“Is There Still Room in Our Hearts for Natalie Merchant’s Solo Debut Tigerlily?”

When I was growing up my music tastes were pretty mellow, by and large, at least before junior high, and I was into bands like R.E.M. and 10,000 Maniacs — the latter of whose singer Natalie Merchant would eventually branch off into a successful solo career. The first CD (I listened to CD’s and tapes, thought records were crusty and had no idea yet what downloading or streaming were) I really fell in love with was Cracked Rear View by Hootie & the Blowfish.

It’s sort of noteworthy that I mention Hootie because they connect with Merchant as being the other act that critic and author Jim Derogatis profusely stymied, precipitative of losing his job at Rolling Stone. Now, it might seem like a menial, insignificant event, a record critic getting fired from a magazine staff (it probably is to everybody in the world except me). I do, however, mention it for a specific reason and that is to illustrate what I believe to be a critical impetus around this time to harrass or debilitate musical acts that were commercially popular. There’s even this bizarre quote from Derogatis in I believe the brief months after his firing something along lines of his manager liking bands that sell eight million records. So what, like Green Day? We’re supposed to throw out all our Green Day CD’s now? Eh, nobody ever goes to that restaurant anyway — it’s always too crowded [1]. 

Even this journal that was supposed to be covering the Derogatis story objectively referred to Hootie & the Blowfish as a “Wonder bread band,” hence obviously denoting some incentive for browbeating the popular [2] — stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, roughly. It might sound nice but doesn’t do much for democratic majority rule, you’ve gotta admit. 

To an extent, then, the numbers have spoken and the critics are indeed relegated to that realm of caricatured “critic” stature, a snooty, thumb-nosed dweeb incapable of actually contributing anything of value [3] to our culture and thereby left to perpetual meat-tearing and disapproval of all things successful. Merchant’s Tigerlily would don this same suit of commercially rendered immunity to the miserly “minds” in the journals and newspapers (remember this is back when people were paying at least $12 or so, sometimes up to $19, for one CD — it’s not like they were getting the stuff for free). Well, it’s a moot point, because Tigerlily received glowing reviews from all parties applicable save for Derogatis, whose Rolling Stone one-and-a-half-star grade is still live on Wikipedia in Tigerlily’s critical reception section. Still, and again part and parcel with why I’m writing this, is what seems to be a buzz in the air, probably not totally unlike the incentive by corporations to make products cheap so that you have to buy more of them sooner, that alternative rock “sucks” or alternative rock is “played out.” I can tell you at very least that I can put on Counting Crows’ debut August and Everything after in the middle of a bunch of crotchety kitchen people and not only is it continually a religious experience every time but it’s also perfect music for that busy, professional setting. To mix that cathartic aspect with a commercial approachability, I think is a skill that’s pretty underrated in a lot of these mid-’90s artists which would be Hootie, which would be Fastball, which would be Third Eye Blind and which would be The Black Crowes. Maybe the problem with some of the critics is that they, uh, don’t get out much. 

Tigerlily came out in the summer of ’95 and is a very melancholy album, especially by today’s standards. It follows the suicide of Kurt Cobain by one year and buddies up temporally with various events like the Oklahoma City bombing and the murders connected by prosecution to OJ Simpson. The most popular movies in 1994, though often effective and memorable, were definitely fairly gruesome, a couple cases in point being Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers and He**, even The Mask with Jim Carrey, which is for some reason way more violent and adversarial of a film than I remember it being when I saw it in the theaters at age 10 or so (I think I’d already been watching sh** like Cliffhanger with my friends, so I was pretty squared away with it). And I think I talk about this kind of often but I just remember this dude on the Oscars or something like that making fun of the way Nancy Kerrigan was yelling “Why me?” when she got attacked and clubbed at the ’94 winter olympics. I mean, you can just look at that and tell it was a pretty barbaric time (anymore when people say they want to go back to the ’90s I’m just like, are you nuts?).

On the cover of Tigerlily, Merchant looks like somebody who’s observed all this. Her facial expression is occluded, essentially, by her hand on which her face rests. She strives to transmit a disposition of disgust. And she is disgusted. She’s disgusted with our voyeuristic society manifest in things like papa razzi, as is explained in the River-Phoenix-referencing “River”: “Why don’t you let him be? / He’s gone / We know / Give his mother and his father peace / Your vulture’s candor / Your casual slander / You murder his memory”. Luckily for us, and for her, and to Merchant’s credit as a continually refreshing, polymorphous artist, elsewhere, she’s able to take this overload of humanity and channel it into something at least superficially positive on “Carnival,” where she likens the whole processional of “cheap thrill seekers,” etc., to that entity through metaphor. 

Tigerlily is a thoroughly lugubrious album, with very few exceptions, which would be “Wonder” and maybe the remix of “Wonder.” It begins with a slow, haunting dirge “San Andreas Fault,” which positions a dream of moving out West and obtaining “milk and honey over there” with the impending disaster of the “San Andreas fault mov(ing) [4] its fingers through the ground”. She sings it in this gentle, dainty voice but also with an album troubling level of certainty, as if she’s perceived this malady actually occurring within one of her dreams or bad acid trips. “Beloved Wife” is profusely, relentlessly melancholy, sung from the perspective of an old man who’s a widower and can’t seem to muster up much will to live without his lost love. 

The real shocker, anyway, might be “I May Know the Word,” which stands at a bulbous eight minutes in length but nonetheless refuses to depart too drastically from the general median style governing the album. The instrumentation is a thing of wonder, anyway, this gorgeous, textural synth/organ combo that gives the song a beautiful fabric somewhat like an icy pond or raindrops falling down a car window. A couple minutes in, guitar comes in for melodic drapery but the style has already been set and the song is rendered wondrously fresh and original by the keys tandem. The chorus of “I May Know the Word,” then, begins two and a half minutes into the album, which as far as I know is the broadest verse/chorus frequency in the history of rock music, meaning the latest within a song that any chorus has ever started. Along these lines, Merchant, as a songwriter (she’s credited with all the tunes on Tigerlily and most of the 10,000 Maniacs songs) is no stranger to trench innovation, as showcased by the chord progression set on “Carnival” whereby the final chorus finds its chord progression tweaked, and made more compact and rapid, cycling through the same chords but allotting a different amount of time to them. Overall, “I May Know the Word” is almost unbelievably light and pliable, given its expansive length and its troubling lyrical rhetoric of “If I’m on my knees / Groping in the dark / I’d be praying for deliverance / From the night into the day”. Actually, it would be pretty much unthinkable to hear “I May Know the Word” and not immediately slot it as one of the 10 best songs of the decade, given an ingenuous, untainted critical disposition not obsessed with finding the “new thing” in music. Sometimes the “new thing” is just doing the logical element of grieving and meditating, amidst widespread calamity, as the spooky mid-’90s should authoritatively attest.  

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[1] I believe this was a Marx Brothers joke. 

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[2] Cracked Rear View, according to Wikipedia, moved 10.5 million units worldwide in its first year and is currently the 19th-most-popular album all time within the United States, in terms of sales. 

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[3] Well, when critics do their job well and don’t actually take an ambition toward the malevolent, they can be pretty useful — I used to read Pitchfork religiously in the 2000s and honestly they were fairly reliable, although this one prick was like really proud of himself for pretending to hate Soundgarden. 

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[4] This construction of the “fingers” image seems to me like an allusion to The Odyssey and all of Homer’s references to the “rose-fingered dawn,” or thereabouts, depending on the edition. 

121 thoughts on ““Is There Still Room in Our Hearts for Natalie Merchant’s Solo Debut <em>Tigerlily</em>?”

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