10,000 Maniacs - The Wishing Chair

Can't ignore the beauty of "Among the Americans," or the drive of "Scorpio Rising," but "My Mother the War" is just such a ferocious thing.

This is such an overlooked album, far superior to their later more commercial work.

voting for the superior recording of "tension makes a tangle", with an honorable mention to "can't ignore the train." great album!

"Just as the Tide Was a Flowing" over "Scorpio Rising," both tremendous.

i forgot that colonial wing wasn’t on the vinyl, that’s certainly my favorite on the cd, that song could stand against anything by prime era banshees… i do prefer the hope chest versions of my mother and tension, but the grey victory here has a bit more bite. puzzle lover and maddox tables are some of her best lyrics but i must vote for arbor day, a perfect melody and waltz backing and probably my favorite vocal of hers when she builds to the higher notes in the third verse. the lyrics are a bit silly but joyously tossed off with pretend profundity, rather like some of the rem songs on fables like wendell gee. it would feel really wrong to me for it to not be the last song on the album! (it was last on the cd)

i listen to hope chest way more and even eden more i think.

You know, I don’t know if I’ve heard this record! (I do know “My Mother The War” from somewhere else)

You probably don't know it from this awesome cover by the millennial-era punk band Suran Song in Stag, but I'll post it anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVz4q75_ULA

Went for "Maddox Table," but there are a lot of great things on here. Sometimes it's just nailing a faintly new-wavey "folk" thing they could not quite recapture even after Lombardo came back. Sometimes it's that the writing and arrangements seem worked over so tightly, everything just perfectly in place. (Like "Scorpio Rising," where a lot of its surprising muscularity comes from every element having such purpose and drive.) There's a certain lightness and ease that hides it, but when the songs are on they are really on! That's part of why I'd say "Maddox Table" — that shift into another gear toward the end is kind of quietly huge and emotionally stirring. Great lyric, unique fusion of new-wave and folky ideas, great missing thumb, great details like everyone following the tripping rhythms around "smokes, spirits, candy, and cologne" ... "Can't Ignore the Train" might be a better encapsulation of the main thing they were up to at this point, and it's possible I'd think more of "My Mother the War" if I didn't prefer the collegiate version, but "Maddox" sticks out to me.

The album certainly has a buoyancy that they'd ever essay again. I give them credit too for not fully amalgamating their often at-war influences (as someone once remarked, that Jamestown, NY college station must've had a GREAT collection).

I'm pretty sure that Dennis Drew, their keyboard player, managed that station, at least for a while!

I'd absolutely love to see some grand list of music they were absorbing during that early period. I feel like there's a kind of guileless, enthusiastic, eclectic artsiness that you could easily cultivate in, say, a slightly out-of-the-way college down in the early 80s, one that would be much tougher even a decade later, or in a bigger city, or anyplace with more consciousness (or self-consciousness) about it — this band feels like a lovely model of that. There's a video somewhere of an early live show where they cover Eno's "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More," which for me really clarified something about where they were coming from. You can safely guess at certain post-punk and new-wave they probably took in (particularly via Rob Buck guitar tones); a few had been in punk or No Wave bands; also feels safe to post that John Lombardo probably enjoyed the Grateful Dead a lot? But all the dub and reggae, the occasional west-African stuff, the ever-growing folk element, the weirdly natural way they could make all those things sit comfortably in the same song — I'd just be so curious to know what they were taking in, and which elements different members were partial to.

I interpreted them at the time as trying to steer their alternative foundation toward something like Fairport and the Band.

Joe Boyd!

What made the early Maniacs interesting for a while is their almost comical reluctance not to write straightforwardly; the difference b/w this album and In My Tribe is striking in that respect, a combination of Peter Asher and of Merchant leaning into narrative.

the subject matter and singing style changed concordantly with the sound and the musical influences. that’s what makes wishing chair interesting, it’s a perfectly transitional record, caught in between the cocteaus-do-reggae postpunk and the wet sprocket they would become.

Those are ... bizarrely good shorthand descriptions.

I think they used Fairport as an argument for why it was fine when Merchant left — "it was always going to be a revolving collective, we'd expected it for a while," etc.

