Concert Reviews

Not simply unplugged but reduced almost entirely to the bare bones, the performance could have just as easily been transported to Club Passim, whether now or six decades ago.

By Marc Hirsh

November 10, 2025 | 1:12 PM

3 minutes to read

Natalie Merchant at The Cabot in Beverly, Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025.

You can’t fault Natalie Merchant for not being self-aware. Towards the end of her concert at The Cabot in Beverly Sunday night, she told the sold-out crowd, “I’m taking you back to your dorm room in ’92,” just before slipping into “These Are Days,” her brightly anthemic 10,000 Maniacs song about pre-nostalgia. And here her fans were, back once again and remembering years later, exactly as they were promised.

But Merchant wasn’t really peddling a rose-tinted view of the past, at least not as she saw it. Save for a horn section that showed up towards the end to add a rollicking roll to “Tower Of Babel,” the singer was accompanied only by her longtime guitarist Erik Della Penna and made no effort to recapture the sound of the songs that made her famous.

With only a trio of 10,000 Maniacs songs – only one of which could reasonably be called one of their hits, whether on the alternative or pop charts – she also made very little effort to even revisit that formative time in the lives of so many of the Gen Xers who took her music to heart.

Even so, the benefit concert for local nonprofit Grateful Friends (which helps to support cancer patients by providing gas and grocery cards, helping to pay utility bills and the like) was, to borrow from one of Merchant’s own songs, kind and generous. Not simply unplugged but reduced almost entirely to the bare bones, the performance could have just as easily been transported to Club Passim, whether now or six decades ago.

At first glance, a lone acoustic guitar didn’t offer much dynamic variation from song to song. But it crucially allowed the songs to become living, breathing things and not simply plug-and-play copies of arrangements familiar from the recordings. Della Penna was a lot more free to gauge Merchant’s temperature moment by moment and follow her lead in a way that a full band is able to do only with difficulty.

And Merchant did lead. Without raising her voice, she took “Maggie Said” on a journey: dropping out, holding back, easing up, waiting for a note from Della Penna to decay. As spare as the minor-key “Texas” was – it could have been a “Dust Bowl” ballad from times gone by – the singer still found reserves of drama to wring out of it, and the simple fingerpicking left room for the directness and quiet defiance of “If No One Ever Marries Me.”

On something a bit more percussive and rhythmic like “Build A Levee”, she pulled back from the microphone when she’d open her throat, adding a tactile space to her vocal as well as juicing the energy.

The stripped-back versions of Merchant’s songs didn’t leave much room for the originals in the audience’s heads, and they were the better for it. “Carnival,” “Wonder” and others were indisputably the songs familiar to fans, but they took those frameworks and wrapped them in new colors and textures. “Don’t Talk,” perhaps the 10,000 Maniacs song with its heart racing most fully, transformed into more of a gentle lullaby that held even as Merchant botched the second verse and circled back to get it right.

Her handling of the lyrical flub was characteristic of her easygoing approach to the fact that she was up on stage and her fans were in the audience. She prefaced “Maggie Said” by recounting the time she went blank three times trying to start it, and she happily (if briefly) chatted with folks about their glasses, their lives and whatever else; “Oh my goodness, the call lines have suddenly opened,” she mock-lamented at one point.

And she didn’t hesitate to follow her own train of thought, even in the middle of songs. She interjected stories into the middle of “These Are Days” three separate times throughout – one about crying while watching the new Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery documentary, the other two with more profane punchlines – and it was only after the third that Della Penna finally stopped playing and waited for the singer to jump back in.

Merchant closed with “Kind & Generous,” warm and open and with a “na na na” refrain effectively built for audience participation. And then, by doing nothing more than singing the lyrics as written, she explicitly gave thanks in song, over and over and over again.

Setlist for Natalie Merchant at The Cabot, Nov. 9, 2025:

• Motherland
• Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience
• If No One Ever Marries Me
• Song of Himself
• Maggie Said
• Texas
• Build a Levee
• Break Your Heart
• Don’t Talk (10,000 Maniacs cover)
• Dust Bowl (10,000 Maniacs cover)
• Tell Yourself
• Wonder
• Carnival
• Sister Tilly
• Life Is Sweet

Encore

• Tower of Babel
• These Are Days (10,000 Maniacs cover)
• Kind & Generous

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected] or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.

Marc Hirsh

Music Critic

Marc Hirsh is a music critic who covers a wide variety of genres, including pop, rock, hip-hop, country and jazz.

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