Natalie Merchant Quotes (14 Quotes)


    I have never relied on my sexuality and I don't really have an image at all. If you look at film footage of me 20 years ago, I don't look much different to the way I do now. I used to say that I would never wear anything on stage that I couldn't wear out to dinner with my grandmother. It just felt more respectable. I always assumed that being a musician was a vocation and that it was something I would do throughout my life and I wanted to do it with dignity. This current pop culture is full of perversity. I've been called the Emily Dickinson of pop and the thinking man's Madonna. You sort that one out.

    I feel we all have the obligation, myself. I want to live in a more humane, civilized society, and I feel like the only way we're going to achieve that is if we all take it upon ourselves. I just wish we could be a more caring society. I feel like we're social Darwinists who believe that everyone has to make it on their own. But the reality is that we all don't start out on the same footing.

    I don't want to live in a culture of despair. I'd like to live in a culture of hope.

    My sister works in an inner-city school in Greenville, South Carolina, and she brought many of her at-risk kids to our show yesterday to the sound-check. It was amazing how these kids opened up with music. Music teaches so much about focus and concentration and group dynamics and appreciation for subtlety and beauty. And that's being taken away from schools.

    I'm on this search trying to figure out exactly who I am and what I have to say to people.


    It's funny, I remember doing the Johnny Carson show, and, uh, I couldn't afford my rent.

    I just want to be known as a good songwriter who wrote songs that were enduring. I hope my music gives people a glimpse of how empathetic we were and how desirous we were of a better society.

    That kind of violence is dangerous to me, to be beamed out via satellite to the rest of the country. Since I don't watch television very much, when I do check in, I'm horrified. But I don't think it took a massacre in a high school in America for me to see that there's too much violence or that children aren't being taught to use their own judgment when they watch television.

    They should point to the gun manufacturers with the other hand, and if they had three hands, they could reserve one for the legislatures for allowing these weapons to be out there. I do agree that television, especially, is overwrought with violence. I can't watch it most of the time.

    Be true to yourself, and, um, don't worry about some large companies' quarterly profit index.

    They came back to me and said, 'No, you have it wrong. This is all about getting these kids together, putting them into antagonistic situations and getting them to compete over a record contract.' It was horrible and mean-spirited. I couldn't believe they would want me to be involved in something like that.

    I would say I'd rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.

    I just wanted to get all this stuff in one place, ... A lot of it was scattered around or out of print. There are songs here that I thought would never get heard, the ones with Billy Bragg, for instance. The lyrics are kind of embarrassing - we wrote them in the middle of the night during these song-writing marathons - but I feel they are still documents of my work and that this is the place to let people hear them.

    I'm in the public eye. I've sold 14 million records -- so 14 million individuals have bought my records and have sat down and intimately listened to them. And if I think about that many people paying attention to me, I'd better say something worthwhile. I do have a personal ideology when it comes to the work that I do and the art that I make. And it's based on just wanting to say something that has substance and to try to move people with music -- and give them an idea of the glimpse I have into what's possible for us.


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