10,000 Maniacs
The Wishing Chair

The writing of Natalie Merchant is unmistakable. Her style, her signature, her distinctive trait. She writes as if composing a canvas, immortalizing scenes, balancing colors, and blending them. MANY colors, to the point where few of her frescoes have a dominant tone. She has the imagination of a screenwriter, the ability to weave plots or simply lay down a series of snapshots, leaving you-the-listener with the task of reconstructing the order that ties everything together.

For example, if you listen carefully to "Can't Ignore The Train," the first chapter of an Album that's hard for me to forget, and follow the lyrics step by step, you'll soon realize that the narrative is absent. There's no logical sequence of events, but a series of sudden flashes and abrupt changes of scene and tone: the blue sky, the night advancing silently in the valley, a station, electric lights, a girl, children playing in the street... and a woman on a chair, in a scene of apathetic grayness devoid of emotions (THE woman and THE chair from the cover). And between one scene and another: a train, a train, and yet another train. The interval between trains marks the imperceptible passage of hours within a (anonymous) American provincial landscape where even the perception of time seems altered, unreal.

The Maniacs of "The Wishing Chair" tell the story of this distant America, blurred and imprecise in its outlines, undefined in space and time. Natalie was its canorous soul, Rob Buck (another of Those who are no longer with us, and it's sad to say) the instrumental soul, the man who, along with ANOTHER Buck (...), contributed to defining—mid-'80s—the traits of the new American alternative music.

In that fateful spring of '85, the Jamestown band was not the only American band staying in London, where this debut for a major label took shape. There were also four gentlemen from Athens who already had an EP and two long plays to their name, and like the Maniacs, were in the studio recording their "reconstruction tales" with one Mr. Joe Boyd... an institution of Albion folk, a luminary of sound who had worked with the Denny-era Fairport Convention, and with a slew of Names such as Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, and John Martyn. Notable Names, indeed...

...and the same Boyd is the man behind "The Wishing Chair". British tradition and star-spangled college rock meet, and from their encounter arises an album of rare beauty, untouched by time, no less profound and varied than the subsequent "In My Tribe"; original melodies and instrumental solutions (alternating or combining mandolins, 12-string guitars, accordions, steel guitars, and electric dissonances...) are the product of Rob Buck's and John Lombardo's meticulous research, the other crucial player in the game; sublime alchemies are studied and found, ones that even R.E.M. would reach years later: in the dreamy acoustic interludes there are already strange echoes of what would become an album like "Green", and while listening to "Back o' The Moon" or "Everyone A Puzzle Lover", with that mandolin - over that rhythm, one cannot help but think of "Losing My Religion"... Even Paul Simon of "Graceland" is beaten to the punch with a track like "Daktari" (absent in the original vinyl version but added on CD), where Africa and the Caribbean mix as they pass through Louisiana and the southern plains.

And then, and then... there's Rob's solo on "Scorpio Rising" which is an escalator to the sky, rarely has the electric guitar reached such lyrical heights; there's Ireland revisited with a country sensitivity in the rearrangement of a traditional like "Just as The Tide Was a Flowing"; there's the sweet interpretation by Natalie, whose Voice renders "Lilydale" and "Grey Victory" magnificent, where Dennis Drew's organ and Buck’s electric guitar complement each other in drawing miles of fields and expanses of flowers; but also the tensions, occasionally emerging, of a visionary post-punk far from stereotypes – in "The Colonial Wing", for example, or in the Masterpiece "My Mother The War", when a genetically modified guitar related to a certain "Paisley" begins to resonate like a distorted and "velvet-like" viola.

But in the end, the psychedelic flashes fade, the vibrations soften, and calm returns. And everything concludes dancing to the waltz notes of "Arbor Day"—and with the hallucination of being in the garden of a colonial Georgia villa, in the shade of an oak tree just after a storm...