Last night I went to a Natalie Merchant concert. While I know that it likely qualifies me as unmanly, Natalie Merchant is my favorite musician of all time, with the possible exception of The Beatles. She’s recently released her first studio album in seven years, and this was the first time I’ve ever had a chance to see her live.

It was awesome, of course. The music was phenomenal, and she was great–energetic and entertaining.

And, as I was sitting there in the amphitheater, I thought about writing (because I’m always thinking about writing) and how the structure of the concert related to writing a novel.

A little quick background on Natalie Merchant’s music: If we’re judging popularity based on radio performance, she was at her popularity peak early in her career, when she was the lead singer with 10,000 Maniacs and then with her first solo album, Tigerlily. Since that time she has moved out of mainstream pop and into other less commercially popular genres. Initially (with Motherland) it was in a more blues/rock direction, but then she dove headfirst into folk. Her 2003 album had old hymns and ballads, and her latest, Leave Your Sleep, is a collection of childrens poems set to music. It’s all really fantastic, amazing music, but it’s not anything you’d hear on the radio.

So, back to the concert. Natalie appeared without any dramatic entrance, strolling up to the microphone and launching into one of the songs off the new album–one of the poem songs.

The venue, Red Butte Gardens, is an outdoor amphitheater where you bring blankets and sit on the grass. You can bring your own food (and alcohol) and there were hundreds of little picnic dinner parties going on as the show started. And, since the concert was delayed more than an hour because of rain and lightning, the audience had had plenty of time to get preemptively drunk.

And, here’s the other thing I noticed about the audience: it didn’t seem like many people knew her music. They were fans of 10,000 Maniacs, or the mid-nineties solo albums, but not any of her non-radio songs. No one around me seemed to recognize anything from the new album–and the new stuff made up the entire first half of the show.

I was a little annoyed with the crowd, because it felt like no one was paying much attention to these new songs–and they’re really great songs, and the 8-piece band was fantastic.

But then, perhaps sensing the crowds detachment, she launched into a couple faster, more-upbeat songs. They weren’t her old radio hits, but you could definitely dance to them. And the crowd responded. People started getting up on their feet, crowding down toward the stage. And, after one particularly successful song that really engaged the crowd, she declared “Let’s do it again!” and was met with cheers.

And then she said: “My job is to make you happy.”

I had been annoyed with the crowd all of this time, because they weren’t fluent in Natalie’s songlist and they weren’t trying hard enough to get into the slower, more-unusual songs. But Natalie didn’t see it that way. She saw it as her responsibility to get the crowd engaged. And, when she saw what they wanted, she altered her performance to give it to them. (And, once they were engaged, she was able to give them more of what she wanted, too.)

It made me think about the responsibilities of an author and the role of the audience. I think a lot of the time we get it backwards. I’m not saying that there’s no place for books that are challenging might take some effort to get into, nor am I saying that we need to write pure fan service.

What I am saying is that readers don’t owe authors anything. No matter how famous the writer is, or how critically acclaimed and well-loved, readers are under no obligation to care. They don’t buy books because of charity. It’s not the reader’s job to make the author feel good. Instead, like Natalie Merchant said at the concert: “My job is to make you happy.” We, as authors, need to give readers a reason to care. We need to get you engaged, not just expect that engagement will happen without effort.