10,000 Maniacs: In My Tribe

"Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother…" An incredibly moving and economical line. There's a trope running through several of Natalie Merchant's songs concerning the unsung suffering of the women who have to pick up the pieces left in disarray by their pioneering menfolk. I'm thinking also of Gun Shy on this album — a sister fearing for her younger brother joining the army — and Gold Rush Brides, which I only know from a cassette version of the Unplugged album that M had in her car. But Hey Jack Kerouac is the best. A few years back I read Big Sur, in which Jack gets almost suicidally depressive. To provide some narrative development, he can't just let his depression run its course to the end of the book, so in the last few pages his mood miraculously lifts and he is at peace again. But his biography suggests this lift was very temporary, and he was living with his mother, alcoholic and guilt-ridden, when he died at the age of 47. I can only guess how that must feel for a mother, though I also read Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road to get some idea of a woman's perspectives on the boys and their japes.

I might well have bought this album when it came out in 1987, but I didn't. No good reason; just chance. I might have liked it a lot then, and I'd have got to know it much better than I do now. As it turned out, I didn't get it until summer 2000, when I saw for a fiver in Fopp, and I see it as a kind of footnote to The Wishing Chair and Tigerlily. It's a transitional album between those two, possibly more popular than either of them. I can see the catchiness and the appeal of What's the Matter Here, Like the Weather and Don't Talk, but from this distance, I don't think this is quite as distinctive as the other two.

MusicBrainz entry for this album