When you are asked why you love someone, you can always give superficial reasons: They’re attractive, smart, kind, courageous — whatever. But the true reason you love someone is perhaps much simpler and not so reductive:
You just do.
And the same holds true for loving artists like Natalie Merchant and her seminal 1995 album “Tigerlily.” Of course, people have their stated reasons. She is a talented artist. And her original band, 10,000 Maniacs, produced epic moments including their album “In My Tribe,” which was named one of the best albums of the ‘80s by Rolling Stone. My personal favorite was the band’s cover of Pattie Smith’s “Because the Night” on “MTV Unplugged.”
And when Merchant went solo, people were inspired. Here was a female artist who did exactly what was not expected of her — struck out on her own and had a successful solo career. She seemed to speak to every person out there who felt constrained by their lives and wanted to break out, but simply couldn’t. And “Tigerlily” included introspective hits like “Wonder,” “Carnival” and “Jealousy,” songs that made many people feel as though she understood what they were going through.
But this analysis misses the point. At that moment in time, and for every moment since, Merchant and “Tigerlily” resonated beyond any specific positive quality. Why do you love her and “Tigerlily”?
You just do.
And guess what? The feeling is very much mutual: Merchant loves all of you, too. And that was the spirit behind her making “Paradise Is There,” her new recordings of the original songs of “Tigerlily.” Not only did Merchant take a new approach to the original songs, but she also made a video in which she discusses the project, and her fans discuss how “Tigerlily” has influenced them.
So it was with great anticipation that I interviewed Merchant. When there is an artist out there who inspires such devotion in people, I want to talk with them to get their insights on life in the hope of inspiring and helping others to find their path.
But my anticipation hit a wall early on when Merchant told me her feelings about our interview. “This is very specific to my own experiences, and I really don’t think it’s going to help most people,” she told me. “I don’t usually do interviews to help people. I usually do them to promote a new record or draw attention to some horrible ecological disaster.”
Ouch.
The gauntlet had been thrown. So just as Merchant recruited fans who recounted how “Tigerlily” had been important to them 20 years ago, I decided to recruit some Natalie Merchant fans who also happen to be health and wellness experts to talk about how Merchant’s new album and her comments during my interview resonate with them now.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, finding willing participants was not difficult. Michelle Roberts, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist clinical mental health therapist and University of Missouri – St. Louis doctoral candidate responded to my request with, “Do I know ‘Tigerlily’? I have a ‘Tigerlily’ tattoo.” Molly Knight Raskin, global mental health advocate and the author of “No Better Time,” said, “Ahh, I love her! She’s beyond cool!” And Mitch Prinstein, John Van Seters distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, exclaimed, “I love her! How can I help?”
And together, what we discovered was that just as Merchant was speaking to us 20 years ago as a single person without kids trying to make it in the world, she is now speaking to us with a new set of experiences. She is still an artist, but also a parent who, like many of us, has had to redefine her self-concept based on this new role.
And by being willing to explore her old songs from this new perspective, she is making a bold statement:
The key to loving oneself and others over time — devotional love — is about continuing to empathetically examine and learn from our experiences and challenge ourselves to apply our insights to our lives.
By all accounts, parenthood is a transformative experience. While there are several factors that may influence a parent’s well-being, one crucial component may be whether one considers being a parent to be a critical aspect of self-concept. Simply put, prior to having children, many of us evaluated ourselves — our “purpose” — primarily based on our career or interests. But this can change severely upon having children.
Understanding and honing our purpose in life is crucial to well-being; positive psychology theorists suggest that one of the keys to thriving is the ability to find a “meaningful” or “purposeful” life, in which one uses his or her strengths in the service of something “greater” than oneself. And having a strong sense of purpose has tangible health benefits. For example, one research study followed more than 6,000 people over the course of 14 years and found that those who died were less likely to have had a sense of purpose.
According to Merchant, her career — and her creativity — has always been a central aspect of her self-concept. And she has drawn tremendous satisfaction from being creative. “You’re an inventor. As a songwriter, these are your inventions. They are useful things that you have made that serve people … I’ve always liked that analogy of songwriters being inventors. You create something that is tangible in the world for people, but it’s really just created out of a thought or an emotion,” she said.
