Listen to the silence. Let it ring on...

We're lying, side-by-side, eyeball-to-eyeball, on the grass of Hyde Park. Natalie Merchant is lost for words. Doesn't know what to say. She hasn't a clue. Not one. The look on her face is as if I had asked her to explain, just-like-that, the meaning of life, solve the mysteries of the universe. Maybe I had.

The silence lifts. For a split second.

"Why is my voice so good, so exhilarating?" she asks softly, not a little bewildered. That look again. It flashes across her face - a face of cherubic descent - and stays there. "What makes my voice so good?" Natalie Merchant simply doesn't know. She whispers those words and the syllables get caught up in the summer breeze wisping through the oak trees and become lost, and irrelevant and nothing. "I don't think it is." She answers as best she could. On Natalie, how little you know. Can't you see, can't you hear? Natalie Merchant looks at me as if I'm mad. Maybe I am.

Without recourse to hyperbole, here are 20 words that scratch at but never really touch below the surface of that voice. Primitive. Quintessential. Driven snow-clean. Forlorn. Enormous. Different. Crushing. Tortured, Not of the earth. Gut-rending. Lush. Lovely. Evocative. Enchanting.

If the adjective fits ... wear it. Natalie wears it well. The 24-year-old out of Jamestown, New York State, has a larynx that fits adjectives like they were John Paul Gaultier-made. Yet, the voice of In My Tribe - a miscellany of razor-gashed emotions - is not an easy one to file. Her tonsils tumbled, arse o'er head, out of the sky one day and shrilled harrowingly about our Earthling earlobes the next. So the story goes.

Evoking at will, the voice of In My Tribe - a searing collection of bleedings-heart pop songs - has the passion of mushroom clouds dividing and descending over Western Europe, destroying, exploding, erupting, exterminating. It has a flawed beauty of your first joining; the emotion of seeing your baby run through with a bayonet, winning the pools, losing your hair, getting caught scamming the dole.....

Those kind of feelings. Rolling into one. As one.

Still Natalie Merchant hasn't a clue. She stares at me blankly. Probably with pity more than anything else. Probably wondering why this poor fool keeps asking that same question, over and over, again and again, ceaselessly: What makes your voice so good, Natalie? At last, she cuts a swathe thru the silence and says, "Well - I sing. I don't have a style that's very experimentally affected at all. It's mostly through singing. I was classically trained for a few years. But mostly it's singing along with albums."

These LPs included absolutely everything by Petula Clarke - her mother loved Clarke, and Natalie "loved everything my mother loved" and, in a big way, Roxy Music. With there being no Virgin Megastore in Jamestown, she relied on the boys who went to college in the big cities. They would return home with a batch of Roxy records. Thus young Ms Merchant was, without ceremony, blown into the middle o'next month by a band who "didn't sound like they were human beings playing the instruments."

Who did you sing along with a broomstick to, Natalie? She laughs infectiously. Like you'd expect her to. "The Monkees! I did it with the vacuum cleaner. Shamelessly. My mother had an old Hoover and it had this red rubber handle on the end and it was just the right height for us when we were five years old. That was our microphone stand."

Now Natalie has her own, real microphone stand and her own records to sing along with.

In My Tribe - 12 songs to sing along with - was one of the finest albums of 1987. Or any year. The reasons are several, most of them fanciful. It can make the crocodile tears gush down your cheeks (What's The Matter Here?, Don't Talk), make the joy swell-up within you like nothing can (Hey Jack Kerouac, My Sister Rose, Cherry Tree). Those kind of feelings. Religion, faith in God ("Not the old man with the white beard") flows through the veins of nearly all the songs. It grasps thorny subject matter like child abuse with bare hands, "He's your kid/do as you see fit/but get this through that I don't approve of what you did to your own flesh and blood." (What's The Matter Here?). One and all, the songs rise heavenward on a wing and a prayer and a range of power and attainment second to few - swirling to a tune that only its ears can hear. And, most importantly, Natalie is not some jumped-up hippy poetess. You can trust here.

Of course I asked her the obvious: what makes In My Tribe so good, so exhilarating? She doesn't dissolve into silence. She has an answer that says there are no answers ...

"That can't be explained. And that's the great thing about music - it can't be intellectualized. You either like and it moves you or you don't like it and it doesn't." She laughs at her own logic. "Exhilarated is a good word because I see people who just can't help dancing when they come to out shows."

