Maybe even finding herself almost in agreement. Now 59, Merchant has long since shrugged off those early critiques. Merchant could have sung the Yellow Pages and still got her flowers. The strange, extraordinary sweetness of it. There’s no chorus to speak of, and the lyrics were provocatively weighty and austere – enough for notorious music grump Robert Christgau to damn her writing as little more than pretentious student poetry. It included the first song she ever wrote, the year before, a chorus-free love song of sorts to her grandparents that grew out of a college class assignment. Merchant was just 17 when she made her first record, fronting American folk-rock band 10,000 Maniacs. She could see it coming, and I lived through it arriving.” So much of what she was writing in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was kind of prophetic, or just really observant of this kind of hyper-culture of mass media, mass production and franchising. “Reading a lot of her books during the lockdown, I realised that we had a similar approach to writing,” she says. Like Didion, Merchant is a prolific journal-keeper, often writing on current events and social critique relayed through some kind of personal connection or experience. Though the sunglasses were a bust, and Merchant was outbid on the couple of other things she’d been tempted by, the experience was a fascinating glimpse into the life of a woman that she’d come to see almost as some sort of kindred. I didn’t expect her to have every Norman Mailer book, but she did.” The thing we were struck by was that they had hundreds of her books, and I’d say 98% of them were by men. You could tell she wasn’t a great housekeeper. “Everything was kind of stained and threadbare. “It was interesting to be among her things,” she recalls. Visiting the auction house in Hudson, New York, about a half-hour drive from where she lives, Merchant viewed the whole collection with a friend who just happens to be an English professor who’d had Didion as a student.
But what their new owner probably doesn’t know is that the shades were also briefly worn by Natalie Merchant – another American treasure – just the day before.
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