And Merchant describes the intrinsic motivation to succeed in her music. “I’m very goal-driven, and maybe that’s because I’ve been self-employed my entire life. And without that inner motivation, things don’t happen,” she said. “There’s nobody lording over me saying, ‘You have to accomplish these five things in the next 3 months.’ I have to set the goals.”
And people like Merchant who invest in their work can obtain significant benefits. Not only may they develop a strong sense of purpose, but research also shows that people who make social investments in work may develop personality traits that are associated with long-term health and well-being. For example, studies suggest that people who have social investments develop higher levels of conscientiousness, which is associated with improved health behaviors and well-being, as well as increased longevity.
The centrality of her work to her overall self-concept was perhaps accentuated by the fact that Merchant predominantly works from home. “Most people — at least traditionally, and it’s changed over the years — most people leave their place of residence and go to their place of work and then come home, and they’re able to leave the work behind,” she explained. “But for me, the option to work is there all the time. My piano is in my living room. I see it from the sink in the kitchen. It’s there. I have a recording studio in my house. I rehearse in my house,” she said. “There’s a lot of fluidity between work and personal life.”
But unfortunately, Merchant felt that at times, the intensity that helped motivate her also had a “dark side.” While people who have high standards and are perfectionistic are usually driven to succeed, high standards can lead to significant disappointment in oneself and people around them. For example, one study found that when individuals who are perfectionistic at work encounter work-related stress, they may become depressed over time.
Merchant explained her rationale. “I honestly feel that I’m pretty harsh with myself and everyone else. I have really high expectations of myself and high expectations of other people. But I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed a lot,” she said. “I get really angry when I waste time, when I feel like I’m not using my time constructively. And I really disrespect idleness. It’s something in my DNA. It’s something that I was born with. People should be busy doing things. There’s a lot of work to be done, and people should be doing it.”
Knight Raskin said that she relates to Merchant’s struggle with the double-edged sword of perfectionism. “When highly motivated people work on projects they’re passionate about, it can create a kind of tunnel vision; a scenario in which the focus is so intense it makes so many things seem trivial. That’s why so many creative types retreat to solitude to produce great work. It allows for that kind of focus,” she said. “But it can lead to paralysis. It’s the voice that tells you nothing you’re producing is original or clever enough to move an audience. So I think success is found in managing it; knowing when to push yourself, but also when to break and breathe a little more.”
But Merchant’s sense of herself changed drastically when she had her child in 2003.
“I spent five full years — I did some writing and some research — but for the most part, I bathed and fed and educated a child. And at the end of some days, I felt like pulling my hair out, because I felt like I hadn’t done anything all day, and then I would say, ‘I took care of my daughter.’”
Part of what was difficult about the transition was that Merchant lost connection with her music. “This wall went up between myself and my music for several years. And that was the place that I would go, whether it was to paint or write poetry or sit at the piano for hours. I had a steady diet of alone, solitary creative time since I was a child,” she explained.
Merchant’s being disconnected from her music was not an insignificant loss. While any productive activity can have its benefits, there is the overwhelming evidence that listening to or participating in music in general has therapeutic value. For example, studies demonstrate that listening to or playing music can improve symptoms of depression, anxiety and chronic pain. Research has even shown that adding music therapy to treatment as usual for people who suffer from schizophrenia mitigates symptoms and improves social functioning.
But as time went on, Merchant became more accepting of this new role and allowed parenthood to become a more significant part of her self-concept. Merchant felt that she was able to make this shift by changing her fundamental definition of achievement. “I had to change my expectations of what accomplishment was. And I would look at her sleeping — a happy and plump little baby — and say, ‘That’s what I did today. I cared for this child,’” she said. “That’s probably the most important function I could possibly have. It’s more important than writing in journals, answering emails, working out or whatever people do with their time that makes them feel like they’ve been productive.
“So it’s all in your mind.”
Moreover, Merchant began to experience the world through her child’s eyes. “Those core experiences you have before the age of 7 really shape who you are and your ability to trust, your ability to allow yourself to be vulnerable, your strengths and your weaknesses — your everything,” she explained. “I felt like a scientist having a child. I was closely observing every phase. My daughter didn’t even have the word babysitter in her vocabulary until she was probably 8 years old, because she was always with me.”
