No joke: It's been a pleasant surprise to discover that the thirty-one-year-old benefit-giving, PETA-supporting, Rock the Vote-campaigning writer of songs about illiteracy, racism, and Nicaragua (among other party topics) is not the all-time drag she's been made out to be. So far today, she's admitted to enjoying an occasional puff on a joint, confessed to being a Tetris and Ms. Pac Man addict ("I knew I had to stop when I was walking down a narrow street and someone was behind me and I actually thought, 'I'm going to be eaten'"), and even semitrashed ex-beau and dear friend Michael Stipe: "He's such a starmonger these days."

Maybe she's feeling loose because she's finally free of 10,000 Maniacs and has produced her own solo debut, Tigerlily. Whatever, one thing is certain: Despite the avalanche of media reports describing her as a drudge - and its hard to find a single article that doesn't condemn the woman as pretentious, self-righteous, or at the very least prim - Natalie Merchant can actually be a laugh. Not that this is one of her top priorities. "I do have a sense of humor. Maybe it's just not funny," she says. "I'm more comfortable with myself, but I don't feel like I have to go about redefining and reconstructing myself as the all-new-and-improved Natalie - I don't have to be a sex kitten now, or wacky."

Not to worry. More media friendly she may be. Ann-Margret she is not. Wacky sex kittens don't confess to "staring at the walls and ceilings a lot." Natalie does. Wacky sex kittens don't drop exclusively designed Christian Francis Roth stage outfits for staid Agnes B. pantsuits. Natalie does. And wacky sex kittens wouldn't be caught dead making pronouncements like "My job as an artist is to be a witness to my surroundings and times." Natalie says stuff like that as steadily as the tide hits the beach. She just can't help it.

It all started with a bunch of damn hippies. As a working-class kid in Westfield, New York, Natalie was a "television addict" -- into H.R. Pufnstuf, I Love Lucy, and Love, American Style - then a pot-smoking, theater-loving high-school misfit when she found true happiness with a community of hippies in her hometown. Natalie idolized these back-to-nature artist types, who "lived in the middle of nowhere with a cow" and made sculptures, weavings, puppets, and -- well, you get the picture. Young Natalie thought she might like to be a craftsperson herself. "Oh, if I could only be like Pam the Puppeteer," she'd pine.

The Westfield hippies gave her more than a poignant love of puppetry, however. They also introduced her to the music of Bob Dylan and leftist periodicals like Mother Jones and The Progressive. These rags. says Natalie, put the first "suspicions" in her mind about "this country and the structure of power." Suddenly the onetime Catholic choirgirl knew that "all was not as it seemed." She cites her hippie mentoring as "probably the reason why I wrote all those serious songs."

Another reason may have been the Merchant family's financial situation. When Natalie was seven her parents separated and her mom supported four children on child support and minimum-wage jobs as a housepainter and secretary. Needless to say, in the midst of western New York's economic woes, financial traumas were many. Shuddering at the memory, Natalie recalls the period when she had to pick up free school-lunch tickets at the front of the classroom. "Oh... I've just crossed the line," she thought.

And years later she hasn't forgotten. One of her best, least-didactic story songs. Dustbowl, is about a mother who can't afford the toys her children demand. Natalie herself remembers that the Merchant kids felt guilty the day after Christmas every year because their mother was weeping over the money she'd spent and didn't have.

Today, six million albums later, Natalie lives quite comfortably, thank you, in a four-bedroom, nineteenth-century gingerbread house on ten acres of forest in upstate New York. She has a pool and a home recording studio but, Natalie being Natalie, shuns other pop-star trappings: She's yet to hire a personal assistant, refuses to have a maid, likes to mow her own yard, and finds joy at the laundromat. "You can do seven or eight loads at a time!" she marvels. (During Tigerlily's recording, she even did the studio band's laundry.) If recognized at her beloved laundromat, she routinely denies her identity. "If I were Natalie Merchant, would I be doing my own laundry?" she asks. She is willing to concede, though, that she's come a long way from her humble beginnings: "I've made more money than I ever thought I'd make in this life."

That money, of course, was made with 10,000 Maniacs. When she was sixteen, Natalie met the band at a 1981 party in Jamestown, New York. Before she knew it, she and the Maniacs were touring with R.E.M. She sang the Maniacs' chiming anthems in a lush folk soprano while whirling about the stage makeup-free, hair aflight, wearing a thrift-shop smock. "I got my whole aesthetic then from watching '30s movies at night on TV," she remembers, "like The Petrified Forest, where Bette Davis plays a sort of homely, poetic girl." Choreographing odd, stylized hand movements to illustrate her alternately oblique and moralistic lyrics, she developed a performance-art-damaged stage persona that earned her media labels like "erudite thrush" and "the thinking boy's American pinup."

But Natalie hated being the only girl in a band of beer-drinking football fans who privately dubbed themselves the Four Stooges. By 1991 she felt she was "suffocating" -- she had little in common with the band besides history, and was weary of the group's slow, decision-by-democracy policy. She wanted "to be a little tyrant and have my own way." And so, like the little tyrant she isn't, she gave the band two years' notice, made two final albums -- Our Time in Eden and MTV Unplugged -- and that was that.

