MERCHANT: And the best was when I was in the hospital and the emergency room was just packed with people. MERCHANT: I've had massive hits and sold lots of records, but I can walk into a store and hand someone my credit card and they can say, oh, you have the same name as a famous singer. And, I don't know, like, you are a star, right? So what is your relationship to fame? RASCOE: Is that true? Like, is that - what is your relationship to fame? Because you've had, like, massive hits. MERCHANT: (Laughter) That's a great compliment. RASCOE: One of NPR's music reviewers said back in 2014 about you that you have a subdued yet unmistakable air of a woman who finds pop stardom rather distasteful. MERCHANT: (Singing) Hard as stone, gone cold as ice. And once I had these songs written, we went in the studio and put them together. And I just fell in love with her voice and her energy and told her that I would love to collaborate someday. We actually staged the largest political event in the history of our area. MERCHANT: Abena Koomson-Davis is the musical director of the Resistance Revival Chorus, and I met her through doing a Get Out the Vote event in the Hudson Valley. RASCOE: How did you meet her, and how did you come to collaborate with her? And there are all these images at the end of ships wrecking and storms and floods and wrecking balls and - but we keep saying, hold on, hold on, hold on. We're addressing everyone and saying, just hold on. Big girls, they don't cry.Īnd at the end, Abena Koomson-Davis, who's singing with me, we're addressing the audience the whole time. MERCHANT: (Singing) There's only one way to survive. And when you feel that someone's empathizing with you and feeling your pain, it is a remarkable thing that happens to us. MERCHANT: It's a powerful thing that's called empathy. It's loss in life and just difficulties in life. MERCHANT: And it's not just a song about loss in love. MERCHANT: I think when people recognize your pain, that's usually when you can break down. RASCOE: That really - you know, that got me in my feelings, when I said - you know, it kind of made me tear up, you know, because it's talking about, you know, how you hold all this pain inside and never show them that you cry. MERCHANT: (Singing) Always thought the game came easy. And then the song "Come On, Aphrodite," it's an invocation to the goddess of love and passion saying, bring it on, right? And then the song "Big Girls," it said, ooh, it hurts. Can't you see how long I've waited?Īnd, yeah, on this album, every time I used love, I was describing love in a different form, whether it was platonic or romantic or this kind of expansive, inclusive love. Can't you see that I've been patient? Come on, Aphrodite. ![]() ![]() MERCHANT: And they can hurt you unintentionally. RASCOE: You were at a point where people could really hurt you when you love them, right? That's the deepest hurt, right? Come on, Aphrodite, from that mountain above. MERCHANT: (Singing) Come on, Aphrodite, you goddess of love. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COME ON, APHRODITE") You know, when you have to protect yourself, like, love is where you're most vulnerable. RASCOE: A lot of this album is about love. MERCHANT: (Singing) Sister Tilly, you go on without us. But it isn't until the time signature changes - we go into 4/4.Īnd then it becomes this series of lyrics that just talk about releasing her, letting her go. Through the first part of the song, it's in 3/4, and I'm talking about, you know, remembering all the aspects of her, even the color of her walls and her tinctures, her teas, her secret remedies and her voice like Buffy Sainte-Marie. MERCHANT: (Singing) You've gone so far away, and you're gone.Īnd I've combined them all into one person to kind of pay tribute to that generation and everything they mean to me. MERCHANT: Sister Tilly is an amalgam of women I've known in my life of my mother's generation. RASCOE: Who is Sister Tilly, and what were you getting at by writing the song? ![]() MERCHANT: (Singing) Tinctures, teas and your secret remedies and your voice like Buffy Sainte-Marie. RASCOE: Let's dive into that tune, "Sister Tilly." You're singing about a character who wears Joan Didion sunglasses. She's out with her ninth solo album, "Keep Your Courage," and joins us now. That lush, layered contralto voice can belong to only one person - Natalie Merchant, the one-time lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs, the multi-platinum creator of "Tigerlily," the environmentalist, film director, mother and artist in residence at a preschool. NATALIE MERCHANT: (Singing) Oh, Miss Tilly, I think you should know everyone's missing you here.
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