We're sprawled together on the grass. Within kissing distance. Like a giant fried egg, the sun beats down. Mercilessly. Natalie takes off shoes, socks and sweater and lays face-down in the grass. An ant dashed up her bare arm. When I tell her she crushes his spine with a hammering of fist. Then running her fingers through her coiffure, she tells me about a new song she's just finished. It goes under the working title of Aunt Eva. One from the heart. As always.

"It's completely devastating to me. My aunt, who died last year, had failing kidneys. So for three years she had dialysis treatment, and after my whole family of her generation was dead, I went to visit her. I hadn't seen her since I was really a small child, and it was really horrible because she was just lying there in so much pain. I sat with her the entire time she had her blood-filter and she kept on telling me that she wanted to die and that she didn't see any reason to live." One from the heart.

What's been the blackest day of your life, Natalie?

"I think when both my grandparents died within five days of each other. That was the worst period ever. My mother had a car accident and broke her back and my sister was hit head-on by a drunken driver and had a broken hip; my father had open heart surgery; and both my grandparents died all within two months. That was the worst period ever. Nothing else that bad has happened." Her voice drops to a resignatory whisper. "It seems like things go in cycles."

Your brightest day?

"I think now. This feels like a good time. Today. The past year."

What emotional state do you write?

"A lot of people can't write when they're happy. I disagree with that. Though I do write when I'm unhappy."

Did you write during those two months?

"No. I couldn't write at all. I wrote the day my grandfather died, because I was with him the night before he died. But after. . ." There is a long pause. Only the summer symphonies of birds and winds and trees can be heard. There is a noticeable tremor in her voice when she resumes. ". . . I didn't write for several months."

Was What's The Matter Here? a hard song for you to write?

"It was hard because the language was so simple. I didn't have any trouble with the subject matter, other people had trouble with the subject matter. Even my band had trouble with it. Everyone was just saying, 'is this right, this song?'"

What was the reaction to it in America?

"People cry when they hear it.... we made a video for it in a very serious, documentary style, with actual children who had been abused and even a couple of them who had been abused on the streets. We live in an area that's extremely depressed: high unemployment, alcoholism, child abuse and teenage pregnancy. Actually, last weekend when I was home, a 15-year-old girl managed to have a baby without anyone knowing it, because she was very obese. She went into labour and had the child and killed it. And that's not the only case of infanticide in Jamestown. So just take that further - to after the children are born. Lots of these children are unwanted. Their parents are too young or their parents are too poor and a lot of anger is taken out on these kids. I see it every day."

Is it in any way, autobiographical? She allows herself a great big chortle. "No, my parents didn't beat me. I had a very ... besides, my parents were divorced."

How did that affect the development of your personality?

"The only thing I've noticed about my personality, coming from a divorced household, is that I take sides easily, because my parents were usually taking sides on issues. When my father left I was six."

A major cataclysm for a six-year old, her father leaving....

"Because we were a really strong Catholic family it devastated my grandparents and it was scandalous at school. The teachers were all very shocked, because it was at a time when there weren't very many divorces. Now 50 percent of marriages in America end in divorce. Jamestown has 30,000 people. I went to a school where the classes were small but where I really grew up was a town called West Field. Just 5,000 people - so there everyone did know. Everyone. Everyone at school and everyone in the town."

There's a plethora of religious symbolisim in your writing. How important was religion to you as a child?

"It was very important to me when I was growing-up. But then my mother married an atheist when I was 11 and he told me that God was a lie, that I was a fool - the God concept was all a scam - and not to believe in it. And he wouldn't let me. He wouldn't let us celebrate Christmas. He was extremely severe about it. He just said that 'when we die - we rot. And that's the end'."

For an 11-year-old kid for whom belief in God was an important part of her life, that must have shaken you up enormously?

"It twisted things round in my head. But then I would visit my grandmother and we'd get on our knees and say the rosary - in the dark! (laughs) She'd have me go to church with her and I knew all the prayers and the hymns. I don't know - I guess you couldn't imagine what effect it had on me. It gave me a very well-rounded attitude! (laughs) But I always rebelled against my stepfather because I believe Him completely."

Do you believe abortion to be a sin?

