Natalie Merchant: “So Uncool that You’re Really Cool”
- Former Maniac profiled on Lehigh Valley PBS program “Articulate”
Natalie Merchant was in CBGBs being shunned by the safety-pin-pierced cool kids when a woman who worked for a record company gave the nascent singer the boost she needed.
“She came up to me and she said, ‘You are so uncool, that you’re really cool,’” Merchant recalled. “Just remember that.”
The singer and activist is speaking to host Jim Cotter on “Articulate,” in an episode titled “The Many Lives of Natalie Merchant.”
Though she possesses one of the most distinctive voices of her generation, Merchant says that, technically speaking, “I don’t think I have a very good voice.
“Because to me, it’s more about (the) emotional, you know, immediacy,” she says.
Across 26 minutes, the Lehigh Valley PBS station follows Merchant from her youth in rural New York to her days with 10,000 Maniacs - “a horrible name,” she says - to her solo career and her life as activist and mother. The episode was filmed as Merchant’s daughter, Lucia, was preparing to go off to college.
“I’m not worried because I know that we’ll be close forever,” Merchant says.
Merchant left the Maniacs at 30 - she joined at 16 - because as lyricist, she was also the group’s “editor.” If she couldn’t find words to fit a bandmate’s music, the song didn’t make it.
“I didn’t like having that position in the band,” she said.
So it was on to a solo career - a huge hit with Tigerlily, whose “Wonder” got her involved with special-needs children - and other activism that resulted in a fracking ban in her home state of New York. Other people got the ball rolling, but music can be essential in closing the deal on such efforts, Merchant said.
“You can bombard people with information, but … there’s something about music that kind of opens up that channel to the heart.”
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