May 07, 2014

Publication title: The New York Times, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Unknown

3 Singers Return, Reflecting About Life

“Pushin’ on, pushin’ on, isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” Natalie Merchant sings on her self-titled new album, a set of dark, brave, thoughtful and serenely startling songs that is her first album in 13 years with her own lyrics. Ms. Merchant, 50, had million-selling albums in the 1980s with 10,000 Maniacs and in the 1990s on her own before turning away from a routine pop career after her somber 2001 album, “Motherland.”

“Natalie Merchant” (Nonesuch) arrives, by coincidence, alongside two albums by fellow songwriters who also built huge pop audiences in the 1990s and have since balanced careers, motherhood and shifting artistic impulses: Tori Amos, 50, whose album “Unrepentant Geraldines” (Mercury Classics/Universal Music Classics) returns to her idiosyncratic pop songwriting after forays into musical theater and classical music, and Sarah McLachlan, 46, whose “Shine On” (Verve) follows her 2010 album “Laws of Illusion,” which was filled with the sorrows of a dissolving marriage.

All three songwriters are grown-ups now, and not pretending otherwise. Ms. Merchant’s album opens with “Ladybird,” a song about “the way that love grows cold and just fades away.” On “Shine On,” Ms. McLachlan confronts the death of her father. “If 50 is the new black, hooray, this could be your lucky day,” Ms. Amos sings mockingly in a new song, “16 Shades of Blue.”

That song leaps out of Ms. Amos’s album, which packs 14 lapidary character sketches into 59 minutes. As “16 Shades of Blue” begins, the singer is being told, presumably by a partner, that “it’s over disintegrating and there’s nothing I can do”; it makes her consider how many warnings women get about age through their lives, like a 33-year-old worried about losing her job if she has a child. Ticking clocks and flickering electronic drums provide no comfort. But later in the album, she shares a song with her 13-year-old daughter, Tash: “Promise,” a hymnlike vow of mutual support that begins with Ms. Amos singing, “Promise not to say that I’m getting too old” and ends with Tash pledging, “I will rescue you.”

Thoughts of maturity and mortality are just one thread on “Unrepentant Geraldines.” Like most of Ms. Amos’s albums, her new one revels in multiplicity and mannerisms; she’s not afraid to warble. The lyrics wander between myth and realism, the personal and the political; some of her characters have names like Trouble, in the folksy “Trouble’s Lament,” who “got evicted from the devil’s lair/I wager she got betrayed by her friend Despair.” Though Ms. Amos’s classically tinged piano is at the center of most arrangements, there are also hints of the Beatles, Celtic music and, in the title song, the Police, as she sings, “Our Father of Corporate Greed/you absolve corporate thieves.” She toys with mythological characters and thoughts of the National Security Agency. But two of the album’s most striking songs are in the first person: “Wild Way,” a confession of emotional dependence, and “Wedding Day,” which recalls a vanished romantic bliss. Ms. Amos, as usual, has a lot on her mind through the album, but beyond her whims and theatricality, what comes through is longing.

Even in mourning, Ms. McLachlan is determinedly reassuring on “Shine On.” This album is a rebound from the despair on “Laws of Illusion”; love reigns. Ms. McLachlan is explicit about the benign cultural role she has embraced: “You turn the radio on, play your favorite song and cry,” she sings in the album’s opening song, “In Your Shoes,” which continues, “You let it all disappear, push back the doubt and fear.”

Working primarily with her longtime producer, Pierre Marchand, Ms. McLachlan hasn’t changed her sound. Her songs materialize in grand resonant spaces, with pealing guitars, piano chords haloed in reverb and drums that boom without aggression. Her voice whispers breathily, swells right up to the verge of tearfulness and then gracefully backs away, ever sympathetic and ever poised. Even in “Flesh and Blood,” a U2-like rocker about how desire overcomes control and “violence and beauty all collide,” her phrasing is elegant. Throughout the album, the lyrics acknowledge sorrow and uncertainty only to push back against them, calmly and firmly. Positive thinking reigns: “One thing that I know is it will get better,” she insists in “Beautiful Girl.”

It’s not an album for the cynical; those who want to can find saccharinity and echoes of self-help. But “Song for My Father” praises him by saying, “Your quiet words a salve to soothe my wayward soul”; she’s making sure it runs in the family.

Ms. Merchant offers far less solace. There has always been a core of melancholy in her voice and of somber purpose in her songs; now, her optimism has faded further. The album envisions loss on both a personal and a global scale. “Seven Deadly Sins” looks back on a protracted, bitter breakup, while “It’s A-Comin’,” set to a steadfast soul vamp and sung with quiet certainty, predicts a worldwide ecological catastrophe: “Wild fires, dying lakes, landslides, hurricanes/apocalypse in store, like nothing ever seen before.”

Since 2001, Ms. Merchant has released “The House Carpenter”s Daughter” in 2003, a collection of folk songs, and “Leave Your Sleep” in 2010, in which she wrote music around poetry for children. That has left her with a store of songs written over a decade, and sometimes it shows. “Texas,” a folky, fingerpicked song about a spoiled “golden child” with an overwhelming sense of entitlement, is a little too topically about George W. Bush, though its portrait of oblivious consumption applies elsewhere. But “Go Down, Moses,” a song about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina that Ms. Merchant shares with a gospel singer, Corliss Stafford, rises to the archetypal in its blend of grief and determination: “I’m alive, I’m a lonely sole survivor.”

Produced by Ms. Merchant, the music is modest but not austere; strings and horns arrive unobtrusively. The album’s centerpiece is “Giving Up Everything,” which suggests a Buddhist renunciation of earthly attachments — “Giving up everything, not haunted by wanting this” — but is set as a string-orchestra elegy, as if Ms. Merchant can’t quite let go. Strings return for “The End,” a waltz — alternately soothing and doleful — in which Ms. Merchant longs for an end to war, religion and poverty, wondering, “How can we have so far to go?” It’s a song from someone who’s not expecting easy answers; the only consolation is in the warmth of her voice.