I checked the "Hope Chest" liners yesterday; Drew and Gustafson were both radio-station guys. Also some nice references to various members playing at some painters' converted warehouse with copious incense and pictures of gurus and Buñuel films being projected on a wall, just a very specific historical eddy of small-town arty/hippie stuff.

In terms of "leaning into narrative" the thing that gets grating over the next two records is the sense of each song being so rigidly assigned a topical subject, to the point where they might as well be titled "The Illiteracy Song" and "The Teen Pregnancy Song" and "The Slavery Song." It's not as if the lyrics didn't have narrative focus before, but with something like "Maddox Table" that feels like a natural outgrowth of being interested in something, doesn't it? Not, like, tasks picked off a checklist of Social Ills to Dramatize in Oddly Pat Ways. (I think I am on record on a different thread as mostly enjoying the previous approach of Things Learned About in Classes to Dramatize in Charmingly Pretentious Ways; if you're going to do writing-assignment topics they might as well be about bullfighters or surrealism or whatever. And obviously later stuff doesn't all have those over-pat qualities — e.g., "Don't Talk" doesn't present as "The Alcoholism Song" any more than "Joey" would a couple years later.) "Wishing Chair" is as close as they ever got to being lyrically opaque: you could listen to a lot of these songs and not immediately know what they're "about," or listen to them for years without being able to say, you know, "Everyone a Puzzle Lover" is about some straightforwardly definable Topic. "Our Time in Eden" seemed like it wanted to escape the Topic trap by going more personal or introspective, but boy did the patness remain.

I was gifted a 10,000 Maniacs compilation by a friend of my parents when I was a teenager and even as a bright-eyed, naive earnest soul I just struggled so much with the moralising and finger-wagging of the lyrics. The descriptions in this thread and remembering that I really enjoyed the stuff at the start of the compilation (ie taken from their first two albums) is convincing me that I absolutely should go investigate their early stuff.

In defence of the band's IMT-era moralizing, I went digging through archive.org to find this old epinions piece that I remembered thinking made a fantastic case for Merchant's lyrics.

i appreciate how daring some of her politics really are: there's a big gap between "child abuse is bad" and "it is my responsibility to interfere with it when i see it, even if i'm rude", and a bigger gap between "war is bad" and "i need to decide how to love my brother the soldier without making him think i tolerate his job".

i've stated my uncool thoughts about her preachy lyrics elsewhere. i like her a lot in that respect. it's okay to be uncool sometimes. i think of her best-intentioned music with the same philosophy as something i heard from gil scott-heron: "if each one reach one, then each one teach one."

not always the most fun, but i think we've all had that one teacher/instructor/professor who was just kind of admirable because of how much they _meant everything_ they said.

xpost- boxedjoy, if i may: knowing your tastes, you would probably find the hope chest recordings to be pretty good fun. and yeah, the joe boyd connection of the early sire stuff is legit. not life-changing, but i think you'll dig it!

finally, mig totally otm with that description!

Sometimes "Planned Obsolescence" is my essential Maniacs track: Here Come the Warm Jets where your high school librarian gets a podium and a mike.

I have very few complaints about preachiness, and honestly sometimes the flip-side of "pat" is "tidily and effectively constructed" — I'm more bothered when the content of the songs feels determined by some make-work topical program rather than some more fleshed-out human impulse. That's probably somewhat unfair — I think a lot of the topics were prompted by her actual family and experiences and whatnot — but to me something like "Maddox Table" feels like a writer imagining and fictionalizing material she cares about in and of itself, while something like, say, "The Big Parade" feels as if it's just stringing together movie cliches in order to conjure its topic. (And would feel that way even if somebody linked a Merchant interview where she's like "I observed each of those details firsthand while conducting extensive research interviews at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.") There's a growing writerly distance to certain things? There is a weird analogy I want to make here involving Taylor Swift lyrics but explaining would involve doubling down on my overposting

The other to-be-fair thing I'll add is that Merchant went pretty much directly from "bookish small-town teenager" to "full-time touring musician and somgwriter," so it's not exactly surprising that the subject matter might lean increasingly toward stuff that feels read-about more than experienced

Blind Man's Zoo was my first purchase. It has a song whose chorus is "The biggest portion is the lion's share."

