Music Review | Natalie Merchant
Songs From an Unrecorded Minstrel
By JON PARELES
Published: January 7, 2008
“This is a new song,” Natalie Merchant announced onstage at the Hiro Ballroom on Friday night, at her first full New York City concert in four years. “Try to absorb it here, now, ’cause I don’t know when I’ll make a record.”
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Stephanie Berger for The New York Times
Natalie Merchant at the Hiro Ballroom on Friday night. New songs filled her two-hour set, the first of her six sold-out shows.
Ms. Merchant, who sold millions of albums in the 1990s, has an adoring audience and no record label behind her. She’s not alone. As contracts end, more and more well-known musicians are trying to reinvent their careers for the era of mass downloading and plunging album sales. At the Hiro Ballroom, when a voice in the crowd asked when Ms. Merchant would release a new album, she said with a smile that she was awaiting “a new paradigm for the recording industry.” Another fan called out, “Myth America,” the independent label Ms. Merchant formed in 2003 to release “The House Carpenter’s Daughter,” an album of rearranged folk songs. Ms. Merchant replied, “Myth America is bankrupt.”
So for the moment, Ms. Merchant is back to the age-old economic model of the troubadour. People who want to hear her latest songs will have to see her perform them. New songs filled her two-hour set at Hiro Ballroom, the first of six sold-out shows through Jan. 10. Although she has played some guest appearances and benefit shows during her hiatus, Ms. Merchant was slightly taken aback by current concert behavior: cellphones raised overhead to shoot photos and video. But she sang with thoughtful passion, traversing American music from folky fingerpicking to soul grooves to pop hymns.
Ms. Merchant, who had a daughter in 2003, has written songs around poetry by and for children. She also had new songs with her own lyrics and a setting of Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet, waltzing gently as she sang about “bare ruined choirs” and thoughts of lost love and mortality.
The new songs, like her catalog, offer sorrows, warnings and solace. A folky political parable described a “golden child” whose father did everything for him. A minor-key rocker held vows of “giving up everything” in a somber crescendo, with images of emptiness hinting at Buddhism. The children’s songs brought out Ms. Merchant’s playful side; she finds wonderful things in archives. She had a countryish setting for a Victorian poem about alternate plans “if no one ever marries me,” a vaudeville shuffle about falling in love with “the janitor’s boy” and a Gypsy-tinged waltz about riddles posed by “The Man in the Wilderness.”
As she unveiled her own new songs, Ms. Merchant let herself be as moved as her audience. In a gospel-soul song about trying to find the courage to push through troubles, which mentioned New Orleans, and in a waltz that contemplated war and human strife and wondered, “How can we have so far to go?,” she burst into tears. They were a troubadour’s live, spontaneous, here-and-now moments: nothing an album could contain.
Natalie Merchant will appear Tuesday through Thursday at the Hiro Ballroom, 371 West 16th Street, Chelsea, (212) 260-4700, bowerypresents.com; sold out.
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