Her pastoral urges, however, are leading her far from that fantasy of isolation. The Maniacs' vanilla-glazed folk rock -- and Merchant's hippiechick esprit in particular -- may have passed for quirkiness in the button-down '80s. But that five-grain aesthetic now swims resolutely mainstream; nearly two years after Merchant officially quit the Maniacs, her earthy solo debut, Tigerlily, entered the Billboard pop chart at No. 13 two weeks ago. "I think she's right on the threshold of being really big," says Lee Chesnut, senior vice president of music programming at VH1, which is currently featuring her first video, Carnival, on Crossroads.

Such predictions, of course, have haloed the 31-year-old Merchant since July 1993, when she officially divorced the band she had fronted for a dozen years. A klatch of college-radio buddies from backwater Jamestown, N.Y., the Maniacs bridged the gap between earnest and eager; their grinning melodies sugarcoated Merchant's often frowning lyrics on songs such as Like the Weather and Candy Everybody Wants. And incessant touring spawned an audience that was cultish in fervor yet centrist in size -- three of their five albums have gone platinum, including their last, 1993's 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged.

But, as early as their fourth album, 1989's Blind Man's Zoo, the feel-good vibe had begun to fray: Not only did critics deride the disc for its stiff-collared preachiness, the group actually stopped playing cuts off the album in concert because, says Merchant, "we realized they were just such a bummer."

"Looking back," she says now, "I think that was the first convulsion of not wanting to be in 10,000 Maniacs, because I didn't want to have to consult with all these other people. I didn't want art by committee anymore."

The split came five months into preproduction on their follow-up album, 1992's Our Time in Eden, for which Merchant (who had moved to Manhattan) returned to the woods. "Going back to Jamestown was a trip back in time," she explains. "Living together again really felt like backpedaling. And being the only female, I'd [buy] the food, and everybody else would eat it and then not do the dishes, and beer cans didn't get rinsed and needed to be recycled and smelled funny, and I just thought, 'This should have happened 12 years ago!'"

Bobbing out of an uncomfortable silence, her voice falters. "We spent too long working on that record," she says, almost to herself. (The Maniacs, who continue to tour without a label deal, refuse to discuss Merchant or the breakup.) "I just came to rehearsal one day and said, 'It's over. I really can't do this anymore.' And I remember [bassist] Steve Gustafson saying 'I'm actually surprised you stayed as long as you did.'"

A den of low, beamed ceilings and colonial lithographs, the Beekman Arms -- the "oldest inn in America" -- is itself a trip back in time, the kind of rustic eatery for which day-trippers flock to the Hudson Valley. Inside, wavering oil lamps render Merchant a '30s actress rather than a '90s singer. "I think it's more difficult for women to age gracefully in this business [than men]," she says, snapping a breadstick. "I'd rather drop out of sight than be a ghost."

Renunciation would, in fact, represent a return of sorts. Raised by her mother, Ann, in Jamestown after her parents divorced in 1971, Merchant quickly found isolation in an already isolated community. "It's the land of big hair and polyester clothing and people still listening to Molly Hatchet, you know?" she says with a laugh. "And I wasn't a part of that." Only after her mother - who now runs a vintage clothing store in the South - remarried and relocated to an upstate commune did Natalie discover compatriots. "I fell in love with those people!" she recalls. "They were artists. They were ladies that didn't shave their legs. They lived alone and fed the woodstove in the winter. And they were strong."

Exiting the Maniacs allowed Merchant to indulge a similar autonomy. With the help of Maniacs producer Paul Fox, she assembled and housed a crew of five relatively unknown musicians last winter at her newly bought Hudson Valley manse. Together they wrote and recorded Tigerlily's 11 cuts over the course of five months; label execs didn't hear a note until the album was mixed this spring.

"A lot of people at the company [Elektra] really had preconceived notions of what my solo record should sound like, and I didn't even want to hear them," says Merchant. The singer claims she initially financed studio time herself with a loan, although Elektra later reimbursed her. "Please," scoffs Sylvia Rhone, who took over as chairwoman and CEO at Elektra after a Warner Music Group shake - up last year. "We paid her a lot of money for this album."

The only true threat to the project's tranquillity, however, arose when Merchant broke with Fox and decided to produce the album herself -- in part, she says, "to preserve my vision." Although Rhone claims the label wasn't too concerned, Elektra VP of A&R Nancy Jeffries admits that she "was scared to death" and initially tried to dissuade the soloist. "But," she adds, "I can understand that if you have someone helping you define what you're saying, it may not be truly your thought. Sometimes for women, it's just harder to be assertive like that."

Yet, while distinctive, the self-produced Tigerlily could hardly be described as pushy. Merchant's rolling vocals dominate the spare instrumentation (all recorded analog, with even digital effects minimized). And her lyrics explore a sadness that yaws between poignant and maudlin, depending on the listener's level of cynicism. River includes this homage to the late River Phoenix: "Let the youth of America mourn/include him in their prayers/let his image linger on/repeat it everywhere."

"I was disappointed in the balance; it's just a little bit too dark," says Robert Krasnow, Elektra's legendary ex-chairman, who brought the Maniacs to the label. "If I were still there, I would have had to make some adjustments."

Merchant, however, fully embraces her melancholia -- and acknowledges its consequences. "I'm ridiculed by other artists and critics for not being among the new wave of women artists who go out of their way to confront people and shock people," she complains. "Maybe that is their ideology. Maybe Courtney Love's sole purpose to her music is to, like, tear away all exterior artifices.. [But] I think beauty exists. I don't think a lot of people could look at those flowers that we saw today and not be able to say, 'Yes. They're beautiful.'. I just don't want to live in a society of artists that can't respect that some people want to create something beautiful."

Yet, she insists, with the salty strain of self-deprecation that prevents even those who find her overly sincere from wishing her ill, "I also don't want to be eating bliss cakes on a little mushroom in the forest, nothing like that!" Not yet, anyway.