New, improved Natalie Merchant product will soon be in a record store near you, writes Alan Jackson.

"My first ever album, or at least that's what it seems like," she says. "Looking back, all the others (seven, if the career retrospective Hope Chest is included) feel like they were me learning how to make this record."

Tiger Lily is its title, a juxtaposition of images that is entirely appropriate: Merchant's voice is proud and muscular when in full flight, impossibly soft and intimate at other times, and her lyrics can be similarly polarised. Now 31, she is a liberal with attitude, for years a campaigner on such issues as homelessness or a woman's reproductive rights.

Merchant was just 17 when she joined four male musicians in her home town of Jamestown in upstate New York to form 10,000 Maniacs, covering material by English bands such as Joy Division and the Gang of Four to limited acclaim.

After signing to Elektra in 1985, however, the acceleration towards fame began. By the time the band's final studio LP Our Time in Eden was released, in 1992, sales were into the multi-millions and glossy magazines were happy for Merchant's face to look, tentatively, from their covers. At which point Merchant announced a disbandment.

"The scope of my life was way too narrow," she said at the time. "I was tired of being with the same group of people." Luckily, for most fans Merchant was the Maniacs, and the fact that she intended to write and record on her own tempered the disappointment. Now, Merchant is likely to become established as one of the key figures in grown-up American pop, as widely celebrated as Michael Stipe, say, or kd lang.

It is a prospect she views with alarm. "Although I think this is the best possible record I could have made right now, I almost want to put brakes on its success," she says. "I'm excited by the advance reaction to it, but I want to keep things under control. I was really happy with the level of success the Maniacs achieved, and I thought that if I could only get to a similar level on my own .. I mean, I live well, am very comfortable, but I can still move around freely. What I hadn't counted on, though, was everyone seeing me not as a new artist but as the singer from a previously successful group. I didn't realise I'd made myself so noticeable."

Merchant is not being disingenuous. She and the band were so camera-shy that they chose not to have their photograph on any of their LP sleeves. And although in growing up she forsook the thrift-shop look favoured in her teens for a more stylish image, she has never been comfortable with using her looks to draw in listeners. Down the years there have been run-ins with stylists hired to coax her towards glamour: "We'd be in some store where any old outfit cost more than most people earn in a month and they'd be urging me, 'Shorter, Natalie, and tighter too', and I'd be saying 'No, not shorter and tighter. Looser and longer'. On occasions I'd be reduced to tears."

Tiger Lily marks another breakthrough, then: Merchant's face appears on the cover, albeit in black and white and without cosmetic aid. "And I've actually done a couple of photo-shoots for American magazines recently where hair and make-up people and stylists have turned up and I've really got into it. I figure now that I am a performer and I am a woman .. use it before you lose it, basically."

We will not be seeing the singer in designer gowns, though, or entering A-list parties on the arm of Brat Pack actors. "That, or becoming a heroin addict, always seems to be good for triggering media interest," she says. "But I don't intend to do any gratuitous promotion. Right now, I'm keen to let people know my record is out but I don't imagine myself seeking any further attention. And by continuing not to talk about my private life, I should ensure that any focus on me is as a musician, not as a celebrity. And soon, when I tour America, I'll be playing only 3,000-seater venues, even though bigger money is being offered to play bigger halls."

Maintaining control of her work is of vital importance to Merchant. "I wasn't so much given carte blanche, as took it," she says of Tiger Lily. Rather than operate on a record company advance and so risk outside interference, she financed it with money borrowed from the bank and handled all the day-to-day administration herself. Recording took place in her home, with the small nucleus of musicians living in, and analogue rather than digital technology was used to avoid what she describes as the latter's cold and clinical sound. She even produced it. "All in all, it was quite a responsibility and look, it's left me with some grey hairs. But at least I can call the record my own, and that's the important thing."

When all the promotion and touring is over, the singer will happily resume her off-duty life in a small town where the locals have been stunned by the sheer conventionality of the rock'n'roller who moved in among them. Volunteer work and benefit shows will be the highlights of her week again. "And going to the laundromat. I love getting into conversation with whoever's at the next machine."