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.
More Quotes from Natalie Merchant:
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.Natalie Merchant
I would say I'd rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.
Natalie Merchant
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.
Natalie Merchant
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.
Natalie Merchant
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.
Natalie Merchant
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Based on Topics: Mind Quotes, Night Quotes, Place Quotes, Thought & Thinking QuotesBased on Keywords: bragg, marathons, song-writing
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