Thoughts of maturity and mortality are just one thread on “Unrepentant Geraldines.” Like most of Ms. Amos sings mockingly in a new song, “16 Shades of Blue.” “If 50 is the new black, hooray, this could be your lucky day,” Ms. McLachlan confronts the death of her father. Merchant’s album opens with “Ladybird,” a song about “the way that love grows cold and just fades away.” On “Shine On,” Ms. “Natalie Merchant” (Nonesuch) arrives, by coincidence, alongside two albums by fellow songwriters who also built huge pop audiences in the 1990s and have since balanced careers, motherhood and shifting artistic impulses: Tori Amos, 50, whose album “Unrepentant Geraldines” (Mercury Classics/Universal Music Classics) returns to her idiosyncratic pop songwriting after forays into musical theater and classical music, and Sarah McLachlan, 46, whose “Shine On” (Verve) follows her 2010 album “Laws of Illusion,” which was filled with the sorrows of a dissolving marriage.Īll three songwriters are grown-ups now, and not pretending otherwise. Merchant, 50, had million-selling albums in the 1980s with 10,000 Maniacs and in the 1990s on her own before turning away from a routine pop career after her somber 2001 album, “Motherland.” “Pushin’ on, pushin’ on, isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” Natalie Merchant sings on her self-titled new album, a set of dark, brave, thoughtful and serenely startling songs that is her first album in 13 years with her own lyrics.
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