This is her first interview since bidding farewell in 1993 to her band of 13 years, 10,000 Maniacs. Although enjoying considerable success and consistent critical acclaim, they ultimately came to rely too heavily on Merchant as singer, songwriter, focal point and spokesperson. Spiritually, emotionally and artistically she outgrew them, and her soon-to-be-released debut solo album, Tigerlily, is the reason I'm here. Her chosen location for the interview is another half an hour's bumpy ride away: The Cloisters, an appropriately tranquil and strange museum just a few miles north of New York City, but a million miles away from its everyday carnival madness. Built in 1938, it features a mixture of breeze-block and Gothic styles, and is a repository for a spectral array of trappings and wares from the Middle Ages. With piped medieval Muzak filling the air, Natalie Merchant settles on a bench in the west courtyard, admiring the well tended garden.

"I can do exactly what I want now," she says, radiating contentment, "which is an amazing freedom. I've never felt that before." Looking me full in the eyes, she confesses that while being both excited and scared, she has no regrets about leaving what she calls the "Maniac machine".

"I was about to be 30 and I felt a change was long overdue. I was just creatively frustrated working with the same group of people from the time I was 17. They knew I hadn't been happy for a long time, so weren't surprised. I think people have their fantasy about bands, that they're like families, but I wasn't that intimate with the band any more. I collaborated with them to make albums and I toured with them, but when the touring was over...". She trails off. "Two years before, when we were in pre-production for Our Time In Eden, I gave everybody ample notice. I said I would finish the record and then tour for a year, and then I would have to go. One of the last concerts we gave was MTV Unplugged, which became an album, so they actually got two last albums, which was a great way to leave, it assuaged a lot of my guilt too.

If she does feel any guilt, she shouldn't. Without her, 10,000 Maniacs would have been bit players on the margins. They certainly wouldn't have sold in excess of seven million albums. During the band's time together, Natalie Merchant established herself as a pioneering free spirit, in no way conforming to the normal parameters of rock 'n' roll. Her lyrics were intelligent, challenging and poetic, her lifestyle hardly one of debauchery and excess. In the year between recording the Blind Man's Zoo album and Our Time In Eden, she even chose to work voluntarily at a centre for homeless children in Harlem. Such actions, however, and her espousal of various political issues and social cause led the NME to champion her as a kind of indie babe while mocking her as a person. If she had been an easily categorisable female singer/songwriter like Suzanne Vega, she might have fared better. As it was, she became lumbered with a reputation somewhat at odds with the truth. Indeed, her speech, for all its often weighty import, is punctuated with short bursts of variously self-deprecating, joyous and mischievous laughter. As in her songs, her words - so often carefully thought out and articulated - at times tumble out with enthusiastic abandon and glee.

Occasionally perhaps too honest and forthright for her own good, she has grown up in public, with the thoughts and feelings of her formative years available in all good record stores. "It's terrifying!" she laughs. "Would you like your school reports to be read or poetry you wrote when you were 16? My poetry that I wrote when I was 16 is on an album somewhere that has sold 300,000 copies. I wish I could recall every single one of them!"

The new album,Tigerlily, is a powerful and often personal collection of songs. At times, not surprisingly, there are echoes of the Maniacs. Mostly, though, it is a bold, stripped-down sound ("live and natural" as she describes it),with greater emphasis on the words. It aches with melancholy, made all the more effective by the fragile strength of her vocals. One track on the album, Beloved Wife, is particularly haunting. "I was with my grandfather when he went to see my grandmother's body after she had passed away. They were married 52 years and since they were together, they were really one person. My grandfather died two days after he saw her. Everyone I play it to cries." Even telling me tears form in her eyes. "My brother was a mess when I played it to him...but, from the feedback I've got, the strength of the lyrics is that they are so universal, which is quite a compliment".

Other tracks chart similarly intense areas of love and loss. Admitting that at times she has laid herself open on this album, she smiles and refuses to be drawn on anything too specific. "I use a lot of literary devices to disguise my own experiences or expand on ones I've had, or whatever, sometimes creating a narrative and using characters. I might be one of the characters, or just someone who observed it happening. But, because it's a solo record there is a great amount of myself in there, and when I am singing personally - which is a secret I will never divulge - it feels so good to know that it's my record and I'm not singing for four or five other people." She pauses again, and scratches her arm. "I'm really itchy because I worked in my garden yesterday and got attacked by these bugs that bit me all over. . ."

Although 10,000 Maniacs came from Jamestown (where most of them still live), Merchant herself has also lived in London (for a year) and before that LA. "My visions of Los Angeles really haunt me," she shudders. "It's really seductive, but at the same time, once you touch the thing that felt so seductive, you turn it over and you realise it's just made of fibreglass or tin or cardboard. The substance is lacking. It's a strange place. There's the cult of the beautiful body and the cult of ostentatious wealth, what kind of car do you drive, what kind of house do you live in, is your body buff or not, are you blonde, are you beautiful enough to survive. When I lived there I didn't even have a car. I had to get oxygen once because I walked to work and was so faint and dizzy I passed out!"

Now settled in an old wooden house in a small rural community near Woodstock, she has a dog, several cats and a growing yen for gardening and DIY. "If I see an old-timer doing something to a property I rush home and do it as well!" she laughs, only half joking. When she first moved there she took a job in the library in order to get to know the local children. "I didn't want them thinking I was some kind of pervert," she explains. "Now I know all the kids, but only about three adults..."

But her lifestyle shouldn't obscure an uncompromising desire to control her own career. She proudly confesses to having had a retirement account since she was 23 ("The older I get the less people laugh at me, 'cos they realisethat social security isn't going to be around when I'm 80 years old"), and has been keen to re-evaluate the business side of her life since splitting from the predominantly male environs of the band. "It might take away a bit of the fantasy of the artist as this free-living soul, but I interviewed seven people to be my accountant!" she exclaims. "I hand-picked everyone that I'm working with now - lawyers, accountants, managers, musicians, everyone. And I tried to involve as many women as I could. I don't claim the role of producer on the record, but I was executive producer. Every single person that worked on it was hired by me, all the finances were organised by me, right down to rental of equipment and hiring vans and picking them up myself and loading the fuckin' equipment into the van. I did everything on this record and it took a lot out of me, but then I'm also proud of it, and I feel like it's completely mine."