This week on talk to al jazeera sinner song writer Natalie Merchant i stumbled into this as a way of life. I had no intention of being in a band or a singer. It happened to me by accident she has rerecorded her break through solo album tigerlily, but this time with a twist. The essence of the songs remains unchanged i think tigerlily, a song like carnival is not political. But it is taking the critical look at the way that we leave the former lead singer of 10,000 maniacs have recorded almost a dozen albums, including one for children. Are you crying my little one the parent of a teenager, she says mother hood changed her i became human, fully human when i became a mother. I felt connected to other people in ways that i never have. Living and past the singer is also committed to causes, including Domestic Violence 17 women who were homicide womens of Domestic Violence in my county she is a champion for the anti Fracking Movement water is sacred to me and new york, it is a crucial resources, clean air and water. It got involved i sat down with Natalie Merchant in new york city. Thank you so much for doing this. It has been 21 years since tigerlily. When you look back at that time, did you know it was going to be a huge hit and sell millions of copies of course not. No why do you think it was so says unanimity resonant. It it was honest and heart felt album. People responded to that. It was the first album that i produced myself, but at the time it was kind of my brave step forward. I had been in a band for 12 years and this was my first solo effort. I didnt want to hand it off to a producer. I wanted to do it myself you actually had a lot of control over the tracks in the original tigerlily yeah. I funded the album myself and gave it to them when it was finished did they make any changes . No it was the album that you wanted to create. So 21 years later youve rerecorded a lot of these tracks. Theyre very different. What is new . Well, the main reason that i wanted to rerecord was i have gravitated towards performing with string instruments. Some have full arrangements and other just have string quartet. The more i played them live the more would ask would ask for a recording of this it was part of performing these lives, but Classical Music was part of the music you heard growing up yeah. It was. My mother. We were not a wealthy family. We were just a working class family, single mother with four children. She was from a pretty poor background herself, but for some reason she had this passion for Classical Music. I remember no matter how little money she had in her checking account, when there was a pledge drive on the local Radio Station she always pledged where did that album come from. Was there a driving inspiration . After being in a group for 12 years, i just had this strong desire to speak for myself i reread all the litrics from lyrics from tigerlily. Theyre not overly political. Are you at a time where songs carry themes from your activism . Is that something that has recently . The last one was a song called the end that i wrote about people who have been about the refugee crisis. It has gotten much worse in the last two years. I had i think my most political album was motherland which had the miss fortune of coming out a month after september 2001. It wasnt a time when people wanted to be taking critical look at the u. S. I talked about Race Relations in that album, rampant consumerism, corporate misconduct. Of course, i didnt sing this is a sing about corporate misconduct. It wasnt so overt, but those were the underlying themes. It is threaded through all my work. I think tigerlily, a song like carnival it is not political, but it definitely is taking the critical look at the way that we live. [ ] i have always wondered what carnival is about about manhattan, walking through the streets of new york and just questioning, if your environment is insane, which i find new york to be, if its illogical, if it just doesnt its not logical, this. People say that new york is like the bumblebee, there is no reason why the bumblebee should be able to fly i was listening to that, have i been blind, et cetera. Ive walked these streets in the wealth and poverty, in the diamond market, they just rolled out for me. Theres so of wealth in this city and theres so much wealth and poverty, they coexist right next to each other. You can see people sitting down to a 400 bottle of wine and lookout the window and see an old woman eating out of the garage can. The disparity and the income gap is like this in the world, but in new york everybody is right up against each other living together. You have to do a lot of convincing of yourself that youre you know, somehow justify your lifestyle to be able to live as accessively excessively as you do and taking advantage of all the material pleasures that are here and not give assistance basically stepping over bodies to get into prada you talk about women in the 90s. There was really a celebration, i think, of female singer song chapman, jewel, joan osborne, victoria williams. I could go on and on. Tori amos i had them all on my play list. When you look at that genre today, do you think it is in today . I think there are still great singer song writers. Laura marling is my greatest artist. She is in her late 20s. Great singer and musician, arranger. I think also the internet has given so much independence to artists and although they may not be super stars, i think so many people have been able to capture a real loyal following some she joined the band 10,000 mainians as their maniacs as their lead singer when she was only 17 years old. Inside story takes you beyond the headlines, beyond the quick cuts, beyond the soundbites. Were giving you a deeper dive into the stories that are making our world what it is. Youre watching jazeera. Im stephanie sy you started out as a teenager with 10,000 maniacs. How did that come about . We came from a small town in western new york and we had to make our own fun because there was none. I just went to party one night and there were a group of people playing instruments and it just turned out to be the people who were in 10,000 maniacs was it a launching pad for your solo career after that . I didnt think of career at that time. It was a way to get out of found town . Yeah. To see some of the world. I literally stumbled into this as a way of life. I had no intention of being in a band. I had no intention of being a singer. It happened to me by accident. Then every step of the way the question of do i go back to college or stay in the band thats surprising to hear that it was an accident that you became a singer because you seem so blessed with that gift and beyond that your song writing, did that start as writing poetry . No. I didnt write poetry. The first lyrics were for the first album which sold a couple of hundred thousand copies which is embarrassing. I ask everyone, would you like your journal broadcast was it your journal . I was going to advance placement in college and my english professor asked if we would keep a journal. He said i wont reaped it but i will count the read it but i will count the number of pages. So i would write about everything. When i joined the band and we started playing shows and we did covers with them, they said, well youve got you are always writing things in that little books. Why dont you write litrics lyrics it twaept a school it was a School Activity yeah at the age of 17 yeah is