by: Kenneth Johnson (page 1F)

The obvious question: Why - after more than a decade - leave a successful band you helped build from the ground up?

The answer: The thrill was gone.

That, according to Natalie Merchant, was her simple reason for leaving 10,000 Maniacs.

"It had to do with growing up, changing, having a relationship go stale creatively," the waifish, folk-pop chanteuse said over the phone from a New York hotel room a few days before kicking off a solo tour that brings her to Ovens Auditorium on Saturday.

It was during the recording of 10,000 Maniacs' last studio record, Our Time in Eden, that Merchant realized she was ready to leave the band she co-founded in Jamestown, N.Y., in 1981.

It wasn't a surprise to the rest of the band.

"It was something that they sensed, I suppose. We were writing the last record and we had been in preproduction for months. I had moved away from Jamestown and they knew I was really dissatisfied with having to commute 375 miles to get to my job. I think that was when I discovered that maybe my life was somewhere else instead of in that rehearsal space."

Those feelings signaled a larger dilemma for the 31-year-old singer.

"I think 11 years is a long time to try to come up with something original with the same group of people," Merchant said. "I was tired by art-by-committee. I just felt like I wanted to pursue a vision that was much more my own."

That vision has led to Merchant's solo CD, Tigerlily, a moody, entrancing collage of songs colored by piercing, introspective strokes from her lyrical paintbrush.

Tigerlily was born in Merchant's Upstate New York house, where she and her new band (drummer Peter Yanowitz and bassist Barrie Maguire, formerly of the group the Wallflowers, and guitarist Jennifer Turner) hunkered down for six months of rehearsals and recording.

The collaboration with Turner was particularly fruitful.

"I wanted a girl in my band, someone I could talk to that was female. And I was really interested in how collaboration would be with another woman, what the ego struggle would be, or the lack of ego struggle, or how open it would be."

Merchant found in Turner a compatible partner. The two were able to communicate musically in a way she had never experienced.

"She taught me a lot about how to listen to music and how to play with other people," Merchant said. "In the Maniacs I played (keyboards) on the last couple records but I didn't think of myself as a musician. Jennifer taught me how to listen, and she taught me all about the groove."

From the smoldering Carnival, the album's first single, to San Andreas Fault, Merchant's dark take on Hollywood, songs on Tigerlily slither and slide chirpy stylings of 10,000 Maniacs.

Recording the album was part of a larger artistic rebirth for Merchant. She hired a new manager and negotiated a new contract with her record label, Elektra.

The singer even financed the recording of Tigerlily herself, a highly unusual move.

"I paid for the studio myself so I could have the freedom to do whatever I wanted, and then I could deliver it to Elektra completely finished and if they didn't like it, then that was my risk and I was willing to take it," Merchant said.

"I wanted to challenge all the things people had tried to convince me about, that recording for a major label you had to have a massive budget, that you had to work with a big name producer, that you had to work with a star engineer. As a solo artist a lot of people would have expected me to go out and seek out the best musicians in the business and pay them top dollar to come in and make me sound incredible.

"And I went against everything."

Now, another phase starts as Merchant takes her new band, her new songs and - in a sense - a new Natalie Merchant to audiences across the country.

It's a daunting prospect, yet she's not sweating things.

"I haven't been nervous about anything, really. I've been feeling strangely confident," she said, laughing.

Can the audience expect old 10,000 Maniacs favorites?