CARMEL, Indiana—A memory stirs as I watch the singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant perform at the Palladium in Carmel.
Decades roll back and I’m lunching at a restaurant close to the newspaper where I work. I’m several years away from getting married.
Across the table from me is a woman with whom I’ve been involved. I can’t remember the restaurant’s name. Nor do I recall what we ate.
What I do recollect—vividly—is that the restaurant played as background music 10,000 Maniacs MTV “Unplugged†album with Merchant singing lead.
That lunch is an ending, one when we both realize not only that it isn’t going to work with us but that it never could have. With this realization, there is regret, but also relief, even liberation.
Knowing frees us.
Merchant’s music—her voice, somehow both husky and delicate—captures this odd mixture of feelings, the regret and release intermingled.
After work that day, I bought the album. I’d never paid attention to either Merchant or 10,000 Maniacs before, but I listened to it again and again as my life moved forward. It seemed to speak to a moment in my existence, a turning toward something new, something better.
Now, as I sit in this lovely music hall holding hands with my wife of 25 years, I marvel at Merchant’s art.
Like me, she is 30 years older than she was when that MTV album was recorded. There is nothing waif-like about her these days. Her gray hair flows in waves down to the middle of her back. She is more earth mother than ingenue, comfortable in her skin.
Her voice, if anything, is better than it was in those now distant days. Time has made it more smokey without diminishing its power or suppleness.
She uses the hall’s closeness—the Palladium seats 1,500 and puts many audience members mere feet from the performers—to create a kind of instant intimacy. She does an inspired riff on the life of Hoagy Carmichael, then delivers a superb version not of the song most associated with the Hoosier songwriter, “Stardust,†but instead his “The Nearness of You.â€
Later, she notes that the piano of her favorite songwriter, Johnny Mercer, is in her dressing room at the music hall.
Then she sings, almost acapella, an intensely moving “Moon River,†her voice as it rises and falls the only sound in the vaulted hall.
But it is her own music that stirs the crowd the most.
As she performs one song after another, pirouetting around the stage, twirling her long skirts as she moves, the crowd sways with her. Most of the folks in the audience are my age, give or take a few years—folks who have seen their share of springtime.
As Merchant sings, all around me people close their eyes and sit trance-like for a spell. I wonder if they, like me, find themselves drifting back to another time, another moment, as the singer’s song speaks to something that touched them.
Shaped them.
That is the power of art, the reason it moves us in ways we often cannot understand but must simply accept. It touches us in the tender spots, the places we often hide from public view.
This is particularly true with an artist such as Merchant, whose gift is transforming the personal into the allegorical.
When she introduces a song called “Eye of the Storm†on her new album, “Keep Your Courage,†she says it’s about pirates. As she adds, her voice laced with equal parts mockery and affection, that it was inspired by a pirate she once dated, many women in the crowd chuckle ruefully.
They’ve known their share of would-be pirates, too.
I know where life has taken me since that long-ago lunch when I first listened seriously to Merchant. I find myself wondering about her life since those days.
I know she left 10,000 Maniacs and that her solo work has been marked by artistic adventurousness, but I hope she has had other satisfactions, as well.
This, too, is one of the miracles of art.
It creates a sense of closeness with the artist, even if we’ve never met her.
Merchant closes her encore with the song that opened that MTV album all those years ago, “These Are Days.â€
“These are days you’ll remember,†she sings in a voice that is like a heart’s cry.
Yes.
Yes, they are.
