But while the Maniacs' music came of age commercially - their last album, Our Time in Eden, sold 1.5 million copies worldwide - Merchant's image has remained cast in the past, an albatross.

At 30, she's no longer the kooky second-hand rose of 10 years ago, whirling round in old clothes.

"People change between 19 and 30," she says testily, from within the folds of her tailored jacket. "I'm so tired of being asked why I don't wear thrift-shop clothing any more, why I cut my hair or why anything compared to how I was - and who I was - all those years ago. I wish they'd let me grow up."

While being interviewed, Merchant displays a range of emotions from near-silent withdrawal to an almost grudging semi-trust. She is, however, visibly agitated by her recollection of a journalist who describes her image as "hippie."

"I have to say that I find it insulting. I think it suggests a certain lack of imagination within me, that I'm more concerned with living in the past than the present, let alone in designing anything for the future out of myself."

Hippies, Merchant seems to suggest, may or may not wear tie-dye, the young New York couturier Christian Francis Roth may or may not design her stage outfits (he does).

But Merchant would prefer that such stylistic details didn't count.

Like R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe - her close friend - she is concerned about music and ethics, not wardrobe and window-dressing. If those principles are thought trendy now, it's because of the size of audience that has gravitated toward them.

That Merchant is now more confident in asserting who she is may be put down to two things: success and a kinder climate. The former became official when the 1987 album In My Tribe took Maniacs' socially aware songs high into the American charts for the first time.

In the late '80s, fresh off tour and sick of the cossetted environment in which she had traveled, Merchant ducked out of the limelight and enrolled as a volunteer at a Harlem shelter for homeless women.

At the time, she was living in upstate New York. It took a round-trip of four hours and a daily fare of $50 to travel to and from her unpaid work. But she did it for six months. It allowed those around her to believe she was a student at Columbia University.

"It did me good to find myself on the street, the only non-Hispanic, non-African-American person in a neighborhood just going about its business - people going to work, buying groceries, taking their children to school, just like any place else.

"To start with, I was terrified at getting off the train and finding myself there. But I got used to walking around, often with two or more children who obviously weren't mine. I thought of it as such a role reversal, because there were so many women in that community who go downtown each day to take care of the children of wealthy white people."

Ultimately, the job brought benefits more directly relevant to her true profession.

"For all their fear, trauma, rage and despair, the children were children just like any others. They wanted to play and dance and do puzzles together and read books, in spite of everything else around them. And, best of all, they were powerfully affected by music. When they sang they became radiant. Just little children singing. It wasn't some big-budget act holed up in an expensive recording studio or out on tour with all the attendant PA systems and buses and trucks.

"It reminded me that all my own songs start the same way, with just a small melody and me singing at the piano. It gave me a greater understanding of what music can accomplish, and allowed me to rediscover why I love music-making," she explains.

Suitably stripped-down examples of the best of Merchant's craft are contained on 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged, an album taken from her former band's unprecedented second appearance on the highly successful American MTV show of the same name.

"The scope of my life was way too narrow," she says of her decision to leave what she calls the 'art-by-committee' environment: "Since being a teenager I'd been with the same people, all from the same town as me. I was tired of it. We'd run out of ways to stimulate each other. Run out of them years ago."

Going solo is a make-or-break thing, she surmises. "That the first LP will define me is something I'm very aware of. I've been in a band so long, and my contribution has been masked so no one knows what I did or didn't do.

"And I've seen so many solo artists embarrass themselves, proving that their talent was as a link, a team member, not as an individual standing alone. It feels challenging and frightening liberating all those things."

Undeterred, she intends to go home and relax during the winter, then see what experiences she has to write about. Compromise is apparently not on the agenda, and neither is fashion.

Copyright (c) 1993, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, OH