Singer Natalie Merchant: ‘It was important to assert my identity. Because I’d lost it’

What brought Natalie Merchant back to music, after nine successful albums, was nearly losing her ability to make it. As the world went into lockdown, her spine crumbled from a degenerative disease. It looked as if she would never again sing or play the piano. She found herself “stuck in a chair for two months. I lost my voice for a year — there was so much trauma to the tissues that I couldn’t sing.”

After surgery, physiotherapy and voice work, shuttling between her home in upstate New York and a Vermont studio, she recorded her first album of new songs in almost a decade. “It was really important to me to assert my identity as a singer-songwriter. Because I’d lost it.”

That new album, Keep Your Courage, deals largely with love. “Love became the only thing that mattered during the pandemic. Other people, who I missed terribly. I’m a very gregarious, hugging friend — I’m Italian [her surname was anglicised, two generations back, from Mercante] and I didn’t realise how much I’d missed that.”

On “Sister Tilly” she delivers a eulogy to the women of her mother’s generation, the ones who befriended the family after her parents’ divorce. Her mother married at 18 and had four children by 24 — Merchant is the third. She was also close to her Sicilian grandmother, whose rituals revolved around “fish on Friday, chicken on Saturday, pasta on Sunday with the whole family”.

Merchant, 59, also muses on the rise and fall of feminism. “Opportunities for women are taken for granted now, to the extent that we could lose the right to an abortion in America. We could gain it and lose it in my lifetime.”

Keep Your Courage is studded with myths: the joyous lead single “Come On Aphrodite”; Echo and Narcissus; St Valentine; the Bible. Merchant champions cultural literacy. “Younger people will maybe look it up and learn something.”

She herself was a happy autodidact. “Peter Gabriel’s song ‘Biko’ — I didn’t know what it meant, I went to the library and looked it up, and that’s how I learned about apartheid. I’m really grateful to him for that.” In an approximation of Gabriel’s breathy tenor, she suddenly sings the opening verse: “September ’77/Port Elizabeth, weather fine/It was business as usual/In police room 619 . . . ”

When Merchant was a child, her mother would sneak her under the fence into concerts at the nearby Chautauqua Institution education centre in New York. “I love the power of a full orchestra with brass and woodwind. And the dynamic range, that you can go from almost a whisper and then it can grow” — she gestures expansively — “and there’s no electric instruments at all. The instruments are so ancient, just strings stretched over pieces of wood. It’s like asserting our humanness. We can do this better than machines!”

Most of the songs on the new album have orchestral arrangements, recorded painstakingly by five musicians at a time. The album’s only cover version is a reading of Lankum’s “Hunting the Wren” written by band member Ian Lynch. She came across the song when a search for Shirley Collins’s “Hares on the Mountain” sent her down a YouTube rabbit hole. Its densely packed use of bird lore to recount the stories of the camp followers of the Curragh, mingling patriarchal repression and the British colonisation of Ireland, was catnip to her. “It’s stark and beautiful. I really admire Ian’s songwriting.”

Merchant grew up in Jamestown, New York, a furniture-manufacturing town that was already in the 1970s and 1980s in deep decline. “I saw the factories shuttering. Now it’s a medical desert. People have to drive 45 minutes to see an ophthalmologist. And [there’s] the whole opioid crisis.” Even in her youth, “80 per cent of the people were on public assistance. Our town never recovered from the recession of the 1970s.”

Out of the hole came the Jamestown indie band 10,000 Maniacs, taking their cues from records delivered to the local college radio station “like a cargo cult — London arrived! Joy Division, Gang of Four, Psychedelic Furs . . . Most of them only knew two chords, and we figured out we could do that too.”

She was 16 when she joined 10,000 Maniacs as lead singer and 19 when they signed to a major label. The rest of the band were men, all several years older. Merchant, who had planned to become a fine art student, instead toured the world.

“I left home with five older brothers, who tried to keep me safe, but I took a lot of risks and was pretty fearless out there.” A friend slipped a demo record to BBC radio DJ John Peel in London, who championed it, and the band parlayed that British success into US college radio fame.

She left the band in 1993, tired of collaboration, somehow massively in debt to the record company and with recurring tinnitus. “I didn’t want to write with other people. And I think they would have preferred if I focused less on political stuff so that we could have more hit singles. [But] I felt I was given this opportunity to have a forum and to talk about what I see.” Her song “Poison in the Well”, about hazardous waste, is an example. “It was heavy-handed, but I wanted to talk about it. I got the reputation of being dour and preachy.” Merchant shrugs. “There are worse things than being considered too serious.”

Her first trio of major solo albums (Tigerlily, Ophelia, Motherland) broadened her repertoire into gospel-tinged chamber pop. Then there was political folk on The House Carpenter’s Daughter and an orchestral setting of Victorian verse about mothers and daughters on Leave Your Sleep. The new album combines all these modes.

Dour and preachy she is not, but Merchant’s political concerns are never far beneath the surface — our conversation turns inexorably towards the US’s political divides, to “that monster that was my president”. Even on an album devoted to love she includes a funky, horn-driven lament about polarisation. “See, this house is divided,” she sings. “See how we’re broken in two. It’s just a Tower of Babel” — she rhymes it, appropriately, with babble — “and everybody so confused . . . ” It was, she says, “impossible to say nothing”.

Yet her upbringing gave her personal understanding of the other side. “I grew up in the sort of town that incubated the people who marched on my Capitol. White, disenfranchised men who formerly would have had a place in our society because they weren’t necessarily skilled workers, but they were needed. You have this whole class of people who . . . feel they have become irrelevant. So how are they supposed to respect the governments that allowed that to happen?”

‘Keep Your Courage’ is released on April 14 by Nonesuch. Tour dates at nataliemerchant.com