Natalie Merchant - Sister Tilly

Donate to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library here: https://donate.imaginationlibrary.com/ Donate to Women's Media Center, co-founded by Gloria Steinem, here: https://act.womensmediacenter.com/a/support-wmc - When I heard the news of Dolly Parton’s death, and then a few days later, of Gloria Steinem’s death, I thought about this song that Natalie Merchant wrote called "Sister Tilly." It’s about losing a generation of activist women who did so much in their lifetimes. And so I wanted to go back and revisit Natalie Merchant’s song, and her beautiful story about what it means to her. This episode originally came out in June 2023. —Hrishikesh Natalie Merchant is an award-winning singer and songwriter from upstate New York. She was the lead singer of the band 10,000 Maniacs until she left in 1993. And then, as a solo artist, she’s put out nine albums over the last 30 years. Between 10,000 Maniacs and her solo work, she’s had multiple multi-platinum records. In April 2023, Natalie put out her first album of new songs in nine years. It’s called Keep Your Courage. And for this episode, she talked to me about the song “Sister Tilly." It’s a eulogy for a fictional character – a woman who represents the generation of women who influenced her. Women who were activists in the 1960s and 70s, when she was growing up. For more, visit songexploder.net/natalie-merchant http://songexploder.net/natalie-merchant.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18. I'm going to be performing solo at Roughtrade Records on Denmark Street. And I'm going to be in conversation about my music, moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carrie. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:37Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. It's now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know that it was Song Exploder. You'll be supporting the show. This episode is sponsored by the podcast What It's Like to Be. Do you ever think about what other people's workdays look like? Satisfying some of that curiosity is the idea at the heart of bestselling author Dan Heath's podcast, which is called What It's Like to Be. In each episode, Dan interviews someone from a different profession to find out what it's like to be a professional Santa Claus,

• 2:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  or a Secret Service agent, or a long-haul truck driver, or an aerospace engineer at NASA, just to name a few examples. The show gives you an insider view into all kinds of jobs from a wide range of industries, answering questions like, what do mail carriers learn about us from our mail? There are so many jobs out there that exist only as titles in our imagination, if they even register that much. This show is a chance to reach beyond what you know or think you know. If you're curious to learn more about the work lives of other people, check out What It's Like to Be wherever you get podcasts. When I heard the news about Dolly Parton's death a few weeks ago, and then a few days after that, heard about Gloria Steinem's death, I thought about this song that Natalie Merchant wrote called Sister Tilly.

• 3:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's about losing a generation of activist women who did so much in their lifetimes. So I wanted to go back and revisit that song and Natalie Merchant's beautiful story about what the song means to her. Also, in the show notes, I'm including links to donate to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, which mails free books to children, and to the Women's Media Center, a nonprofit that Gloria Steinem co-founded. Okay, here's the Natalie Merchant episode, which originally came out in June 2023.

• 3:36Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Natalie Merchant is an award-winning singer and songwriter from upstate New York. She was the lead singer of the band 10,000 Maniacs until she left in 1993. And then, as a solo artist, she's put out nine albums over the last 30 years. Between 10,000 Maniacs and her solo work, she's had multiple multi-platinum records. In April 2023, Natalie put out her first album of new songs in nine years. It's called Keep Your Courage. And for this episode, she talked to me about the song Sister Tilly. It's a eulogy for a fictional character, a woman who represents the generation of women who influenced her, women who were activists in the 1960s and 70s when she was growing up.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  My name's Natalie Merchant.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  About three years before I wrote Sister Tilly, I went to a funeral for a beloved librarian in my small town. The memorial was so large that we had to have it in a school auditorium. Her husband came up to me before the memorial because I was running the sound. And he said, when I give you the signal, play this song as loud as you can. And he gave me the signal, and it was Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks. It was her favorite song. And the entire group of people in the room started weeping and laughing, and everyone stood up. And I was one of the people laughing and crying at the same time. Millions of people swaying like flies