She's spoken to them only once since their last show -- a benefit, naturally -- in 1993. "It's not that I don't like them. I just don't feel connected to them." she says. For her it's like a love affair that's ended; everyone needs to get on with their lives. "Maybe someday we'll be friends, but for now I need my space." Though she insists there's no ill will on either side, the Maniacs seem to have indicated differently: At a recent show with a new singer, Mary Ramsey, a mike was handed mid-concert to an audience member who warbled the old Maniacs hit Trouble Me. At the end of the song, one of the band members sniped, "Anybody can sing that part". That may be, but this Natalie-free version of 10,000 Maniacs currently find themselves without a record label.

Natalie, though, has got what she calls a savvy deal with Elektra and her very own album, Tigerlily - so named because, like the word itself, Merchant feels the LP has a "fierceness and gentleness." Dumping the Maniacs' bouncy sound for ultra spare sonics, Natalie gives her coffeehouse muse free rein. There are folky, acoustic-based songs about nature (Where I Go), death (Beloved Wife), love lost (The Letter), and one about her friend River Phoenix (River) -- it's Merchant at her most elegiac, melancholy, and, some have said, lugubrious.

Though a couple of the cuts have a modified funk vibe to them -- including the first single, Carnival, with its Santana-like guitar -- the feel of Tigerlily is that of a hushed confessional. Whereas her past albums have taught lessons, this one lashes out at ex-lovers and media vampires. There's the distinct feeling that something personal is at stake. And though Tigerlily can be painfully earnest, it should be noted that this is a painfully earnest time in pop (consider Hootie and the Blowfish and the Dave Matthews Band). It should also be noted that few '90s pop singers have a more distinctive voice than Natalie Merchant. It is a luxuriantly dusky instrument that takes the edge off some of the mopiest lyrics of her career. "If there's a motto to the record," she chuckles, "it's that sad isn't always a bad thing. I didn't set out to make a gloomy bed-sit record -- but I made one after all."

Tonight, though, it's time for fun at the lower tip of Manhattan, under Cirque du Soleil's cobalt blue big top. Natalie has tossed off her sandals and is sitting barefoot, Indian-style, thrilling to the Felliniesque performance of contortionists and fire-eaters. Throughout, she laughs, gives solo standing ovations, gasps, giggles some more, then laughs at herself for being so giddy. It's Natalie lite, and it's a hoot.

Later, back at her hotel, Natalie confesses to being infatuated with "half the people who were onstage tonight" particularly Cirque du Soleil's rock chanteuse. "She was so beautiful, so delicate, so pale. Her voice was so wondrous. But it wasn't the kind of infatuation of, Oh, I really want to make love with that woman. It was more...I adored her."

Natalie has a rule about interviews -- she won't answer questions about her personal life, won't talk about who she is or isn't going out with, won't "slice open my heart and bleed. People would read it and two days later it'd be on the bathroom floor. And it's nobody's business." But now, looking down at the ground and thinking about how striking the Cirque du Soleil performance was, she takes an unexpected turn, and the talk becomes uncomfortably personal. She's almost whispering when she suddenly confesses, "I see men and women all the time who are physically beautiful, but I always feel inferior -- I think, 'Oooh, they're extremely beautiful and I'm not.'"

Caught off guard by this vulnerable Natalie. I say. "But you're famous, so who cares. right?"

NATALIE: I'm known for being a songwriter and a singer. I'm not really known for being a celebrity or being glamorous.

ME: Because you don't encourage it. Except for when you were wearing the Christian Francis Roth outfits. You looked great in that Hullabaloo outfit on Saturday Night Live.

NATALIE: My mother said my breasts looked too large and my nipples were showing.

ME: Well, it was the first time we'd ever seen the shape of your body.

NATALIE: Look, performers are different from each other; their motivations and goals are different. I can't be Bjork, I can't be PJ Harvey, and I can't be Courtney Love. I am who I am. Maybe I limit myself in how comfortable I feel about my body. Maybe I'm just too inhibited. But I wonder where all the criticism comes from. 'Cause it's been coming for years: She's so plain, so average, so boring. I don't have any tattoos or pierced private parts, but at the same time I've been able to endure over a decade, under a great amount of scrutiny. I sell one and a half million copies of every record I put out. I have an audience, and what I do appeals to them. We'll see what happens now -- if the new material appeals to people.

ME: Are you nervous about that?

NATALIE: No. not at all. I dread doing more interviews, though -- trying to explain myself.

Natalie sips at her nightcap -- straight orange juice -- and sighs. The day's explanations are almost at a merciful end. Tomorrow Natalie will take the train back upstate to her personal Eden, away from the tormenting media machine. She'll audition a bass player and guitarist for a tour later this fall, await the arrival of a childhood friend, and go for a hike in the hills.

But for now. she's stuck trying to explain herself. She knows what her detractors say about her -- "Oh, that rotten do-gooder's up to her old tricks again -- raising money and awareness for people who do good!" And she knows, as well. how to keep it all in perspective -- "I think it's a good. humbling experience to scrub behind your own toilet."