What's the Matter Here? - Live Unplugged

Like many songs on the album, "What's The Matter Here?" is a powerful piece of social commentary, in this instance about child abuse. Natalie Merchant sings from the perspective of a woman how lives near a family that is abusing their young son. She deplores the abuse, but isn't sure what to do about it. Afraid to take action, she wants to confront the family and ask, "What's the Matter here?" but she doesn't dare. The Suzanne Vega hit "Luka," from a year earlier, has similar subject matter.

Natalie Merchant explained the inspiration for this song during her 1998 VH1 Storytellers performance: "It was a song I wrote about a little boy who was neglected and abused. In my neighborhood there was a house that was one of these houses that had kind of a black aura about it - you would walk on the other side of the street so you didn't have to walk in front of it. It had a garbage-strewn yard; broken windows stuffed with rags; a large, vicious dog on a short leash that had dug a circular circumference into the yard over years of running in circles; a battered upholstered couch on the porch. But at this particular house there was also a little boy. A very beautiful, harmless, innocent child. I'd see him playing on the front steps with a broken toy or maybe digging in the dirt with a spoon - he liked to do that. But every time I would walk by the house I would hear this voice coming out of the open door screaming obscenities at him. And I never really understood why - I mean, what can he do?"

Merchant wrote this song with the band's guitarist Robert Buck. They collaborated on several tracks for the band, including "Hey Jack Kerouac," "Cherry Tree" and "City of Angels." They would write by Buck coming up with some music with the band, and then Merchant forming a vocal melody around it. She would then rough out the lyrics, which Buck referred to as "tone poems," since she was working from the musical tones. Once she had a story and a structure, she would flesh out the lyrics. According to bass player Steven Gustafson, they often didn't know what the song was about until they started recording it.