"WE LOVE LUCY" scream the banners pinned across the wooden houses of Jamestown, New York, as a whole town keeps a respectful vigil for America's favourite funny lady.
The star of what is arguably the nation's most successful comedy show is fighting for her life 3,000 miles away on another coast and looks unlikely to keep her appointment to receive an honorary diploma at the local college. More than 30,000 people are preparing for mourning.
"Lucille Ball was born here, but she's only been back twice," our guide tells us. "She hates it as well."
Jamestown was founded in 1816 by James Prendergast and the town had to wait nearly 100 years for its next notable achievement, the birth of Lucy. With the passing of Miss Ball just days after our visit, our guide - Miss Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs - is now the town's most famous daughter.
After a bumpy and terrifying 40 minute flight on a 19-seater commuter plane from Pittsburgh, Natalie greets the NME team at the local airport, a complex marginally smaller than a motorway service station. The interview has been switched from Manhattan to chez Merchant because Natalie has been unwell for a few days. After our flight, it appears she is determined that nobody else is allowed to feel healthy either.
"That's the only flight I ever threw up on," she tells us as we drive through Jamestown, a confusing mix of Walton's Mountain and a giant monopoly board. The kind of small town where people only stay up after midnight it there's been a sudden death in the family.
"Did you ever see 'Blue Velvet'?," asks Natalie. "I couldn't watch that movie because it reminded me too much of where I lived."
"I went away for a few days and when I came back they'd pulled down my favourite pizza parlour, the owner had a mechanical voice box and spoke through his throat.
"Every story has a sad ending in Jamestown."
Lucilie Ball may have passed on to that great studio lot in the sky, but Jamestown still has one kooky dame to boast about - and this one doesn't need a script.
Natalie unplugs here fridge so our interview can be heard on tape afterwards. She asks us to remind her to turn it on again when we've finished, as a similar move during a session a few days earlier resulted in a pool of melted foodstuff on her kitchen floor.
Cummins and myself are asked to deposit the heavy crates we've been carrying from the car onto the floor. Phew. what's in those, Natalie?
"Er, soya milk. I belong to a shopping club and I buy it in bulk. I just go down the post office and pick it up when it arrives."
The extent of Natalie's health consciousness stretches to having no tea containing caffeine in her cupboard and openly flinching at cigarette smoke.
Later, during the photo shoot on a nearby hill, I sneak off behind a tree for a crafty drag, as if hiding from teachers at school, fearful of Natalie's reaction to my polluting of the Jamestown air. There are times during our six hours together when Natalie Merchant makes me feel ashamed for living.
Does she take great pride in the town of her birth? Why does she stay?
"Well, the best reason for staying is not knowing where to go. I can't make a decision about where I want to go. I never had the means to move until this year so I've never given it much thought. Also, I still have family here and I feel that I still have a role in the town. It's safe and it's cheap, as the people say, ha ha."
A joke peculiar to the local population, no doubt. I grin nervously.
"Jamestown is also a source of stability for me, but if I had to stay here every day of the year I think I might just go insane, ha ha."
The town was also used for the video of the new single, Trouble Me, which features Natalie and seven or eight of Jamestown's most senior residents.
"I hate making videos, but at least if we get on MTV it will mean four minutes less of the likes of Motley Crue, which is ironic seeing as we're on the same label. It's a king of irony because the money they make goes into our projects which makes me feel good. It's like blood money, ha ha.
"I did the video with all these old ladies and now I can't wait to be old myself. I love that translucent quality to old people's skin. I want to be one of those absurd old women who still go swimming whey they're 85, ha ha."
Blind Man's Zoo is 10,000 Maniacs' third album, and their first new product since In My Tribe nearly two years ago. Peter Asher is again employed as producer and there are obvious parallels in the sound of the previous two records.
The major difference is in the songs themselves. The band are more confident in their playing and Natalie's lyrics are her most articulate and cohesive. It's a far cry from the clumsy pseudo-British folk music of their debut The Wishing Chair and is likely to establish them as one of America's most accomplished and intelligent pop groups.
Blind Man's Zoo is actually a children's game, where the person who is 'it' is blindfolded and all the other children make animal noises while whoever is 'it' tries to catch them.
"The cover has a lot of pictures of elephants on it and a lot of people have linked that and the title to the parable of the four blind men and the elephant. They all touch the elephant in different places, and one feels the trunk and thinks it's a snake, another touches the leg and thinks it's a tree, and so on. The moral is that you have to see something in its entirety before you can really understand it."
So the LP has to be digested as a whole to be able to comprehend its contents?
"No, not really, I just chose the title because I like the combination of the words and the strange images it conjures up. I just think it sounds good, ha ha.
"I suppose if there is a theme to the LP it is one of betrayal, although that's something I only picked up on myself after listening to it a few times after it was finished. With the exception of Trouble Me, every song is about some kind of betrayal, be it at the hands of your country, your leaders, your religion, your loved ones or even yourself.
"Like in Eat For Two which is about a woman finding herself pregnant when she didn't want to be. (Dream child in my head/is a nightmare born in a borrowed bed) the woman has been betrayed by her lover, or even by herself.
"Some people have interpreted that song as being a pro-life song, but I don't necessarily want to be seen taking any particular stance on that issue, I don't like a label like that. I'm a self-respecting liberal, therefore I'm pro-choice.
"I remember the last time I talked to the NME. That boy said I killed an ant in Hyde Park which is just not true! I had to write to so many people and tell them that he made it up. I brushed the ant off my arm and it was still alive. I did not kill it!"
Blind Man's Zoo returns to the anti-violence, anti-militarist themes first explored on Gun Shy from the last album.