"I do."

Why?

"Because I think it's carelessness and that's a sin."

What if a rape has taken place?

"I think that abortion is a very complex question. If a woman is raped? I don't disagree with it being done. I, personally, wouldn't have one."

Even if you were raped in this park tonight and became pregnant?

"I'd have to find out. It's like being a vegetarian for years and, say, there was a horrible drought and after two years of famine you've exhausted all your supplies and the only thing left to eat was a rabbit. Could you kill it? I would find out then, at the time. If I was raped tonight I probably wouldn't become pregnant, I'm menstruating." (laughs)

But you'd still call abortion a "sin"?

"For me. I don't decree what is sinful and what is not. Let me tell you what I think. I think abortion should be legal and should be provided for those who need them. I'd rather have children killed in the womb than slowly killed outside the womb."

Do you have a belief in heaven and hell?

"Heaven and hell that is made on Earth, yes I do. Hell is poverty. Hell is wanting. Hell is loneliness."

Have you ever been to hell, Natalie?

"I, personally, have never been there. I'm very thankful for that."

Even when your grandparents died?

"It seems like there's always a quality of retribution involved in hell. It's something that you deserve and that's the thing I argue with. If I was raped in this park tonight I'd think I'd done nothing to deserve that. Just like a friend of the band who was swimming in a lake and he dived into shallow water and broke his neck. He's paralyzed now. I don't think he did anything to deserve that. It seems like completely indiscriminate retribution. So if hell is just a form of punishment that doesn't seem quite right. It feels like the people who I think deserve punishment don't ever get it. There's a man in America who saw a girl who's car had broken down at the side of the road. He took her into a field, raped her and cut both her arms off . He spent seven years in prison and was released. If I was to take an extremely radical stand - that man was sick, he's incurably sick from what I can see, and he needs to be kept from the civilised world."

Your life hasn't exactly been happy, Natalie. It's been dotted with tragedy and cataclysms of all sorts ...

"It always seems to happen around me," she says her voice full of sad reflection. "Never to me."

What would you read into that?

"Maybe I'm supposed to, help all these people. I don't know. I'm not very good at thinking that there's a destiny, that I'm fated to act a certain way, at a certain time." She pauses. "There's so much pain. Everywhere. Around me. A lot of my friends are very poor because they either study topics or subjects that wouldn't get them very good jobs. They're artists and they're trying to make films or paintings or write books and they're all working in jobs, menial jobs that they don't like. In the meantime I'm, if you like, an artist who's writing and performing and actually becoming self-sufficient. It seems like it's my role to help out these other friends."

With the charts perennially clogged with crap, where is the 10,000 Maniacs' place in all of this? Where will they fit in?

"I never felt we would fit. I still don't know if we ever will and we certainly don't aspire to. . . I've had so many women in the record company say, 'If you will just wear such and such a dress and if you would just wear a bit more make-up. Maybe if your dancing wasn't so idiosyncratic. Maybe if....' Those kinds of women I don't listen to any more. I listen to the ones who say, 'I really appreciate what you write in your lyrics'. But just as many men as women appreciate what we're doing. That's why our label, Elektra, signed Tracy Chapman. I don't think they ever thought they could squeeze Tracy Chapman into a dress and finger nail polish and get her singing to a disco backbeat!!!!"

But you were asked to raunchy-up your image, as it were?

"I've been asked - 'You're so pretty Natalie, why don't you capitalize on it?' And I tell them that if there's any beauty there I want it to come out from a different place."

What do you want out of life, Natalie?

"To stay out of hell."

Where's heaven?

"The opposite place to where hell is. It's being healthy. It's being self-sufficient; feeling that your life is worthwhile; you're needed and you're loved."

Are you in heaven now, Natalie?

"I'm in heaven now. Yeah" The voice of In My Tribe - a classic, beyond all reasonable doubt - beams me up a smile and the sun catches her eyes and glistens. She is a bizarre, charming young lady. A pearl lodged irrevocably amidst the swine. Something to hold on for. Natalie Merchant's eyes - eyes with the power to captivate, hold - lock onto mine, eyeball-to-eyeball. For a split second in time. The Little Big Woman from Jamestown opens her mouth and, just as you think she's going to tell you something that will change both our lives immeasurably, irreparably... Natalie closes her mouth.