NEWBEATS
When Natalie Merchant was 12, her mother had the family TV set disconnected. She laughs, recalling the moment. “We were all having D.T.’s. It was so strange; she’d leave the house and we’d get the TV out. But it worked eventually.” At that time, the singer’s family lived in a farm house located two miles from their nearest neighbors.
NEWBEATS
HOW MANY MANIACS CAN YOU CRAM IN A PHONE BOOTH?
When Natalie Merchant was 12, her mother had the family TV set disconnected. She laughs, recalling the moment. “We were all having D.T.’s. It was so strange; she’d leave the house and we’d get the TV out. But it worked eventually.” At that time, the singer’s family lived in a farm house located two miles from their nearest neighbors. “It was pretty easy to be alone. My brothers and sisters and I spent all our time in the woods. That was our big entertainment, which I thought was a wonderful way to grow up. We never got bored.”
That might sound like cultural deprivation to you, but for 10,000 Maniacs, it has meant escape from the clutches of the mass media whose chief function is, as Robert Warshow put it, “to relieve one of the necessity of experiencing one’s life directly.” Happy result: The Wishing Chair, |he six-member group’s major-label debut, an album so fresh in vision it seems like a privately-bound book of poetry lost among a glossy stack of massmarket paperbacks.