This is an area where Natalie will never be misunderstood. The Big Parade tells the story of an orphaned boy making a pilgrimage to the Washington Monument, which features his father's name along with 50,000 more of those either killed or missing in Vietnam.
"The boy feels he's been betrayed because he's had to grow up without a father because of that war. He makes the pilgrimage to the monument to try and purge himself of this national shame that America feels, and I thought it best to illustrate the way the whole country feels with one person's story rather than with a clinical overview.
"A lot of people are still suffering because of Vietnam, through the side effects of Agent Orange and babies being born with physical deformities. There is a national shame, not because we lost but because we were involved as much as we were and for what end? There were certainly a lot of people in Washington who wanted the war to end but they didn't know how to make it happen."
Does America feel embarrassed by its involvement?
"I think people should be embarrassed by any war. My grandfather was a marine who fought in the South Seas and I wonder how he can sleep at night knowing what he did. Maybe it was necessary and maybe the times were different, but there have always been conscientious objectors, people who oppose all wars."
Natalie also feels embarrassment at the Iran-Contra scandal and apologizes to the people caught in the crossfire in Please Forgive Us.
"I wanted to say sorry to the people in the middle in Central America who were undeniably innocent. The American people should be informed about what s happening to the money we give in taxes and for a year or so it just wasn't made public what was going on.
"But it has ceased to shock us, it just seems that Americans are becoming accustomed to scandal. People expect their politicians to be corrupt, but that still doesn't excuse what happened. If the hundreds of millions of dollars that had been poured into Central America had gone into social aid, well... "
At this point, the rather lucid and intelligent Miss Merchant tries to illustrate her argument and completely loses the interviewer. Drop me a line if you can work this one out ...
"I've been reading about the Amish communities lately, we have one nearby, about how they don't accept any social security. They pay income taxes and property taxes, but they don't pay into the social security because they say they have one of their own which is their family and their community.
"There's something to be said in their self-sufficiency and sense of community. I don't know if we could ever have that again, maybe in a crisis situation. It takes a crisis to bring people together. Have you ever been to Los Angeles? Lack of community! It seems the Asians and the Latins can create a community in LA, but most people I know who live there never see their parents, even though they're in the same city. It's funny, ha ha."
Natalie treads gingerly across a lawn to have her picture taken, occasionally glancing over her shoulder to check the ground where her feet have just been.
"I never liked to tread on grass, I always thought I would automatically kill it. But then someone told me that it usually bounces right back up again and carries on growing, so I don't feel so bad about it now."
Like her close friend Michael Stipe of REM, Natalie Merchant cares for her environment. In the wake of the Exxon spillage in, another song from Blind Man's Zoo takes on a greater significance.
"Poison In The Well was originally about a suburban neighborhood in Buffalo, which is not far from here. It was built on a toxic waste dump and people started discovering a black glue oozing into their basements and all kinds of horrible pollutants seeping into their water.
"It was something that happened back in 1978 and now it's happening again in Alaska. The song is really a question of corporate culpability, who's going to make any amends if amends can be made. People made their living from those waters and now they can't. Who's gonna provide for them?"
To listen to the subject matter covered in Blind Man's Zoo, it would appear Natalie wants to put the world to rights and has a lot to say in her allotted 45 minutes of vinyl. She comes across as caring, compassionate and angry, but surprisingly she says she finds it difficult to write songs and put her thoughts down on paper.
"I have to do a lot of research for my songs, checking out historical information. When I was writing Hateful Hate I spent a lot of time in library trying to find out more about to colonial period of Africa. Coincidentally, it was during Black History Month, and I see the song as my contribution to that."
Likewise, she scoured the gospels for a fitting verse to illustrate the album's closing epic Jubilee, a terrifying story of a demented, religious fanatic who burns down the local dance hall after seeing black boys dancing with white girls. It's the LP's most impressive moment and illustrates Natalie's almost obsessive preoccupation with religion.
"I suppose Jubilee is a little like a Flannery O'Connor story because of all the Catholic imagery and because it would appear to be set in the Deep South, but I don't actually say where it's set in my story.
"It's attacking racism and it's attacking religious fanaticism, because I think a lot of people are easily swayed by religious dogma. For centuries people have been led to war and horrible atrocities in the name of one god or another.
"I'm using my character, Tyler as a symbol and also the dance hall as a symbol of what he deems evil, when really there's nothing evil at all. It's just people enjoying themselves, people being very carnal."
The lyric mentions a verse in Matthew to add to the poetic imagery, but Natalie only refers to it, leaving the listener to look it up. Is this a sign of a strict religious upbringing?
"I had a very pious upbringing, but after my parents were divorced in the early'70s they weren't allowed to receive communion, it was kind of scandalous at the time.
"But I would still go to church with my grandmother, because I loved the singing and I loved the stained glass windows and the rosaries and the religious icons. I think it was beautiful to grow up with a sense of something mystical around me - more than just the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. The Virgin Mary giving her son to world and Christ giving his life to cleanse the world of evil was really a brilliant mythology to grow up with."
"Anyone caught smoking on the premises will be hung by the toenails and pummeled into unconsciousness with an organic carrot."
So reads the sign in the health store/restaurant that we visit after the interview and photo shoot. Another example of Jamestown humour? Hell no, I believe them!
Natalie's poor health mentioned earlier is in fact a pretty heavy cold. While in the store she stocks up on natural remedies to keep the bug at bay - $50 worth. Not for her a sachet of Lemsip and a large hot toddy, this is Natalie's town and she does as she pleases.
The curtains may be closing as mark of respect to Lucille Ball, but this is Natalie Merchant's domain now. She deserves it. A clutch of clever and well-crafted songs have made her one of the most inspired and respected women in pop music today, but to many if the folk of Jamestown she's still the kooky dame who keeps off the grass.