New York, NY (October 30, 2023)—Currently out on her first extended tour in nearly a decade, Natalie Merchant has been bringing her mellow, insistent folk pop to the masses once again in support of her latest album, Keep Your Courage. Backed by piano, drums, bass, guitar, a backup singer and a string quartet, the singer/songwriter finished a second U.S. leg in September and hit Europe this month to share selections from across her solo career and the occasional tune from her previous group, 10,000 Maniacs.
In keeping with the bespoke nature of her music, the tour’s sound is equally self-contained, with mixing duties provided by FOH engineer George Cowan and monitor engineer Dave Cook. “Both of us go back a pretty long way with Natalie,” said Cowan. “We both met her in recording studios—Dave worked at Dreamland Studios in the 1980s and I worked at Bearsville Studios, all in upstate New York.” Cook befriended the singer while assistant engineering on 10,000 Maniacs’ 1989 album, Blind Man’s Zoo, during the recording of which Cowan became acquainted with the group (“My wife was catering the food,” Cowan explained). A few years later, the band’s 1993 MTV Unplugged album and then Merchant’s 5x-platinum solo debut, 1995’s Tigerlily, were tackled at Bearsville. “I was on another project,” said Cowan, “but I would meet Natalie in the in the hallway, say hello and subsequently got to know her. Fast-forward a few years, she was doing Lilith Fair in 1998 and they were looking for a front-of-house engineer; somebody brought my name into the discussion, and she nodded approval because she knew me.”
Cook began mixing Merchant’s monitors 12 years ago on a tour behind 2010’s Leave Your Sleep, but both engineers keep busy in recording and live sound, as Cook owns Area 52 Studios in Saugerties, New York and Cowan has his own mixing facility.
While the current tour has been using local or house PAs, the two engineers have opted to bring along gear they own, much of it—such as the mics—culled from their own studios. The audio path starts onstage with Midas DL32 mic pres leading into Cook’s Behringer Wing monitor desk where pre levels are set, and then signal heads out to FOH via Dante networking.
“I’m using an old Yamaha DM2000 mixer as a control surface, which people sometimes make fun of because it’s an older desk,” said Cowan. “The audio gets to me, then it’s going through Universal Audio plug-ins and then out to the house. I have three Apollo units racked up for plug-ins and reverbs, with 24 paths to and from via Lightpipe. I have the UA Capitol Chambers plug-in for vocal reverb, which sounds beautiful; Little Labs IBP Phase Alignment plug-in, which helps line up the phase response of the bass microphone and DI; various Lexicons for drum reverb; LA-3As, LA-2As, and I put everything through a Studer A-800 plug-in so I get to bring back a little analog tape wonk to the whole picture.”
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Tackling monitor mixes on the Behringer Wing desk, Cook uses onboard emulations of dbx 160s and a LA-3A on vocals, as well as the company’s take on a SSL Bus compressor for mastering the musicians’ in-ears. “We have a couple of sidefills, and Natalie will keep a couple of downstage wedges as insurance, too, but the stage volume is very quiet,” said Cook. “Everyone has brand-new Ultimate Ears custom molds, and Natalie and the background singer are both on Sennheiser ewG4 wireless for their in-ears. Everyone else has Behringer P16 personal mixers, where I’m sending a combination of direct outs and pre-mixed stems so they can dial in what they need themselves. There was a learning curve during rehearsals, but everyone’s settled in and loves it.” Miking for the stage includes Sennheiser Digital 6000 wireless with a Neumann KK 205 capsule for Merchant’s vocal, while the string quartet is captured via DPA d:vote 4099s.
Throughout the Natalie Merchant tour, audiences have warmly welcomed the singer back after such a long absence from the road. Cook cited stops in Portland, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center as particularly memorable shows, but arguably the highlight for the crew may have been the unusual hospitality of the St. Augustine Amphitheater; he explained, laughing, “We all got to hold a three-foot alligator they brought in from a local alligator farm!”
