Natalie Merchant, No Strings Attached

By JON PARELES New York Times

Natalie Merchant has stepped off the pop treadmill. After 17 years with Elektra Records, first as the main songwriter and singer of 10,000 Maniacs and then with million-selling solo albums of her reflective folk-rock, Ms. Merchant decided to go it alone.

When her Elektra contract expired in August 2002, she chose not to renew it or to seek a deal with another major label. "I would make a big-budget pop album, followed by a year of touring and promotion and then some downtime for recovery," she said. "I don't even know if I was writing music that was appropriate for that mold." Instead she will release her next album, a collection of traditional songs called "The House Carpenter's Daughter," on her own label, Myth America Records. It is to be released June 1 through Ms. Merchant's Web site, nataliemerchant .com, and July 1 in stores.

Recorded on a modest budget, marketed primarily to existing fans and not relying on radio exposure, "The House Carpenter's Daughter" breaks free of the commercial pressures that have turned major-label releases into risky gambles that can cost a million dollars in promotion alone. In contrast, Ms. Merchant's transition suggests the model of a sustainable career for a musician who is no longer eager to chase hits.

"The business is going one way, and Natalie's going another," said her manager, Gary Smith, also the general manager of Myth America.

Ms. Merchant has little to lose. "I'm in a privileged position," she said by telephone from Hawaii, where she lives part of the year; she also has a home in upstate New York. "I'm beyond financially independent. I had a lot of success, and I gathered together a very large audience. And I was in a rare position, because my material was unorthodox as the pop-hit mold went, but I was able to sell multiplatinum albums and have relatively large hits."

When a musician is signed to a label, the company pays for recording and promotion, then recoups expenses from the musician's royalties while retaining ownership of the finished recordings. (Elektra still owns Ms. Merchant's catalog; Rhino Records, distributed by the AOL Time Warner conglomerate that includes Elektra, is releasing a 10,000 Maniacs retrospective this summer.) A label also uses its expertise and clout to market and distribute an album.

Ms. Merchant paid for recording and packaging "The House Carpenter's Daughter," including the $3.50 manufacturing cost of an elaborate box for the first 30,000 copies. (The CD will sell for $16.95.) The special package "was printed in America for three times the price in Hong Kong," Ms. Merchant said.

"It's just not in keeping with American business practice right now," she added.

Even so, "The House Carpenter's Daughter" needs to sell only 50,000 copies to break even, less than 15 percent of what "Motherland," her last album for Elektra, sold.

"We're not trying to recoup some enormous debt," Mr. Smith said. "The economics of making this record are very prudent. When we sell 200,000 copies, we'll be standing on our chairs, hollering. If we released this record with these kinds of goals on a major label, we would look like a failure. At Elektra, if you just sell 1.5 million, everyone goes around with their heads down."

Ms. Merchant is not the first well-known musician to become independent. Prince, after battling Warner Records over his desire to release more music in a year than the label thought it could market, started his own company, NPG, and has since released double- and triple-CD sets at whim. Todd Rundgren markets his music directly to subscribers to his Web site, patronet.com.

"For those already through the door, doing it on your own is incredibly viable," said Jay Rosenthal, a music-business lawyer who represents the Recording Artists' Coalition. "It's going to be very attractive, and it's going to be a viable alternative even for bands who are doing well. The only reason to go to the major labels is to get your songs on the radio, to go for the promo money. If you don't need to get on the radio, and you've got a name, go out there and go for yourself. If there's any moment that artists should do it, it's now, before things get worse."

He added that some musicians would have no choice, as he expected major labels to cut their rosters by 30 to 50 percent in the next year.

Ms. Merchant's album "Motherland" was made before Sept. 11, 2001, and released shortly after. Her concert fans welcomed its somber songs. But Soundscan, which tabulates retail sales in the United States, shows that "Motherland" has sold about 398,000 copies, far fewer than "Tiger Lily," released in 1995, which has sold nearly 3.6 million, and "Ophelia," released in 1998, which has sold 1.2 million.

" `Motherland' was the best material I ever wrote, and I was really happy with the record," Ms. Merchant said. "I don't know if it was timing or the way the industry is today, but it just didn't seem to interest the label so much. And I thought, why fight an uphill battle for attention?"

Elektra, Mr. Smith said, "offered her a sizable amount of money to stay, at a juncture when she felt like she was ready to go."

The label does not comment on musicians who have left its roster, an Elektra spokeswoman said.

"The House Carpenter's Daughter" is a collection of other people's songs. Ms. Merchant began delving into them in 1999, before the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou" put traditional music back in the Top 10 in 2001. ("Motherland" was produced by T Bone Burnett, who also produced the "O Brother" soundtrack.) She researched books of folk songs and listened to field recordings collected by Alan Lomax; she also took courses in the history of American folk music at Bard College.

A few selections on the new album are well known, like the English ballad "House Carpenter" and the labor movement song "Which Side Are You On?"; others are rescued from archives. Ms. Merchant found one, "Weeping Pilgrim," in an 18th-century hymnal at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. "I really appreciate the songs as social documents," Ms. Merchant said.

She performed them during a summer tour in 2000; since then, live versions have been circulating on the Internet. When the tour ended, she decided to take the band into the studio simply to document the songs. The road-tested band mixed banjo and fiddle with drums and electric guitar, like a bluesier and bluegrass-loving American cousin of the English trad-rock band Fairport Convention. Four days of sessions, recorded live and barely overdubbed, yielded the makings of the album.

Ms. Merchant and Mr. Smith are now learning about marketing and distribution. "This is the first time that we don't have somebody watching over us," Mr. Smith said, "telling us that we can't do this, or it's going to cost too much money, or it's not going to work."

They expect fans to learn about the album from Ms. Merchant's Web site and through publicity and a small advertising campaign. To gauge demand, they may offer fans who order the CD in advance a downloadable file of a song from the sessions that is not included on the album. In an increasingly consolidated retail business, a handful of chain stores, like Borders and Barnes & Noble, have accounted for a large percentage of Ms. Merchant's sales in the past; now her label is approaching them directly.

"I don't know that every artist has the capability to go directly to these chains, but Natalie has a history," Mr. Smith said.

He doesn't rule out the possibility of more major-label efforts. But for the moment, Ms. Merchant sees them as unlikely. She says she may go live in Europe for a time; she's considering setting medieval Latin liturgical texts to music or making a children's album. Million-selling albums and loyal fans have given her the freedom to experiment.

"This is the kind of record I want to make, going forward," Ms. Merchant said. "I've been writing things that are much more obscure and sort of shelving them, thinking I can't get this past a corporate boardroom and I won't even try."

"I understand that the larger labels are just interested in the projects that can generate the most capital for their quarter," she continued. "But I didn't want to subject the music to that kind of corporate boardroom and radio censorship. Why subject myself and the work that I do to that kind of environment when it really doesn't matter any more?"