About Me
Biography article for the top "99 women in country."
"Natalie Merchant was born October 26, 1963, in Jamestown, New York. Her father, Anthony Merchant was a jazz musician and her mother Anne was a secretary. The couple had four children, but it was Natalie who was mostly drawn to music and art.
She was extremely successful at school, and her parents decided they needed to nurture a young Natalie's artistic side by purchasing a piano for the home. Almost instantly Natalie established herself as a true natural on the instrument, and piano lessons followed soon after. Natalie would often pretend to be reading music, as she was playing all of the pieces by ear.
Sadly, when she was seven years old, Natalie's parents separated and her and her three siblings were left in the custody of her mother who remarried a college professor soon after the divorce.
Throughout high school Natalie continued to excel in both academics and the arts. So much so that she graduated at 16 and enrolled at Jamestown Community College. Quickly she gravitated to the music scene on campus and especially the radio station, where she hung out with the DJs. A few of the guys had bands of their own, and Natalie would show up to their gigs to dance and generally support them.
Once during one of these concerts, they decided to ask Natalie to come on stage and sing with them. She was nervous, partly because she hadn't performed in public since she was a child, and partly because she didn't know any lyrics to sing with the group. Searching desperately for something to say on stage, she looked into her bag and found a Social Studies Textbook. Figuring that words are words, she got on stage and improvised an entire night's worth of songs from that now infamous textbook.
The night was a huge success, and the collection of musicians decided to stay together and keep gigging at local clubs in Western New York. After a while, they developed a strong following and a solid set list. All they needed was a name and they settled on 10,000 Maniacs. In early 1981, the band became official.
Most of these early gigs could be summarized as a group of talented folk musicians led by an insane lead singer. The latter coming from the fact that Natalie would often improvise lyrics and use words as sounds with no respect to their meaning. She would also dance feverishly on stage, which often led people to believe that she was some sort of otherworldly being. Natalie's following almost reached cult status as people would arrive at the show with gifts of flowers and poetry books in an effort to express their love and reverence for the young and mysterious singer.
When Natalie decided to start writing real lyrics, the band really began taking off. They started traveling across the US and were getting their demo played on a few college radio stations in New York. In 1983, the group recorded their first real album, Secrets of the I Ching. It sold less than a thousand copies, but it made its way into the hands of some very important people, and soon 10,000 Maniacs were playing gigs in New York City. This led to a record deal with Elektra and the release of their official debut album, The Wishing Chair.
That album performed well, but their follow-up, 1987's multi-platinum In My Tribe, skyrocketed the group into stardom. Now they were being put into the same lofty company as R.E.M., and getting regular rotation on MTV. The next two years were spent promoting the album and touring across the globe. When Natalie Merchant finally returned home in 1989, she was met with some terrible news: she had contracted spinal meningitis, a disease that had plagued one of her brothers during his youth.
The stress from touring, the news of the disease, and the alienation that comes with stardom, all contributed to Natalie losing her musical touch. She felt as though she could no longer write or perform, but rather than fall into self-indulgence, she chose to spend all of 1991 working with children in a Harlem homeless shelter. The experience was enough to reinvigorate her soul and her musical ability. So much so that she told her bandmates she wanted to pursue a solo career in two years.
Natalie refused to let her bandmates suffer from her decision, and her goal was to spend the next two years working on projects that would help secure the financial future of her friends. 1993's MTV Unpluggedwas a multi-platinum album that gave the group the security needed for Natalie to walk away guilt-free.
The group split amicably from each other, but not from the label. As soon as Natalie signed as a solo artist with Elektra, they dropped 10,000 Maniacs. That experience of separation served as one of the major themes for Natalie's 1995 debut album, Tigerlily, which spawned such hits as "Carnival" and "Wonder."
Natalie had finally established herself as one of the great female musicians of the 1990s, a status she cemented as one of the acts on the inaugural Lilith Fair tour in 1996. That exposure helped expand Natalie's audience from thirty-something 10,000 Maniacs fans to the high school and college crowds.
The success continued through 1998 when Natalie released her second album, Ophelia, which was another hit, and further proved her ability to use her clear, wispy voice to perform poetic songs. Her most recent release is 2001's Motherland.
With multi-platinum albums, sold-out tours, and worldwide acclaim, Natalie Merchant is a major star. While she has always valued her privacy, she remains as approachable as anyone, probably because the small-town girl behind the piano still resides inside of her."