• 5:38Speaker 01

  on Waterloo underground.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Fast forward three years, in the middle of the pandemic lockdown. I had a couple other friends of that same generation pass away, and we weren't able to have any memorials. One was Sally Grossman, who was a local legend in upstate New York. So between those two experiences of being at a memorial with a full room of people, all celebrating this woman of that generation, and then poor Sally passing away, and no one could gather for her, I had them in mind and how I wanted to celebrate the lives of these women and so many others of my mother's generation.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I was just sitting at my piano. I wasn't really writing with the aim of making an album. I hadn't done that in almost 10 years. And I came up with the chord progression that made Sister Tilly appear. Oh, Miss Tilly, I think you should know. Everyone's missing you here. I just said, Oh, Miss Tilly. She just came out of my mouth, and that doesn't happen very often. Sometimes it's a blessing when you get a little message that says, this is what your song is about. And sometimes it's cursed, because then I was like, okay, I've created Sister Tilly, but I don't know who she is, where she lives. I just had to flesh her out.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I really wanted to turn Sister Tilly into a composite character, an amalgam of many different women, because I'm not really just eulogizing her. I'm eulogizing the generation of women. And so I thought that it'd be better to take characteristics from several different women I knew.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  The women that influenced me at a young age introduced me to yoga, definitely all the books that I've read, films that I saw. The influences, they're just the air that we breathe. Crystals, chimes, and your moonflower vines. Tinctures, teas, and your secret remedies. Once I determined that she was a woman who was in her prime in the mid to late 60s, early 70s, I decided I would make some references to some of the music that was popular at the time. And so the cadence is very much influenced by Dylan.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Your tinctures, your teas, your secret remedies, and their voice like Buffy Sainte-Marie. And all the Sister Tillys are into tinctures, teas, and secret remedies. Just put this clove of garlic in your lower lip, Natalie, and you'll be great.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  My mother was not a Sister Tilly. My mother was a teenage bride who had four children by the time she was 23. She and my father were separated when I was eight, divorced when I was nine. And she went to work at the art department of the local college. And it was there that she found a group of people who inspired her to think more broadly. And there was a Swedish woman who came to teach for a year. She taught ceramics. She had really long braided hair and wore ponchos and Birkenstocks and didn't shave, and she would help me make pottery on the wheel. And I think she was my first Sister Tilly.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  I thought it was amazing that you could earn a living through your creativity. And I couldn't imagine a more successful outcome for life than to be an artist. With your hair in a mess, in your outdated dress, when Houston was all the rage, back in your Chelsea girl days.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  We recorded up in a rural residential studio in Brattleboro, Vermont. I decided I would work with an arranger named Gabriel Cahain. I met Gabriel years ago when he was workshopping his musical. So I asked him if he would be interested in coloring my narrative. We started with a core band of drums, bass, piano, guitar. And that was Tilly's skeleton.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And then the strings. And it was still the fifth wave of COVID. So we decided that we would keep it to five people in the studio at a time, which meant that these huge arrangements had to be layered. And Gabriel wrote this string part that sounds like it could be a Jimmy Page guitar solo.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  You're feminist raves in your Didion shades and your Zeppelin so loud, so proud. I give a passing reverence to John Didion's sunglasses. And the week I did the vocals, she passed away.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And that's why I dedicated the album to her, to John Didion and all her sisters. And it just shows you, just not a moment too soon. That's what I feel about this song. Every day, we're losing more of these women. And there's so many aspects of our lives that we take for granted. The fact that I was able to have my daughter in a state-of-the-art birthing center. My mother had a fully, she was fully anesthetized when she had all four of her children and was handed some formula as she walked out the door. And it would have been considered, quote, perverse if she had suggested, "Maybe I'd like to breastfeed," when I was born in 1963.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  But by 1979, completely acceptable to have an unmedicated birth. But those are things that the women of my mother's generation fought for. Here's to your days at the barricades. Here's to the girls in the fray. Alex Sopp came in with alto flute. And she put on five tracks at least. And then came the oboe.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And then came the brass section. It's unusual in pop music to hear a lot of oboe and alto flute and flugelhorn these days, but it makes it a richer texture, richer fabric. I always make sure, even if it's just someone coming in to do a single instrument overdub, everyone had to understand what the song was about.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  And so the cello line in "But You're Gone" is just an octave. But you're gone. I remember just telling Eleanor, the cellist, this is the moment when people realize that she's passed away. And she started crying. Her mother's a Sister Tilly. But you're gone. You've gone so far away. But you're gone, gone.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  You've gone so far away.

