It was late 2018 and Natalie Merchant was in London visiting the V&A museum when she felt her arm start to tingle and then go numb. Next came intense pain. She flew home immediately and within days was in hospital having an MRI. The results were not good: she had a degenerative spinal disease. “My spinal column was collapsing into my spinal cord,” Merchant says. “I needed to have emergency surgery.” The six-hour operation involved making an incision below her throat and shunting her vocal cords to the side while surgeons removed three bones from her spine. When she regained consciousness after surgery Merchant discovered she could no longer sing. “It took me to a place of panic,” she says. “It made me wish I had made more records.”
Merchant had been a much-cherished singer-songwriter for more than four decades: she joined the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs at the age of 17 in 1981; 12 years later, she left to pursue a solo career. Now, an enforced silence stretched from weeks into months, and Merchant started imagining a post-music career sewing, creating artworks and gardening.