that your still still your process that you write in a journal . No. I approach it from i can compose something on the piano its you compose while youre also thinking of what you want to say in the song then i also did this sevenyear long project of adapting other peoples words to music. It was leave your sleep project. It was a double album in 2010 it was poetry. Obscure. A lot of what i think would be considered classic childrens poems when you read poetry does a melody come to your head . Yeah. It was interesting because i wanted to illustrate, take these poems and illustrate them with music. So i took one and i went into the studio with chinese music on with various instruments ancient chinese instruments . Yeah. There was a poem called the adventures of isobel and it is spunky i know the poem well because that is my daughters name. I almost imagined her with pigtails and bare feet. Covered in mud and bruises did your daughter inspire all these ideas of collaboration and putting poetry to music . The first poem that i adopted was when i brought her home from the hospital. When she was only three days old. I adopted a poem and it was an lullaby. I thought i was going to do poems. Are you crying my little one, foot sore and weary. I must try through the night. Pay me. Here on my shoulder. While the windfalls upon me, colder and colder. The only problem with her was she was a victorian poetist and they were for dead children. It got dark really fast. I did a few of hoer poems and thought maybe others. So i did this project. Edward offered a lot of great poems. I wanted to bring it more towards the present and then i got into others is everything you write auto biographyical . No. I used firstperson pronounces all proceednoun pronouns all the time. It is easy to convey to other people rather than saying there was a wachlt. You say im the woman and people pay attention. Tell me your story there is a terrific song on one of your recent albums called ladybird. This resonated with me as a mother because i think it really speaks to how bitter sweet that period is for a lot of women. What does that song mean to you . Well, i think this is common among a lot of my freendz who are art friends who are mothers. We love our children and we put creativity into raising them, but theres a part of you that gets lost. [ ] and you dont know what you feel, but you know its not satisfied. The more wise parts of us say, well, this is 18 years and it will be over. The grand scheme of thing is going by really fast, but the most to moment endurns test makes you question will i ever find myself against did you access creative parts of you when you became a mother, when you talk about how your daughter inspired certain types of musical arrangements, but did you find that you could access something that wasnt there before emotionally . Yeah. I became fully human known for her music career she is committed to social causes. Up next she tells me how and why she got involved in the anti Fracking Movement. This is talk to al jazeera with me, stephanie sy. Im speaking this week with Natalie Merchant. You are also sort of really involved in community activism. I know that youve been involved in the new york state anti Fracking Movement. That . I was asked to come to binghamton to perform a benefit for an ithacabased organization because the counties around ithaca, about 80 of four of those counties had been leased over a 20year period to the gas industry. People woke up realising that if fracking is allowed in new york state we might be looking at 40 to 80,000 fracking wells. We were also waking up to the nightmare in pennsylvania of water contamination. I went to binghamton. I had been reading about fracking, didnt understand it, didnt understand the potential impacts at the time and my eyes were opened. I met this family from pennsylvania who had a jug of contaminated water from their well and between the methane migration and the introduction of the chemicals in the fracking process, they were saying the water in our town has been destroyed. Water is sacred to me. New york, those are crucial resources, our fertile land, clean air and clean water and so, yeah, i got involved did those communities feel at all torn because they also know that, perhaps, it means jobs in a place like binghamton which has lost a lot of jobs yeah. The farmers stood to make a lot of money. Many people who leased their land in pennsylvania sold and left. We were in danger of Something Like that happening. There wasnt full disclosure about the risk. Also a lot of the people leased early and didnt really get adequate compensation. As time was moving on, and the moratorium, the governor paterson put in a more tom your so moratorium for an impact study. People were getting more communities were getting more and more divided because the people who leased their land were waiting for their payments and other people were stepping back another issue that youve taken on locally, in your immediate community, is the Domestic Violence and in that case you actually sort of married music with your activism. Can you talk about that . These are emotional issues. In preparation for that concert that i did in the hudson valley, i had been to a billion rising event. So we i walked into the event and there were cardboard cut outs full size of women and there were 17 of them. These were 17 women who were homicide victims of Domestic Violence in my county this was just in your immediate . Yeah. My little county, community. I was shocked and so i made contact with the women who ran the Domestic Violence there was only one shelter with 17 beds for a county with tens of thousands of residents. Then i met across the river in dutchess county, the people who ran the shelter there. There werent many more beds there. Then a special prosecutors and victims of Domestic Violence and survivors where there had been homicides all got together, and we were meeting over a regular basis and we wrote the script and gathered all the statistics because it had never been quantified before on a regional level. How many calls how many Domestic Violence 911 calls are there, how many incident reports are filed, how many go to court, how many are convicted, how many people end up in Emergency Rooms it was staggering. 37 homicides in 15 years. 37. Anywhere from a 3 month old child to a 78 year old woman are those moments those that you are glad you are Natalie Merchant, that your celebrity can be used to highlight these issues. Is that almost the point these days . Yeah. Ive been involved in doing benefits from day one, so 35 years of doing benefits, but i feel in the last six or seven years i dont wait for people to call me. I sort of assess where theres a need and then i get really involved your albums have sold millions and millions of copies, so i assume youve done quite well thats why i feel the responsibility of those who are given much, it is expected of them. I always took that to heart. Maybe taste catholic upbringing or whatever, but i feel like maybe its i feel like i have to give back Natalie Merchant thank you for talking to us. Thank you. There comes a time in every republican candidates debate when the state of the u. S. Military comes up. And thus becomes a candidate to candidate serial lament over how bad it is ill equipped, demoralized, weak, in need of a lot more money a lot more stuff. The audience applauds but is it true, is American Military decline in absolute terms or