Tom Dunne: Learning at the feet of the great Ms Natalie Merchant
Natalie Merchant's new album is Keep Your Courage. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)
You think you had a bad covid experience: In the week before the first covid lockdown Natalie Merchant had spine surgery. “There was a risk they’d nick my vocal cords, but the alternative was eventual paralysis,” she tells me.
They did nick the cord and as lockdown unfolded, she was in a neck brace, in a wheelchair and couldn’t sing or access follow up care. Scary, I think you’d agree, by any measure.
This weird, silent, isolation was further complicated by her then quite odd relationship with the music business. Despite sales, firstly with 10,000 Maniacs and then as a solo artist, of over 20 million albums she was largely on a sabbatical. She is a single mum and has been for twenty years, and family have taken precedence.
In Nick Duerden’s excellent Exit Stage Left, The Curious Afterlife of the Pop Star, this sees her characterised as one of those quirky types, happier to sing now to school children than tour. She had turned her back on fame and fortune to sing to four-year-olds and prioritised her daughter above record sales.
Incredibly, this is largely true. “Yes,” she says. “I spent about three years as a volunteer teacher in a subsidised pre-school. I was singing for about five hours a day to 150 four-year-olds. Those kids don’t hold back. They’d pile on top of me, ‘Ms Natalie! Ms Natalie,’ they’d say.” She brought a guitarist and a fiddle player to these sessions. Her upcoming US tour will grace the finest venues in the USA. Ten of the shows will be with orchestras, one with the National Symphony Orchestra. Yet I doubt any of those will rival what those pre-school kids got to experience. I wonder is there an album?
The non-singing crisis lasted a year. Can you imagine how that must have been? It’s one thing to choose not to sing, for now, it’s quite another to think that you may not be able to ever sing again. “I should have recorded more albums!” she thought belatedly.
The silence ended when her sister Tilly, a masseuse, called by to give her a 90-minute massage. “And at its end I could sing again, just like that, immediately. Tears were cried, hugs were given, and an enormous tip!” she laughs.
Six years had passed since she had last written a song. She says the fear of writing doesn’t decrease with time. I ask is it like riding a bike? “I’d much rather try to learn to ride a bike than try to write a song,” she says, “it’s always scary trying to write. You get afraid in the middle of writing a song that you might be about to lose it.” I hear you, is all I can say.
Inspiration came from a book, Robin Robertson’s prize winning The Long Take. “It re-ignited my passion for language. We became pen pals for three years.” With the inspiration came the songs and a series of Covid restricted four-day recording weeks, the result of which is the album Keep Your Courage.
“I didn’t set out to write about love,” she says, “but when I looked back at it, the word “love” was there 26 times, so I guess it’s how it ended up. It’s about “being wounded” but you keep going back. You have to.” It is a remarkable album from a remarkable talent, full of lush orchestrations, stunning lyrics and some of the most beautiful songs she has ever written. Her voice, as always, is utterly unique. And that sensibility, for what is important, what is real, as vital as ever.
We seem to be especially gifted for albums at this moment in time; Lankum, Boygenius and now this, three astounding albums, in a little over three weeks. Coincidentally there’s a song by Lankum’s Ian Lynch, ‘Hunt the Wren’, on this too.
“That album is fantastic,” she says of False Lankum, “that song could stand alone without the music.” She returns to a world that has changed out of recognition over the last two decades. Many new vibrant female voices have arrived in the interim. I’m sure many of them would put Natalie on the same kind of pedestal they’d reserve for Patti Smith.
Interesting that in its own right. Both are visionaries, both had their biggest hit with Bruce’s ‘Because the Night’, both eschewed the music business, temporarily, for family. It’s another one for the Vinyl collection I’m afraid, another one to shell out on, another one to savour and love.
- Keep Your Courage, by Natalie Merchant, is out now
