Natalie Merchant
Natalie Merchant

THE REVIEW

A few days before Amos, another famous fifty-year-old, also known for her storytelling skills, releases an intimate and melancholic album, after a 13-year period during which she dabbled in folk music (with a cover album) and a culturally significant work that encapsulates a century of children's poetry.

I'm talking about Natalie Merchant, the voice and mind behind the 10,000 Maniacs, and since the second half of the '90s, the architect of a solo career that may not be the most prolific, but certainly one of the most appreciable.

In the past twenty years, she has produced three masterpieces in the rock-folk realm (Tigerlily, Ophelia, and Motherland), a collection of folk song covers (which, in my opinion, doesn't hold great musical value) and, finally, four years ago, a collection of 26 tracks crafted by setting to music a series of Victorian-era children's poems.

Natalie Merchant is not just a self-titled album, but something incredibly profound, a journey into the singer's mind, which tells us what it's like to be fifty and realize that her family life (presumably divorcing her husband in 2012) no longer satisfies her.

This concept revolves around the first single "Ladybird," in which Merchant sings "Maybe it's time to fly, time to fly away", combining all her previous musical experiences in terms of sound, thus creating a familiar and truly well-balanced track.

Natalie does not experiment, does not try to surprise us with special effects, but wins us over by starting again from where she left off in 2001. In fact, this album has only sporadic remnants of the pure folk of The House Carpenter's Daughter or the insistent and sustained rhythms found in some tracks from Leave Your Sleep.

The track list is not very long, 11 tracks totaling almost fifty minutes of listening, where there is also ample space for the instrumental part, which alternating with Merchant's voice creates a particular atmosphere that makes you feel part of the stories being told.

The entire album is characterized by well-arranged music and cultured and profound lyrics, and I feel compelled to highlight two tracks that, according to my personal taste, capture the essence of the album: the first is "Giving Up Everything," a very evocative song about the liberation that comes from abandoning everything ("Giving up everything, see the whole magnificent emptiness/Gave what I want for how it is, for the stone inside, for the bitterness, for the sweetness at the core of it"); the second track, "The End," is a song that was removed from the Motherland track list—a decision the singer would later regret during an interview—and it speaks about the great question mark that comes with the end. Unfortunately, in this track, the predominance of the instrumental part is felt a bit too much, although for a closing track, it is not an unusual choice.

In summary, an excellent album, truly a gem in Merchant's production, which in recent years has not sparked much interest among "non-experts," but now she is back with an album of unreleased tracks that is also suitable for a broader audience, characterized by a very refined and mature rock-folk with blues incursions.