#4 Natalie Merchant - Ophelia

Album: Ophelia, 1998.

Lyrics excerpt:
Ophelia was the circus queen,
The female cannonball
Projected through five flaming hoops
To wild and shocked applause

Ophelia was a tempest cyclone,
A goddamn hurricane
Your common sense, your best defense
They wasted, and in vain

Reasons to love this song:
Ophelia seems to be a character who has inspired many songs. This is my personal favourite. The song may or may not be about Shakespeare's Ophelia, but it is about a woman who certainly shared Ophelia's fate. Natalie Merchant tells us Ophelia has been various women throughout history -- a Carmelite nun, a sufragette, a "sweetheart to the nation", a "demigoddess", a mafia courtesan and a circus artist. Natalie Merchant plays all this women in the official video and, in the end, when she sings "Ophelia's mind went wandering, you'd wonder where she'd gone", we see her in a white nightgown, crying in a place that could be a sanatorium but looks more like a dungeon. We see images of the six women again, and this time the girl in white blends in with all of them. At the end of the song hear the voices of the women speaking in different languages, and we are not sure if all the women mentioned were a product of a madwoman's imagination, or if she had really lived all those lives and the intensity proved too much for her.

Link to the official video on Natalie Merchant's website:
http://www.nataliemerchant.com/w/ophelia/ophelia-music-video

Excerpts from the short film Ophelia, in which all the characters speak about themselves, can also be seen on the website. The women are all played by Natalie Merchant, and voiced by Natalie Merchant, Rocio Paez (Spanish), Camille Labro (French), Carmen Consoli (Italian), Suzanna Schmitz (German).

YouTube Link:
Live performance in New York City, 1999