Is natalie merchant gay
Natalie Merchant sang and wrote songs for the group 10,000 Maniacs in the ’80s, had a huge solo career in the ’90s and now, in 2010, she has launched a fresh project.
Windy City Times: Hi, Natalie. So what inspired this new album, Exit Your Sleep?
Natalie Merchant: Well, I started doing these adaptations of poetry when my daughter was born, in 2003. And people had told me for years my voice was very soothing to children. So many people told me that my voice was the only thing that could put their child to slumber. [Laughs] I didn’t know if that was a compliment until I had a screaming infant of my retain. But anyway, I thought I would make an album of lullabies and I would ground them on 19th-century British poetry. So that was how the project started.
WCT: Interesting. And then it just grew and grew?
Natalie Merchant: It started expanding and I thought it would be really appealing to put some old nursery rhymes to music because they have the rhymes and things like that. They are very easy but very intriguing. A lot of beautiful imagery and passages that probably had some historical significance that’s been lost. And so the project kept going along,
Natalie Merchant still moved by the earth, and her home
A lot has happened in Natalie Merchant's life in the 13 years since she released her last collection of all-new material.
The singer/songwriter who rose to fame as frontwoman of the '80s pop outfit 10,000 Maniacs has, in that time, gotten married and divorced, giving birth to a daughter in between. But Merchant says the songs on her fresh, self-titled album, out Tuesday, are driven by the identical sense of empathy that has always motivated her.
"I've been in a position for a limited decades to shield myself from so much," says Merchant, 50, "but I've chosen not to. It's always been part of my technique to record about larger events in the planet in a personal way." She's moved by "the nice of things that are on the front page of your newspaper, whether it be climate change or nourishment scarcity or civil unrest."
In one recent song, Texas, Merchant seems to consider the identity of an oil heir who goes about "pumpin' and a-suckin' till the skillfully is dry." The lyrics were "written about a specific person; but I don't want to say who that person was, because it's really about greed and the lust for influence, which unfortunately are human traits
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10 years ago. I haven't seen hide nor hair of her in the last decade. Last I heard, she lived in some old house in upstate NY that didn't include electricity. She washed her clothes in a nearby river/creek. Pretty odd chick. |
She's always been love that, acc. to the drummer of a band I was in with in the late 1980s when I lived in Greenfield, MA. He was from upstate NY too, and was best friends since childhood with the bassist from 10, 000 Maniacs, and was going to join 10K Maniacs, too, at his friend's recommendation, but somebody else came along who would work for cheaper, so, this guy got screwed, as he saw it. Well, eventually, they all got screwed, as she dumped the band, but they didn't get screwed in the way ARFCOMMERS would like....
Natalie Merchant
Natalie Merchant is one of those fortunate artists who achieved success and acclaim as the member of a band – in her case 10,000 Maniacs – and then went on to have an equally well-received solo career. That solo stint began with 1995’s Tigerlily, her highly praised solo debut and continued with 1998’s Ophelia and most recently her eponymous 2014 disc and 2015’s Paradise Is There (Nonesuch). On Paradise Is There, Merchant reimagines Tigerlily via wonderful new arrangements that reinforce the staying influence of the songs while exposing a host of previously unheard nuances in the material. Accompanying the Paradise Is There CD in the deluxe edition is a DVD containing Merchant’s production memoir of the same label. Merchant took time out of her schedule to answer some questions about the project. [Natalie Merchant performs on March 8 at the Warfield in San Francisco, March 9 at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angele and on March 11 and 28 at the Beacon Theater in NYC.]
Gregg Shapiro: Natalie, in recent years, artists have taken different approaches to rerecording their songs. Joni Mitchell worked with a symphony orchestra on Travelogue, while Cyn