The Writer’s Block: Natalie Merchant on Songwriting and Where She Gets Inspiration

Life has a funny way of stopping songs. For nearly a decade, Natalie Merchant couldn’t write. After taking a hiatus from touring from 2003 through 2009 to raise her daughter, Merchant released her fifth album Leave Your Sleep, followed by a self-titled album in 2014, then couldn’t write for roughly six years afterward.

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“I was raising my daughter, and I’m a single mom,” Merchant recently told American Songwriter. “My days are so full that it never occurred to me that I should sit down and write a song. I was just focused on so many other things. It’s an indulgence to sit down with the piano and sing. It got to the point where I forgot that I was a songwriter, or that I could write songs.”

Following the release of her 2014 album, Merchant was busy directing the short documentary, Shelter: A Concert Film to Benefit Victims of Domestic Violence. She spent another three years campaigning against fracking and she curated a 10-disc box set comprised of her solo albums in 2017, all while volunteering at Head Start, a preschool program serving low-income children and children with disabilities within the Hudson Valley region of New York, where she has lived for more than 30 years.

Eventually, Merchant began penning enough songs for her ninth album, Keep Your Courage.

Produced by Merchant, Keep Your Courage is a celebration of women, from its opening “Big Girls” and “Come on, Aphrodite,” featuring Abena Koomson-Davis of The Resistance Revival Chorus, along with meditations on a lost generation (“Sister Tilly”), love (“The Feast of St. Valentine”), and more narratives spun around mythical and spiritual figures (“Narcissus,” “Guardian Angel”).

The album—which also features orchestrations from seven composers, along with the Celtic group Lunasa, jazz trombonist Steve Davis, and Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh—was also a culmination of everything that was happening in Merchant’s life over the past several years, and written while she didn’t know if she would ever be able to sing again, following a 2020 surgery to help repair degenerative spinal disease.

Merchant recently spoke to American Songwriter about how songwriting often feels like a “trance,” New York City and its inspiration, and the hundreds of songs she’s written that may never see the light of day.

American Songwriter: Thinking back to 10,000 Maniacs or (solo debut) Tigerlily (1995), are you still the same songwriter?

Natalie Merchant: Essentially, the way that I write when I get around to doing it is very much of a quiet and solitary place. I think my writing methods since I left 10,000 Maniacs, have stayed pretty much the same. I always play the piano, and the first thing I do is decide what key I’m in the mood for because every key evokes different emotional responses. Then I find an interval, a rhythmic pattern. It might sound very elementary, but that’s how I go about writing. And maybe if I’m lucky, some phrase or even a single word will come to mind.

It’s almost like being in a trance after a while. A word just comes and then that’s the direction the songs going in. Just about every song I’ve written, ever, still resonates on some level.

AS: How did you land on this pattern of writing?

NM:
It’s a strange thing because I’m not trained by anyone to do what I do. I just taught myself everything, and I have moments where I think, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do it properly.”

I keep using the word intuitive, but for me, it is just intuition. I’m just trying to transfer what I’m feeling into the piano and through my voice to other people. For years, when I wasn’t making records, I wasn’t trying to transfer anything to anyone. I was just trying to keep myself sane, probably.

AS: You’ve mentioned coming down to New York City. Is it a source of inspiration—or the contrary?

NM
: I can write words in the city [New York City], probably not lyrics, but it’s such an amazing parade of people. Every person that walks past me, it’s like I’m reading the entire novel of their lives. Then, I’ll sit on the subway, and I feel like weeping just looking at the amount of pain around me. Life is not fair, and it’s a struggle for so many people in it.

I think that’s part of the reason New York is really hard for me to be there for any length of time because I’m a fixer and a problem solver. When I see people on the street eating garbage, or sleeping on cardboard boxes, I want to fix it and I can’t, and it’s defeating them. I can’t believe that life is going on all around it, but I’m digressing.

AS: No, it’s being empathetic and caring for others. This is part of your fabric.

NM:
I’ve been down to New York about 10 times in the last five months. I’m finding people to be very friendly, and I’ve had wonderful exchanges with people. Maybe it’s post-pandemic, maybe people are just happy to be back to ordinary life. I don’t know. And even if they’re a little rude, it’s kind of my sport, I go down to the city, and I try to melt people. A lot of people in the city, just to survive they put up the steel wall, but you can melt it. (Laughs) I just throw my hands up and say “I’m from the country.”

AS: Whether it’s in the city or the country when the lyrics are coming to you, when do you know a song is ready?

NM: That’s intuitive. You just know. I always write far more verses than I need. On this album, I just let it be. I don’t know how many verses are in “The Feast of St. Valentine.” It might be 10 verses and no chorus 

AS: It sounds like you also write more songs than needed.

NM:
I’m not that prolific. … I’m just a merciless self-editor. If an idea isn’t really going where I’d like it to go, I just abandon it. I probably have 300 abandoned songs that I hope no one ever finds. I should probably just destroy them all.

Something I discovered about songwriting and album making is that it’s an endless series of small decisions—thousands of them—and sometimes the decision can be as mundane as “should we flog this song to death, or should we move on to something else, or is everyone just really hungry?” (Laughs) It’s really good to know when I have to feed people. Then you come back from lunch, and everything sounds great.

Check out the July/August 2023 issue of American Songwriter for our full interview with Merchant.

Photo by Shervin Lainez / Sacks & Co.