Like None I Have Seen

10,000 Maniacs “Stockton Gala Days”

There is an anthemic quality to the chorus of “Stockton Gala Days,” but where others may have sung that part with joyous abandon, Natalie Merchant played it down, opting instead to sing her words with an emphatic yet measured yearning implying that her expression was only a faint shadow of a powerful, overcoming emotion buried deep inside. It’s appropriate to the subject matter of the song, which primarily deals with emotional repression. In the verses, Merchant flashes back to her character’s wild, idyllic youth, but in the chorus she sings about her accommodating, compromising adult life: “How I’ve learned to please / to doubt myself in need / you’ll never know.” There is a terrific ambiguity to those words, or at least there is up until the end, when she clarifies that her selflessness has come at a terrible cost to herself, and that her kindness to the people she loves has made it so that she can never be fully honest with them. The music in the verses is bright and sunny, led by what sounds like the tinny strum of a mandolin approximating the treble-scratch rhythm of a Holland/Dozier/Holland composition, but after the chorus, the mood darkens considerably during an instrumental refrain that hints at the depths of the character’s hidden melancholy and loneliness.

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