The Return of Natalie Merchant
New tour and album and, here, a few songs you may have missed.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films. He was also a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy.
Glad to see this week that Natalie Merchant is mounting her first major tour in years this spring and promising a new album. Although I knew and liked some of her early hits (with 10,000 Maniacs and after), I had lost track of her and the albums that followed. But about four years ago, we caught her stunning performance in a small parlor up at the fabled Mohonk. (She had long put off tours due to health or other issues but always managed to play a little in the Berkshires or Hudson Valley, often benefits for her many, many causes.) After that, I caught up with a few highlights from those “missing” lps. A few of those tracks below, along with the usual political cartoon.
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First, here’s a message from Nonesuch Records on her upcoming album:
Nonesuch Records will release Natalie Merchant’s Keep Your Courage, her tenth solo studio album and first of new material since 2014’s self-titled record, on April 14, 2023. An eclectic album, produced by Merchant, it features two duets sung with vocalist Abena Koomson-Davis (Resistance Revival Chorus), contributions from the Celtic folk group Lúnasa and Syrian virtuoso clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and horn arrangements by jazz trombonist Steve Davis. There are lush orchestrations throughout by seven composers including: Gabriel Kahane, Stephen Barber, Colin Jacobson, and Megan Gould. Keep Your Courage comprises nine original songs by Merchant as well as an interpretation of “Hunting the Wren” by Ian Lynch of the Irish band Lankum. The vinyl LP edition of Keep Your Courage includes four bonus tracks from earlier albums, previously unreleased on vinyl.
Now, songs from previous albums I heard at Mohonk for the first time.
“Tell Yourself”
Live, acoustic version of “Motherland” from just last month.
“Not In This Life.”
“Seven Years”
The upcoming album on vinyl will include four songs never before on vinyl, including this one, re-mastered, “Giving Up Everything”
Cartoon of the Day
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.