From Hell To Breakfast: Musical Review With Recipe. Merchant & Monica
Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 9:44AM | by Otter 
Natalie Merchant: Can dip her socks in my Prozac any day.Back in college when the "compact disc" was being hotly debated and it was generally decided by my set that it would hang around for awhile, I was economical and cautious and had two.
Don't laugh: I had good vinyl.
But of compact discs, two.
They were Mark Heard's Dry Bones Dance and Daniel Lanois' Acadie, and I listened to them constantly, mainly in the college library where the new tech (a thing called a "compact disc player") lived and moved and had its being.
Many things were missing from my new collection, obviously, most notably a good soulful angsty feminine voice, and this need went unfilled for many years. (Yeah, YOU try replacing your whole music collection in a new medium. It was traumatic for all of us. We were still making mix-tapes well into the 1990's.)
Natalie Merchant's Tigerlily became, in 1995, the supply for this lack.
It was brilliant, moody, philosophical, musically interesting, and a trifle judgmental. It wasn't 10,000 Maniacs, for better and worse: it was too dark to play often, lacking the playful wit of the Maniacs, but it had some killer songs on it.
Until Norah Jones got her hooks into my ears, Merchant defined must-have music that made me feel like I did back in junior high when Rachel told me over the phone that Christine really liked me and thought I was cool in a hippy sort of way. That whole ache-yearn-thrill-dream thing.
Merchant was not quite Joni Mitchell (still on vinyl and cassette at the time). But she had it going on.
Recently Natalie Merchant has been done with the human race for the most part, dropped out of sight to have a daughter, paint, be inward.
Now CD's are gone and downloadable mp3's and mp4's are in, and Natalie's back, 46 and still drop-dead-musical-sexy-in-a-depressive-sort-of-way, with Leave Your Sleep. I didn't realize how much I'd missed her.
Her new project takes other peoples' poems, hunts for their musical groove, writes (usually) interesting melodies around them, and submits them to a sort of musical democracy (or mob: over a hundred musicians worked on the album).
Sometimes it's been faulted in reviews for lacking cohesiveness, but there are some damned fine songs in that album. And I'm bound to say it reminds me a little of Bob Dylan's Love and Theft in the easy way it transcends genre. Folk ballad? Got you covered. Jazz standard? No problem. Relentless Tigerlilyesque morality screed? Done.
Sometimes records just hit the crease and get a sort of grace in spite of their own chaotic methods.
Leave Your Sleep's smooth, satisfying, and a bit over the top.
Like Crawfish Monica.
Crawfish Monica at Jazz Fest. Easy to make. Bypass surgery not included.
Here is a dish, like cheesecake, that exists for no purpose but pleasure. And it's easy to make, unlike Leave Your Sleep.
Take a pound of crawfish tails. Best if they're fresh and just shelled, but realistically you'll probably use frozen: be sure they're thawed before you start. If your grocery store doesn't have even frozen crawfish tails, buy the manager a drink and explain the facts of life to him. Or move. Your call. But you live in the hell of your own making.
OR you can use a pound of shelled shrimp.
OR you can use a pound of lump crabmeat.
OR a pound of oysters.
Some poor souls have even used a pound of lean quartered chicken-breast.
Cook one pound of pasta, any sort you like. Rotelli is best as it hangs on to more sauce. Thicker is better, and spaghetti, while probably already in your cupboard, doesn't give the surface area for the sauce to cling to.
Drain the pasta, rinse in cold water, drain it again. Set it aside.
Melt a pound of butter in a LARGE saucepan (I'd use my pasta pot) over a medium heat.
("Wait, wait," you are saying. "A whole pound of butter? Isn't that... bad for you or something?" Hush, hush, my child. It's about to get worse. Do not use margarine. There is a special place in the underworld for those who use margarine.)
Sautée six cloves of garlic and a big bunch of chopped green onions in that butter until they're soft. Keep stirring it: it should only take about three minutes.
Add the seafood or cubed chicken. Sautée for two or three minutes.
Add a pint of half-and-half. (I told you it was going to get worse. Tomorrow you can eat Granola all day if it makes you feel better.)
Add a few pinches of Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning. This is very much to taste, but stir in a couple of pinches and sample before adding more. You want to avoid it getting too salty and aim for a nicely balanced, flavorful creaminess. But the greater sin would be leaving it too bland.
Five minutes, ten at the most: cook until thickened. I tend to stir it a lot, but that's just me.
Add the pasta, blend it well, and let it warm over a very low heat for a few minutes.
Top it off with some fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (not that hideous stuff in green tubes). Serve it up at once with a stiff chilled white wine, french bread (and don't be shy about sopping up all that sauce), and the business card of a good heart surgeon.
Reader Comments (4)
Natalie Merchant STILL has it going on....Love her.
All I had growing up were the radio stations out of Wichita, so I didn't meet Natalie until I found In My Tribe, in college. Tigerlily came out the year I had my first baby and at a time in my life when I'd fallen into sort of a thankful-God-redeems-me-'cause-I'm-no-good-on-my-own philosophy. Singing along with Wonder felt almost subversive, and damn good.
Years ago a coworker told me that he imagined my singing voice to sound like Natalie Merchant's. It's the closest I've ever been to actually being able to sing. I do like her style but could do without the crayfish. We collected some from a local creek years ago and my son took them on as pets and even named them. When someone mentioned "they eat crayfish in Louisiana," my son promptly punished the state by eating the little puzzle piece in our US Map puzzle so we could never get it back. Yeah, that'll show 'em.
Helen said:
I'd sell everything but my children to be able to sing like Natalie Merchant.