• 15:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  More with Natalie Merchant after this. Song Exploder is sponsored by DistroKid. If you're an independent artist, DistroKid is now offering a new way to start selling merch without dealing with inventory or running an online store. DistroKid Direct automatically turns your existing album artwork into merch products like shirts and hoodies, posters, totes, all kinds of things. And you choose what to sell, you set your prices, you connect PayPal, and DistroKid handles the printing, the shipping, and the customer support. They don't take a commission, so you keep 100% of your merch sales. It's a simple way to add another revenue stream to your music career without adding more work to your plate.

• 15:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 16:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 17:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 17:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 18:04Speaker 01

  There's several different movements to the song. And I thought it would be great to describe her life with the more dreamy, ethereal approach, this 3/4 feel. And then when she's making her departure, she's got places to go. Oh, you've gone away. You've gone away. I did the vocals for almost a full week. Sister Tilly, you're a constellation. Sister Tilly, you're a white light vibration now. We tried doing it as a gang vocal, and it was a great amount of fun to have everyone

• 18:49Speaker 01

  standing around one microphone, but it sounded god-awful. It just sounded awful. So I decided that I would go in and sing all those vocals myself. Tears fall down like rain. There's nothing but the big forever. There's nothing but a sweet surrender now. And then at the very end, it gets kind of mystical when I am ushering up her off into the great beyond. Go on without us.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  That's another aspect of 60s music, that kind of Eastern influence and a kind of Ravi Shankar sitar kind of feel. And, you know, Sister Tilly spent some time in an ashram, of course. So I had to make some kind of reference to that.

• 19:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And who's playing that droning thanpoura sound?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  The bass player had, it's actually a tone generator that he uses to tune. And I was like, that is great. We have to have that.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  I'm becoming a bit of a Sister Tilly myself, to be honest. And there's quite a bit of me in Sister Tilly. The Rilke poems and the stacks of Mother Jones, it's all, I'm a Sister Tilly in training.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Not only was I raised by women of that generation who had Tilly-esque characteristics, I'm a child of the 60s and 70s, so I can't escape the influence of counterculture, because counterculture was my culture. And it is a concern of mine that the work of the Sister Tillys of this country has not been credited to them and has not been fortified and cherished, and therefore will be lost.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Take, for instance, bodily autonomy for women. That's a right that my mother's generation fought. I can't even talk about it.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  I can't, because I see this image of thousands of women, because this is my childhood, too. Thousands of women marching in the streets of Washington. The momentum of those women and the power. They fought so hard, and we didn't secure it, and now we're losing it. And I worry about my daughter's generation.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  It's almost like Sister Tilly knocked on the door, and I had to let her in. Not many songs come about like that, yeah. And now I'm getting to share her. People are seeing themselves in her, and they're seeing their mothers and friends. And I think maybe it will fill people with more urgency to appreciate them.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  I'm being a real softie today.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  I was just about to start crying again.

• 22:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now here's "Sister Tilly" by Natalie Merchant in its entirety.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Oh, Miss Tilly, I think you should know. Everyone's missing you here. Your fortune-telling cards, red flags in the yard, your Rilke poems and your stacks of Mother Jones, your feminist raves in your tiddy and shades, and your zepplin so loud, so proud.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Zepplin so loud, so proud.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Here's to your days at the barricades.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Here's to the girls in the fray.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Oh, how I wish you could stay. But you're gone.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  You've gone so far away.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  But you're gone.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  You're gone so far away.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Oh, you've gone away.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  You've gone away.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Oh, you've gone, you've gone away.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Sister Tilly, you go on without us. Sister Tilly, you don't think about us now. Everything fades away. Sister Tilly, you're a superpower. Sister Tilly, you're a lotus flower now. Everything fades away. Sister Tilly, you're a constellation. Sister Tilly, you're a white light vibration now. Everything fades away. No craving for sensation.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  No want and no temptation now. Tears fall down like rain. No fear and no delusion. No doubt and no confusion now. Tears fall down like rain. There's nothing but the big forever. There's nothing but a sweet surrender now.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  You're a constellation.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  A white light vibration now.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  A superpower.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  A lotus flower.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  No sensation, no temptation. No delusion, no confusion now.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Go on without us.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Don't think about us now.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 29:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream "Sister Tilly."

• 30:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram, @RishiHirway, and you can follow the show at @songexploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 30:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Radiotopia.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  From PRX.

• 30:54Speaker 03

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