10,000 Maniacs

10,000 Maniacs – Can’t Ignore The Train

(1985 – Inclusa nell’album “The Wishing Chair”, Elektra, 1985)

Can’t ignore Natalie. That's the thought that inevitably haunts anyone who's stumbled on YouTube across an old clip capturing one of the first TV appearances of the 10,000 Maniacs, on The Tube, in 1985. That post-high-school girl, with her unripe sensuality and fluttering lilac skirt, didn't exactly look like a popstar — more like the frontgirl of a college band, with her naive, slightly awkward euphoria. And yet it was impossible to remain indifferent in the face of such a display of grace and delicacy. Credit goes, of course, to the very young Natalie Merchant, but also to that song. “Can't Ignore The Train.” A concentrate of sweetness and melancholy in jangle-pop form. And then the harmoniousness of that gorgeous melody, sung with the barest thread of a voice, painting a rural watercolor: “Steep is the water tower/ Painted off blue to match the sky/ Can’t ignore the train/ Night walks in the valley silent/ You could swear the earth just moved/ Can’t ignore the train”. A long, subtle shiver, spreading under the skin — that's what 10,000 Maniacs' “The Wishing Chair” delivers, the album that had people crying out that Fairport Convention had risen again.

Natalie Merchant and her bandmates had got there step by step. She, a seventeen-year-old student at Jamestown Community College at the time of their debut, had within four years already transformed herself into a polished songwriter and elegant vocalist, at the service of an atmospheric, frugal folk-pop built on the wave-scented keyboards of Dennis Drew and the guitars of Robert Buck (who sadly would leave us in 2000, at just 42, due to a serious liver disease) and John Lombardo, who also wrote the songs. For everyone involved, after the experiments of the EP "Human Conflict Number Five" (containing their first hit, "Tension") and the debut LP "Secrets Of The I Ching", the time had come to take flight. But without any risky leaps forward. Simply by staying seated in the Wishing Chair: "Sitting in the wishing chair", as the closing line of "Can't Ignore The Train" puts it, the passepartout to success for this eccentric gang of horror b-movie enthusiasts (like the one they took their name from, Herschell Gordon Lewis's gruesome "2,000 Maniacs").

"Can't Ignore The Train" is not one of those sweeping anthems that brand a generation, just as Natalie is not the kind of aggressive frontwoman who can pierce the screen with a single hip movement or a magnetic stare. It's one of those songs that can just as easily slip into gentle oblivion, or take up residence in some remote corner of the heart and stay trapped there forever, as happened to be the case for the writer of this piece.

Then again, spells come naturally to Natalie Merchant. The same naturalness with which this Emily Dickinson of pop composes her existentialist frescoes: collages of impressions and pastel-toned snapshots of a small-town America, blurred and undefined, slipping away from the listener's gaze, just like the landscape seen through a train's windows. "Can't Ignore The Train": that train which relentlessly punctuates the song's lyrics, and whose passing keeps interspersing a series of flashes, of sequential (analog?) images that flow swiftly through Natalie's narrative: the water tower and the blue sky; night walking into the silent valley ("Night walks in the valley silent") and the breathless run along the abandoned tracks ("Ran along side the wasted tracks"); the wardrobe mirror reflecting the cold beige room ("a room so beige and cold") and children's street games filling the afternoon routine of an endless month ("the children pick their/ Street games on thirty, thirty, thirty afternoons"). Panels of a life slipping slowly by, while a woman sits dreaming in the Wishing Chair, waiting for something that might, one day, change her fate. And the mind drifts back to another famous "sitting", Otis Redding's, lost in thought on the shoreline of "Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay".

The 10,000 Maniacs' jangling, vaguely Smiths-like guitars are the perfect frame for this melancholy pastoral vignette, this campfire song sung by Merchant with all the sweetness of her clear contralto voice. And behind the scenes, weaving together the pieces of the puzzle in a London studio, was a guru of British folk like Joe Boyd, already the deus ex machina behind Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Nick Drake and John Martyn, and, in that very same year of 1985, the man behind Rem's "Fables Of The Reconstruction", the standard-bearers of the college-rock movement that was spreading across America and that the Maniacs themselves would go on to ride to success, sealed with a live rendition on MTV Unplugged.

"Can't Ignore The Train": just two minutes and forty-three seconds, yet touched with a grace that feels infinite. Paradoxical, for a band born out of a horror film.

Steep is the water tower

Painted off blue to match the sky

Can’t ignore the train

Night walks in the valley silent

You could swear the earth just moved

Can’t ignore the train

Dust to be kicked up

In the crack faced idle sinister town

Screen door to the rail station, devil in her shoe

Ran along side the wasted tracks

Hem pins darted in her calves

Can’t ignore the train

One spoiled girl with the tidiest apology

Some how wedged inside her throat

Can’t ignore the train

Patience their virtue but I never could abide by that

Dungeon life with electric light, a clean towel and a basin

Mantle figures mind their places and laughs where they belong

Through adventure we are not adventuresome

Rage to share with a wardrobe mirror

In a room so beige and cold

Can’t ignore the train

Window days saw the children pick their

Street games on thirty, thirty, thirty afternoons

Molly the boys are starting in that rhyme again

Teasing more and more

The second daughter, how she fell?

Young locked in Some Folk's Prison, made to dwell

‘Til they’re braiding her gray hair sitting in the wishing chair

Sitting in the wishing chair, sitting in the wishing chair

Ride the wave of great music

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10/03/2026