And this resulted in Merchant experiencing a deeper kind of love than she had felt previously. “I felt every stage of her life so far, and it has been full of emotion,” Merchant explained. “All different sorts of emotion — joy and satisfaction that I never thought I’d experience in this life has been the undercurrent. And love. I didn’t really know what love was.”
Merchant feels that having a child made her not only more understanding of her child, but also of others. “I think once I understand — and I usually do try to understand — other people’s circumstances, I can usually soften,” she said. “I think it made me finally mature and become a more fully realized human being and a much better citizen of the world to have a child. Because I think artists can be extremely self-centered.
“So, I just became more compassionate.”
Merchant’s experience with parenthood resonated with Prinstein, who described going through a similar experience when he and his wife had children. He told me, “It’s amazing to hear Natalie talk about that moment all parents experience, when suddenly we are no longer the most important person on the planet, when we switch from selfish to selfless love. It’s humbling, inspiring and scary as hell.”
Roberts’ experience with parenting was similar to Merchant’s in that it broadened her empathy and creative scope. She told me, “It’s always a balance to retain our creative anima as we move through life in general and parenthood in particular. Becoming a parent forces us to be about more than ourselves, to be less self-centered, open to others. That opening of the heart naturally makes us more empathetic, more able to feel and absorb what is happening around us. Ultimately, I think this kind of empathic feeling makes us better observers and artists.”
And it is with this compassionate spirit that Merchant approached “Paradise Is There.”
“I felt that my whole career has been about talking about love. But not romantic love so much as a more expansive form of love — whether it’s familial love or love even of nature or love for other beings,” she explained. “And love of community. Outside the confines of your natural-born family, there’s the community that you make or that you’re part of or that you adopt or that adopts you, and you can love that, too.
“My feeling is that this whole project was a love offering to the people who have been supporting me and taking care of me all these years,” she said. “And I’ve been taking care of them by writing music that addresses their core issues in their lives. And it’s this amazing symbiotic relationship that I’ve had with my fans and that any artist usually has with their fans. You feed them, and they feed you. And it’s just this really beautiful, balanced cohabitation.”
Prinstein, who specializes in human development, recognizes how important it is for an artist to model how to examine their own work and learn from their experiences. He said, “We hear songs play at different points in our lives, and despite the permanence of the melody and the lyrics, it touches us in completely new ways. It’s striking to hear how even Natalie reacts to her own music differently now. I never imagined that an artist would see their own reflection evolve while they sang the same song over the course of their lives.”
Along those same lines, Roberts added, “I am thankful for this gift from Natalie. The remake of this album gives me another chance to experience these songs in a new, more introspective way, with another two decades of life experience under my belt. I was listening to the new version of “Seven Years” the other night. I loved the song in my early 20s, but it nearly brought me to my knees, now that I’m in my 40s. I’ve now lived through that relationship, for seven years no less. Having a soundtrack to remember and reflect on the pain of loving someone who didn’t love me the way I deserved to be loved is a powerful way to remember, process and move forward.”
As an example of the evolving relevance of her music, in the video that accompanies “Paradise Is There,” Merchant talks about the song “Beloved Wife” and the “devotional love” that existed between her grandparents. “The death of my grandmother and my grandfather’s dying of a broken heart – it’s sad. It’s beautiful, but it’s sad. There’s a lot of sadness on that record.”
She described how the song helped accentuate the devotional love felt between folk singer Pete Seeger and his wife, Toshi, at her funeral. “When Pete Seeger’s wife, Toshi, died, they’d been together 47 years. I sang at her memorial, and her memorial went on for five hours. Every person who took to the stage and stood in front of that microphone said that she had changed their lives,” Merchant said. “When Pete got up at the end to speak, he said, ‘People ask me what my life would have been without Toshi,’ and he said, ‘My life would have been a catastrophe.’ And I sang at that event, and he was sitting five feet away from me — that was an intense experience, too — to have written a song that could be utilized in a situation like that, really used, to be useful on that level as an artist.”
