Life Is Sweet

A single from Natalie Merchant's second solo album Ophelia, "Life Is Sweet" is titled after a common saying, but she put her own twist on it. In her 2005 VH1 Storytellers special, she explained: "A while back ago, I decided I was going to write a song for all the toll booth operators and supermarket cashiers in the country because I felt that the job probably required a lot of self-restraint and probably quite a bit of day dreaming because it's so confining and repetitious and there's a lot of isolation involved too. I thought it would take a lot of courage every morning to get up and go do a job like that. And I wanted to give those people a song that would help them escape where they were if they felt like escaping. That was my original mission but in time the song 'Life Is Sweet' started to take on a more broad and evangelistic tone. And I decided that I would kind of blend the spirits of Allen Ginsberg and Judy Garland somehow. You could have laughed at that, but I was serious about that. I won't go into too much detail about why I decided on those two personages being combined but you can use your imagination. And I wanted to use a phrase that was considered a bit cliché and a bit trite and overused but elevate it in the song so that it would begin to mean something again. Sometimes, if you repeat the same word over and over – water water water water water water – it just doesn't make any sense and you can't remember how to spell it. That kind of syndrome. And I thought 'life is short and sweet,' what a fundamental truism. Is it not short and sweet? But the phrase doesn't really mean much to us anymore, sort of in the way that the conceptual artist Judy Holzer made a group of stone benches in which she carved clichés to give them that same kind of weight, permanence and gravity. So, life is sweet, life is short and if that makes any sense to anyone here, good. If it doesn't, think about it and see me after the show and I'll try to get a little deeper into that explanation."

Merchant also wanted to reach out to anyone who had, or was living through, a troubled childhood. She explained in an interview with The Diane Rehm Show: "There was a need for a song that was encouraging to children of very cynical, dark, unrelenting parents. That maybe a voice that said, life is beautiful. And life is sweet and short and let's appreciate it. And I just felt like there was so many kids that I was seeing were receiving other messages. The opposite of that."