Natalie Merchant

I remember walking the streets of Asheville, NC as a teen and listening to Blind Man's Zoo by 10,000 Maniacs. The pulse of the beats and the powerful crescendos, along with the crisp staccatos of Natalie Merchant's voice would grow stronger with every flip of the cassette in my portable walkman. Those songs became a soundtrack to my life at that time and when I listen to the album now on my Dell DJ, I am taken back to that magical summer.

Natalie Merchant left 10,000 Maniacs a few years later after the group moved from being a college band associated with R.E.M. to a radio mainstay on VH1. Merchant's solo music is ok, but the simple, yet original rhythm section and the fluid jangle of the guitar has disappeared. It seems that virtuoso musicians, although talented and very proficient, lack the enthusiasm and the creative imagination a less skilled musician may have.

I have played drums for many years and with many bands, and I have tried to study and advance myself like Neil Peart of Rush or Niko McBrain of Iron Maiden, but, even though those drummers do some very amazing things, I find myself touched with the gentle, but simple beats of people like Meg White or Jerry Augustyniak. Sometimes becoming so involved in complicating a rhythm can drain out the emotion that was there.

I think it is beneficial to all artists to remain in that realm of amateurism to a large degree. The studying and out doing of others begins to infect the music or poems that we produce. A poet that has studied English Literature throughout his college life becomes a slave to his views of literature based on T.S. Eliot or Yeats. A person who writes from the heart without the predisposed influence of "the masters" can create much more original and thought-provoking work.

Natalie Merchant, a once shy and bashful youth, poured that emotion into her art with 10,000 Maniacs, and when you listen to the albums you can hear and feel the wanting and the need to share their thoughts and ideas with us. The trick is battling past your successes, because the public turns a song or a poem into a "miracle," and it causes you to think that it will shadow anything you produce later. But it won't, I believe, if you continue to speak from the heart and retain that love for creationism.

I don't know if Natalie Merchant will join with 10,000 Maniacs again someday like Pink Floyd and the Pixies have done, but it would be nice to hear that voice couple with the musical excitement of a band that has returned to the place that they belong. But it will be without the fluid jangle of Robert Buck who succumbed to liver disease in 2000 (Click here to donate to the Robert Buck Fund).