But make no mistake — having a child has not mellowed out Merchant when it comes to taking up societal causes. “I’m sort of mystified by the way that people behave and the way that our society functions. There are so many illogical systems out there, and I get really frustrated,” she explained. “I’m disappointed because I see potential, and then I see how we don’t achieve it over and over and over and over — as individuals, as a community, as a nation and as a species. That’s where my greatest frustration is.
“I care about the future more, because I created the person that’s going to be living decades and decades from now, hopefully,” Merchant said. “I’m more invested in the future, and I also feel such a greater level of empathy for other people, because I know how innocent and vulnerable we come into this world — blank slates. And when you hear about the traumatic experiences people have, whether it’s through demonic parenting or war or poverty — whatever the circumstances — and you see how those experiences scar people when they’re small people, and people stay small people inside.”
Roberts, whose research revolves around people she’s dubbed “super empathizers,” echoed Merchant’s commitment to the future. “I think becoming mothers makes us naturally more concerned about the world around us. It also makes us frustrated because, as creative, concerned women, we know there is nothing we would stop at to get the job done if we had the power to do so,” Roberts said. “I’m learning through my work that empathy can open us up to the world, but too much can also paralyze us and make us feel helpless. It is a balance, and for deeply feeling artists, the woes of the world present a constant dialectic — a source of both creative fuel and deep angst. It is that discomfort that makes us uncomfortable. But being uncomfortable is OK as long as we stay creative and engaged.”
Knight Raskin, whose work involves bringing attention to the devastating mental health issues that can be caused by war and poverty, discussed how having a child can intensify the desire to make change happen. She told me, “Natalie has embraced the responsibility that we all have of being a citizen of the world. She not only wants to make the world a better place, but also she wants to leave it better for her child. That’s a very visceral desire, but it’s not always easy to translate into action. Every time I see a child suffering, I think of my own, and it often breaks my heart. But it also emboldens me. Translating empathy into action is something Natalie Merchant talks about so eloquently. She sees the suffering, and she feels frustrated enough to use her celebrity to champion action.”
Merchant is particularly interested in environmental issues. “I just feel like we’re destroying the planet because of our obsession with things,” she explained. “Making things and having things that are toxic to produce. I’m just thinking about the lead and the cadmium and the coltan. The coltan mines in southern Ghana, where the people have no clothing, and they’re enslaved and held at gunpoint to destroy their own land so that we can get the [rare-earth] minerals to make my cellphone.”
Ultimately, Merchant stands defiant and continues to take action. Most recently, she worked on the concert film “Shelter” to raise money for victims of intimate-partner violence. As we learn more about the prevalence of intimate-partner violence and its devastating effects, it is becoming acknowledged as a serious public health issue.
“Domestic violence has been a very difficult issue to approach; people don’t want to acknowledge the level of crisis and trauma that so many of our neighbors, women and children in particular are living with,” Merchant said. “Horrendous crimes are being committed behind closed doors in houses all over this country that often go unreported and unpunished because the victims feel trapped and are dependent upon their aggressors. But the cycle of abuse will never end until there is transparency and accountably. And we need to help heal the children who have been traumatized or they will be at risk of continuing the cycle.”
Merchant acknowledges that focusing on these issues can be drive one crazy. “Maybe that’s the only healthy response, to go crazy,” Merchant said. “If you think too deeply about these systems that we’re dependent upon that are so toxic, you just have to repress that knowledge, or you would just be in a fetal position.”
But people are paying attention and learning. “The police department loved using the film. They were giving it to their recruits. They were giving it to their older officers. The film itself is changing attitudes of officers in the way that they were approaching domestic-violence cases. The shelters received more unsolicited donations than they had ever received the day after that concert,” Merchant said.
And her ongoing work is resonating with, and inspiring, others. Prinstein said, “We all want to feel like we offered the world something that was singular to us — to feel like we left our mark. In all of the buzz about record sales, social-media followers and magazine covers, it’s cool to see that Natalie finds most meaning in how her inventions helped someone else in their moment of need. She always seemed to rise above the frenzy of celebrity, and it makes me feel good to know that she continues to be as grounded now as she was back then.”
As an artist, inventor and mother, Merchant is devoted to the planet and the people on it, and that devotion continues to grow. And luckily for people who love Merchant, the party’s just getting started.
Because devotional love is forever.
