By Berlinda Recacho
It's all coming back to me now, how much I wanted to be Natalie Merchant in the early Nineties. She was the kind of cool that I found both accessible and aspirational: the brunette bob, the swingy dresses, that rich voice with its odd cadence and accent of unplaceable region. I liked the air of mystery she conveyed --enigmatic and reserved -- as distinct from other women fronting bands as her group 10,000 Maniacs was from the other music of the day. Her bookish, literate songs made the world a more interesting and occasionally scarier place. I listened to the Maniacs out of order, always with several years between each discovery. My classmates and I sang "Trouble Me" and "You Happy Puppet" from 1989's Blind Man's Zoo on the car trip to our high school Latin state competition. Then I discovered In My Tribe from 1988 and loved all of it completely. The appearance of Our Time in Eden was a surprise; "These Are Days" --on constant rotation on WHFS around this area -- was, and still is a favorite. At the 1993 Inaugural Ball she dueted with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and later that year, the Maniacs’ cover of Patti Smith's "Because The Night" on MTV's "Unplugged" program became their highest charting single. When Merchant left the band to go off on her own, I was heartbroken. I put her in a time capsule, tucked it away in my memories and forgot where I stashed the map.
Nostalgia -- a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations -- is a powerful force. Art is basically the only thing that can tame it. I recently watched a film titled Nostalgia by the auteur Andrei Tarkovsky: a series of dreamlike images that open into each other and overlap and recur, the haunted recollections of a poet in exile. Natalie Merchant similarly operates within these bounds of recollection and remembrance. She casts her storytelling net wide to capture even scenes you'd like to forget. Her scope reminds me of an art installation I once encountered, one which began with an invitation into an impossibly dark space, with warnings and disclaimers that visibility would be limited by the darkness. Halfway in, I froze and refused to go any further. Merchant hones in on the fact that we are aware that we're afraid of the dark, both literally and figuratively. Throughout her career, she's written songs that I've found difficult to listen to because they describe this fear with bleak and sorrowful accuracy. Merchant has never seemed afraid to tackle a difficult subject or an unpopular point of view, staying true to the activist/protest era of her formative years. There's a melancholy inherent in all her work, where even an upbeat tune belies a darkness that can seep through the lyrics. I've always admired her for this ability, though at times it can be too much to bear.
When I learned that Merchant was releasing Keep Your Courage, her first album of new music since 2014, I was intrigued, and perhaps a little apprehensive about how to approach these new songs. I compared and contrasted some of the new tracks to Merchant's canon. The gentle "Song of Himself" pays tribute to transcendentalist poet Walt Whitman as "Hey Jack Kerouac" served as a fitting tribute to the pioneers of the Beat generation. "Sister Tilly" is a quiet epilogue, the bookend of a life that might have started with In My Tribe's ebullient wedding song, "My Sister Rose". Merchant's observations are studied and reserved, but no less powerful: "Oh Miss Tilly, I think you should know/Everyone's missing you here/With your hair in a mess/and your outdated dress/when Halston was all the rage/back in your Chelsea Girl days." The timbre of Merchant's voice has deepened, but she can still traverse her familiar vocal range; the high notes especially retain flickers of recognition. In the first two tracks, she is joined by Abena Koomson-Davis (of the group Van Davis), who echoes a younger Merchant. "Big Girls" and "Come On Aphrodite" sound like duets between the same woman at different points in her life. "Girls" is a richly imagined interior monologue in case of emergency. In "Aphrodite", entreaties to the "Flower of the ocean/pearl of the sea" to "make me love" resound through the ages. The Sixties-inspired soul, complete with horn section, calls to mind Our Time in Eden's rollicking "Candy Everybody Wants" and "Few and Far Between".
But not everything on Keep Your Courage is a pastiche of what came before. "Tower of Babel" incorporates Latin brass in an alluring tango, attempting communication through music when words fail. "Narcissus", my favorite track on the album, is the perfect balance of sadness and beauty, a dynamic blend of blues and strings. This is Natalie Merchant at the height of her powers; when she sings, "But I was drawn to you like those ships of fools that had gone before/Drawn by your haunting voice/but never/but never reached the shore," you can't turn away, not that you want to.
Aging gracefully is the myth of marketing, a siren song that veers your ship into rocks and wrecks and ruin, but Natalie Merchant is not buying what they are selling. Even as a young woman, she occupied her own strange space, inscrutable and mysterious. Her dark hair might have turned to silver, but she is intrinsically made of the same substance that made her so compelling nearly forty years ago. In Keep Your Courage, she charts the passing of time as an older version of herself, with no apologies.
[Photo: Shervin Lainez]