campfire Song," from their 1987 release In My Tribe.
In My Tribe was their most successful record yet. The video for "Like the Weather" garnered MTV and VH1 airplay and broke the band in the states. The album also included "What's The Matter Here?," about child abuse.
Their solidarity with the spirit (if not the vagueness) of sixties peace anthems led them to include the Cat Stevens classic "Peace Train." The video featured the band on a raft floating downstream while children ran through the fields to the riverside. Band members seemed visibly embarassed about the video when interviewed in 1993; Drew told Kim France, "We tried to be in some of the videos, and it was such a horrifying embarassment... Did you ever see the 'Peace Train' video? Uccch." They refuse to perform the song anymore- because Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in
the wake of The Satanic Verses.
10,000 Maniacs opened for R.E.M. in a series of shows, and Merchant and Michael Stipe began to be linked romantically in the press. They refused to confirm or deny the rumors, but they were certainly very good friends. It was from her association from Stipe that Merchant picked up her wary strategy of
dealing with the media. Some have also noted that Stipe's influence made her lyrical politics more complex, more nuanced. (He appears as a guest vocalist on "A Campfire Song".)
From In My Tribe on, you can view her lyrics and Stipe's as in dialogue. Both evolved from an overtly politicized lyric around the time of 1989's Blind Man's Zoo (and R.E.M.'s Green) to a more introspective style around 1995's Tigerlily (and Automatic For The People). This latter, introspective style doesn't ignore
politics: rather, where an earlier Merchant might have written a polemic or morality fable, the current one tells a personal, real story about (or from the viewpoint of) someone who has been wronged. In some ways, she has returned to the songs about her grandparents' house: her "Beloved Wife" from Tigerlily is about her grandparents' deaths.
-VH1 Biography