Natalie Merchant looks worried. “Oh,” she says. “I promised my manager I wouldn’t talk about Madonna any more.” In this country, although Merchant and Madonna share the same record company, the dark, serious brunette regards the vampy blonde as her ideological enemy.

“The lyrical content of her music is ridiculous... insipid pop lyrics about nothing. I would never consent to singing those songs,” she says with a shudder. “I’m not saying that Madonna has no right to exist, I’m just frustrated that she exists on such a massive scale. That means more people prefer her kind of music to the songs I perform or to the music of those I feel a camaraderie with like Tracy Chapman.”

Natalie Merchant worries a lot. Too much maybe. On her pale, young shoulders the cares of the world hang heavy. While Madonna and her ilk are busy thrusting a perfect cleavage to the greedy lens, Merchant is down below, scratching away at the global underbelly. She worries about the neglect and abuse of children, she worries about crimes against the environment, and she worries about people being inconsiderate and insensitive.

We all worry about these things but the meloncholy Merchant takes them one step beyond. For example, she believes that having a child is one of the most incredible things a woman can do, but she worries about having a baby. She explains, “There were times when I was growing up when I cursed my mother for bringing me into this world.”

Like when? Like when she saw forests being chopped down in her native Jamestown in upstate New York and when she was told she couldn’t swim in a lake because it was polluted. At this point, any cries of, “Hey, we’re all in this crazy mess together!” are not advisable. “I am plagued by cynicism and pessimism, but people don’t seem to see it,” says 26 year old Merchant. “That’s good because I don’t want them to.”

They wouldn’t have to look much further that the lyrics she writes for 10,000 Maniacs, the band she has sung with since she was 16 years old. With a deft poetic hand and a world weary eye, Merchant - at times in tandem with various members of her all-male band - has written a treasure chest of intelligent pop music designed to gnaw at the corporate American conscience.

Her subject matter ranges from the Iran Contra scandal to toxic waste dumps and the Vietnam hangover. Once these lyrics are married to the sweet, guitar-based melodies that have become 10,000 Maniacs’ trademark, the tunes are saved from becoming depressing dirges in much the same way that Natalie Merchant’s sudden, girlish laugh rescues her conversation from the brink of cheerless gloom. She may worry, but she’s not a complete doom merchant.

All of this has made Merchant and her group the darlings of young, liberal America; folks can’t get enough of the tales of sexism, alcoholism, racism and religious fanaticism that stud their songs. There are 10,000 isms out there and Natalie Merchant is going to write about all of them.

Merchant researches many of her songs but some of them come from deep personal experience. For example, Eat for Two - a song that caused no little controversy in America - is about the rising incidence of rural teenage pregnancy and the burgeoning power of the American anti-abortion lobby. Natalie Merchant did not have to read a book to empathise with this topic.

When she was 15 years old, she had sex with ther 22 year old boyfriend. “I wasn’t a stupid girl, in fact I felt I was being rather sophisticated because it was me who insisted on birth control. Unfortunately, the condom broke. I didn’t menstruate for three months and I was terrified. The most terrifying thing was, how on earth am I going to tell my mother? In the end, I wasn’t pregnant but if I had been my entire life would have been different, none of this would have been possible. So when I see very young girls pushing babies around, I feel a terrible sense of loss for them.”

All of “this” is Natalie Merchant’s career with 10,000 Maniacs which began in the backwater of Jamestown in 1981. Her town’s only other claim to fame is that Lucille Ball was born there too. Merchant once said that she couldn’t bear to watch the David Lynch film Blue Velvet because it reminded her too much of home.

Her parents divorced when she was seven and she grew up not in poverty but in a family for which a visit to McDonald’s was a big treat which had to be carefully budgeted for. She was encouraged to be a teacher or a nurse. “Nobody,” she was told, “gets to do a job they enjoy.” Miss Merchant had other plans. She wanted to sing in a band.

As there was no music scene in Jamestown and no other groups, 10,000 Maniacs developed in a vacuum and emerged with a unique sound which quickly found a following on the American college circuit. In the UK, DJ John Peel became a devotee and pave the way for the Maniacs to tour here in 1984. Since then, album sales have been steadily rising and the group have toured constantly.

During the past two years they have spent a grueling 16 months on the road, an experience that put Merchant in the hospital with meningitis and made her vow she would never put her job before her health again. Being a strict vegetarian, she has more problems than most finding good food on the road. “You simply cannot get a good macrobiotic meal in the middle of Oklahoma on a Sunday morning,” she reveals. To give them a break, the current release from the group, Hope Chest (WEA), is a retrospective collection of their earlier albums.

Merchant has finally escaped Jamestown and now lives in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Earlier this year she became involved with a housing facility for homeless families in Harlem, an experience she says tought her how to become a “civilian” again. She learned some other interesting things too. “It taught me I could go to Harlem. Many white New Yorkers think that if you venture north of Central Park, you’ll step into a vat of acid and come up floating bones,” she says.

Merchant originally got involved with the homeless under fives because she wanted to make a film about how poverty affects children. But with the intensity that seems to characterise all her work, she fell in love with the kids and stayed on as a volunteer. For three days a week, she works there as a teacher’s aide, mopping up spilt orange juice, teaching colours and introducing the children to new tactile experiences.

“Once we took them apple picking in the country. It was pretty amazing because most of the kids had never been outside the city before,” she says.

The experience is a happy one for her but, she claims, lots of things make her happy. “Well, maybe I don’t wake up in the morning and feel glad to be alive. That takes about half an hour,” she says. Her friends make her happy, music makes her happy and food makes her very happy indeed. “Vegetables are my favourite food group,” she says with relish.

Every year Merchant can’t wait for Thanksgiving, the annual American beanfest to celebrate the harvest. It is her all time favourite meal, she says, and she just loves the chestnuts and the corn and the sweet potatoes and the squashes. “But this year, I even found a way to make that dismal,” she says sadly. She discovered that the Indian who, according to folklore, originally planted all the seeds for the harvest and then told the story for future generations, could speak English only because he had been kept in slavery for many years.