Alaska Employment Law

It’s hard to think of a sillier name for the Boston Pops’ spring series than EdgeFest, but that’s its name. Keith Lockhart - edgy? Am I in the right building? Watch out for the lunatic triangle player in this crazy band! Get down, Pops!

All right, whether or not Beethoven actually rolls over, I guess the idea is to attract a younger crowd and put fannies in the seats, and nearly all the seats were taken when Natalie Merchant, ex-10,000 Maniacs songstress who is ending a lengthy maternity leave to begin performing again, joined the edgy house band at Symphony Hall on May 27. Merchant has a wonderful voice, a husky quavering vehicle full of expression that in many ways found its match in the lush arrangements that accompanied her typically literate lyrics. Indeed, it’s hard to be more literate than Merchant was when singing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 to orchestral accompaniment (That time of year thou mayst in me behold/ When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang). The one obvious flop in this otherwise successful collaboration was “Ophelia,” the title song from her 1998 solo album. This is a pop song that calls for a real drummer and a real rhythm section, neither of which was anywhere to be found. Nevertheless, a good show. Merchant’s charisma is almost tangible, and her audience loves her.

I was amused a few weeks later to find Merchant’s name come up in Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, a memoir by Dean Wareham, lead guitar and vocalist in the rock bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, and now half a duet with his second wife Britta Phillips, also ex-Luna. Postcards is Wareham’s frank but oddly disengaged story of trying to start a band, trying to get a record contract, touring with the same band members day in and day out, playing in wretched clubs, suffering the temptations of the road, feeling the stress, using drugs, watching his marriage come apart, and so on and so forth. Merchant? At one point the members of Luna are sitting around wondering which rock divas of that time would be the most fun to, well, get to know a lot better. Merchant doesn’t quite pass that test, though the band really wishes it could open for 10,000 Maniacs. So much for being a sex object when commerce beckons instead. Black Postcards received an enthusiastic review from Liz Phair in the New York Times Book Review. Honestly, I would rather read Liz Phair’s memoirs, if they ever come out. Skip this one.