Rhymed with what now feels like a Trump tweet ("the lambs go hungry — not fair!") and preceded by "the lambs are bare of fleece and cold / the lion has stolen that, I'm ... reliably informed" — but for me this one gets away with it by leaning into the animal-fable quality? That helps on "Campfire Song" too, though significantly less so. Maybe if like 10% more of these were framed as just-so stories I'd have no complaints.

My bestie and I made a music video in high school to "Eat for Two" in which the actors lament an actual broken egg. It was extremely literal from start to finish.

see, I like "Campfire Song." What a verse melody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObuJ3LL2qN8

the version of my mother the war on streaming services is the secrets of i ching (hope chest) version with the rubato bass intro. the correct wishing chair version is above with full band intro. i don’t begrudge votes for the wrong version but i do wonder if joe boyd’s choice to re-record a few of the best songs from the first lp has retrospectively dampened some enthusiasm for wishing chair.

Prefer the rubbery guitar-frenzied Hope Chest version.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I have a copy of this but for better or worse the top three might be the only ones I can name when's it not actually playing. (Plus the Trad "Tide".) I shall refresh my memory...

I have probably told this story here before: I didn't care about 10k maniacs and found them "preachy" when they were around. Parenthetically -- coincidentally -- not sure how to frame this because tired, but also, anyway, I was physically abused as a child & as an adolescent. Part of the hard shell I was trying to form in response made me feel allergic to, put off by, resentful of do-gooder stuff like Merchant's work. At the same time, that resentment occurred automatically and without thought -- I hadn't developed any grand theory of "be a hardass" or anything. And I really didn't think about the abuse much, it was just part of my life, and was pretty freshly in the rear-view. I was all fucked up, but didn't feel like I was fucked up. And I'd already heard "What's the Matter Here?" at least once on the readio, and responded all hardass in my mind about it -- sure, yeah, what do you know, you're just making shit up to look pious, etc etc. Defense mechanism shit on my part. And then one day I was driving down the street, going to rent a video, and the radio played "What's the Matter Here?" and it seized me right down at my core, right where I was hiding from my own pain, and said to me: it's fucked up that somebody hit you when you were a kid: and you're still wounded, man, you're hurting, you just won't say so. I'm driving at 50 mph with tears streaming down my face, I'm sobbing to this soft-ass music by this lady who had to have an opinion about everything...but no, none of the learned strategies were working, the voice & the music did not let me escape into my reaction formation. I had to hear & listen & feel it, hear how my younger life would have looked to an outsider who cared.

It was just one experience on an afternoon in California. It didn't immediately change my life right then. But it connected me to myself in a very important way, and I am thankful to that within Natalie Merchant's character that drove her to risk coming off preachy, pious, whatever. She sang a song that, really, started me down the long path toward self-discovery and healing.

Excellent thread, everyone. Really appreciating the erudite critiques and heartfelt reminiscences. Prompted me to relisten while following the lyric sheet, which I hadn’t done in many years.

I prefer the early versions of all the songs they re-recorded, probably would have voted “Scorpio Rising” although “Maddox Table” and to a lesser extent “Lilydale” are lovely examples of Natalie’s history buff lyricism. And I had never heard “The Colonial Wing” before today, wow!

Happy birthday, Natalie Merchant.

Thanks for sharing, JCLC.

you have to hand it to young merchant. leads a band of older dudes, moves to georgia with them as a teenager, sells plasma to make ends meet, meets michael stipe and influences his lyrics first to be more literary-historical and then more political, then fucks him, duets with ubernerd david byrne on a country song at the inaugural gala, then leaves her band after their first top forty single, then has a few even more successful singles as a solo act. headlines lilith fair after profoundly influencing all the other performers, sets shakespeare to music with gavin bryers, refuses to get the band back together after the lead guitarist dies.

she must be one of the wonders, God's own creation!

Hope Chest is the album of theirs that engaged me most, it’s among my favorites by anyone.

(I’ve liked other stuff they’ve done, but never quite that much.

I have a memory of being in college and, as a member of the Japanese Club, driving various members to a hibachi place a few towns away. Had Hope Chest playing in the car. The club president, an American, was absolutely blown away by the record and by some of Merchant’s vocals in particular, and felt like those were Japanese, or influenced by Japanese.)

I may have posted this in some other thread but the first time I saw the Maniacs, early 80s, I was not at all sure she was singing in English.