“I’m all about the happy/sad music,” says Natalie Merchant towards the end of our chat. She has good cause to say this – her solo career is strewn with love’s complementary phases, and none more so than on her ninth album, Keep Your Courage, which charts the route of a fearless heart. How does anyone navigate, successfully or otherwise, that kind of journey? Merchant advises to be resilient, patient, resourceful, and pragmatic – each is an important part of the excursion.
“A lot of people journey through love and, regretfully, experience something painful and then shut themselves down. That’s one of the things I keep reinforcing through the songs and the lyrics on the album. Yes, you risk pain but that’s the way you grow. Perhaps the worst thing that could happen is you gain some wisdom.”
The past few years have been more than cumbersome for Merchant, whose sage-like demeanour runs smooth and unflustered for most of our time on a Zoom call. The primary theme of Keep Your Courage – love – is something she wasn’t originally planning.
“It was an involuntary immersion, the one I ended up in over and over. You can blame isolation brought on by the pandemic, but it was also a combination of having not many distractions.” She says that aside from the pandemic inhibiting her movements, the lack of diversions included the not-insignificant matters of undergoing “major spine surgery and then nearly dying from a mysterious brain virus. Between those things I came to acknowledge the fact that I really missed my friends, I was sad I didn’t have a partner that I could be isolating nearby with, and I really missed being close to the people I loved, hugging them. Human contact – it’s the meaning of life, right?”
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The most fulfilling part of her work, she says, is when people say that listening to her music makes them feel they’re not alone. “The music that I was drawn to during the pandemic wasn’t ... well, let’s say I wasn’t listening to a lot of Nick Drake. I didn’t want to wallow in my frustration and sadness. Instead, I wanted to listen to music that made me want to dance and that would bring back pleasant memories of better days.”
Merchant has always liked doing things her way and has found the closer she is to her creative template the better it is for all concerned. For a dozen years, from 1981 to 1993, she was the lead singer and principal lyricist with successful American alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs; she left the group because she became tired of her ideas for songs being undermined and underused. From her 1995 debut solo album, Tigerlily, she has utilised all manner of music styles, including sumptuous orchestral arrangements, Middle Eastern rhythms, indie-pop, folk and rock. Few of her solo albums, however, can match Keep Your Courage, which is buoyed by a multitude of musicians and a collection of orchestrally textured, nuanced originals and one cover version (Lankum’s Hunting the Wren – see panel below).
The music that I was drawn to during the pandemic wasn’t … well, let’s say I wasn’t listening to a lot of Nick Drake. I didn’t want to wallow in my frustration and sadness
The album is dedicated to the American writer Joan Didion, who in December 2021 died in the same week that Merchant recorded the vocals for Sister Tilly. The album’s most charming, least adorned song, it is a gorgeous rumination on the older women in Merchant’s life who influenced, inspired and politicised her, and who are now steadily dying. “Your feminist raves in your Didion shades, and your Zeppelin so loud and so proud,” sings Merchant. “Here’s to your days at the barricades, here’s to the girls in the fray, oh, how I wish you could stay.” The dedication is also, she says, “to all of Didion’s sisters”, the older women who “tend to be shoved aside. I don’t know how it is in Ireland, but in the US the feeling is along the lines of ‘Do us a favour and become invisible once you reach a certain age’. But these women I write about are vivid characters; they’re wise, intelligent, have an incredible amount of experience, and I turn to them for advice. It’s really heartbreaking they’re leaving us.”
Apropos of this, Merchant recalls her days in 10,000 Maniacs, with whom she had been on the road, touring constantly, from the age of 18 to her early 30s. “I was away from my mother for so long,” she remembers, “but I had many surrogate mothers all over America and beyond. These days, any time you call them, you’re never really sure if they’re going to pick up the phone, or whether or not they’re sick. As a society, we owe so much to them for the way they pushed us forward in so many ways. The thing I comment on whenever I can is that women now enjoy the advances these older women promoted, yet they take it for granted.”
Half the women in my country have lost the ability to control their reproductive health. Men need to empathise because I feel we’re losing the fight
One of those advances, she reveals, is when she gave birth to her daughter, Lucia, in 2003. “We had a beautiful, well-equipped and enlightened medical facility called the Birthing Centre, in which you could have any childbirth experience you wanted. It could be completely unmedicated, you could have your baby in a pool, you could have as many people as you want in the room, and you could have a surgical suite if things were going haywire. Those options didn’t exist when my mother had all four of her children. She was also completely anaesthetised – she doesn’t remember any of the births – and they handed her jars of formula milk when she walked out the door.”
Facilities such as the Birthing Centre, says Merchant, are the outcome of years of women advocating for their rights, “to have the kind of medical care they deserve and want. It must be so horrible for them now to see that as of August of last year, half the women in my country have lost the ability to control their reproductive health. Men need to empathise because I feel we’re losing the fight. We need the advocacy and support of men, their allyship. Especially men who are in government.”
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Merchant’s usually calm voice rises a notch. She isn’t going to go deep into the topic, she says, “but my anger, my rage towards the Conservative-stocked supreme court we have in the US is ... ” We can guess how she feels as her voice rises to a somewhat higher level. “The Republican Party swindled us out of two nominees that could have provided some kind of impartiality, but now they’re not just chipping away, they have a wrecking ball.”
Natalie Merchant and the Irish connection
“The first time I heard Lankum was in 2019 when I was doing an internet search for Shirley Collins’s version of Hares on the Mountain, and I came across a version by Radie Peat and Darragh Lynch. It was a really powerful rendition, and then I sought them out and listened to their albums; I love Ian Lynch’s lyricism, how they interpret traditional material ... I love their new album, False Lankum, which is cinematic and orchestral, even though they don’t use that instrumentation, but how Hunting the Wren ended up on Keep Your Courage was a little strange.
“When the core musicians were laying down tracks for the album, I played the Lankum song to them. We share music and songs that we discover, and I said they had to hear it. When they listened to it they all really liked it, which by and large meant it might be on the album. And then every time a batch of musicians came in and added their parts to it, it became more apparent it was going to be included. I had never done that before, because usually from the minute I walked into a studio, I’d always have a clear idea of what was going on to my albums, but I loved the spontaneity of the tune.
“When it was recorded, I sent the song to Ian and he was very kind and complimentary. I remember how I felt when Christy Moore covered my song, Motherland, and how when I played Irish shows people would say to me afterwards that it was great to hear a Christy Moore song being covered by me!”
Keep Your Courage is out now. Natalie Merchant plays 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, November 8th
