by: Gene Stout (section: What's Happening page: 6)

COMING UP: Natalie Merchant and The Innocence Mission. Folk/rock concert Sunday night at 8 at the Paramount Theatre. Sold out.

Natalie Merchant's new video is a wonder.

Directed by Jake Scott, the unusual video is based on Wonder, a touching and inspirational song about a handicapped woman. It comes from Merchant's new million-selling solo album, Tigerlily:

Doctors have come
From distant cities
Just to see me
Stand over my bed
Disbelieving what they're seeing . . .
They say I must be one of the wonders
of God's own creation.

Merchant, who performs Sunday night at 8 at the Paramount Theatre, entrusted Scott, son of film director Ridley Scott, with the creation of the video, which features women of different ages and ethnicity.

"He wanted to make a video that showed women to be what they are, physically and spiritually beautiful, a miraculous creation."

For Merchant, the video engenders a feeling of exhilaration.

"I told (Scott) that the song could be about anyone, even though I wrote it about a handicapped woman. His way of dealing with that was to have everybody in the video lip-sync the song.

"So you have an 80-year-old woman lip-syncing the song and then you have a 10-year-old singing the song, a small girl with Down's syndrome. Then there's a woman who looks like a fashion model. She's so incredibly beautiful. He let each of these women let the song be their song and the lyrics be about them."

As lead singer of folk-pop band 10,000 Maniacs, Merchant enjoyed a successful recording career that began in 1987 with the group's breakthrough album, In My Tribe, and the hit songs Like the Weather and What's the Matter Here.

Her decision to leave the band she had joined at 16 took several years to make.

"I informed the members of 10,000 Maniacs two years before I left. I had a lot of time to think about making the decision, I had a lot of time making the decision and then I had a lot of time living with the decision."

Merchant wrote the song I May Know the Word two days after finishing the last 10,000 Maniacs tour in 1993. Within weeks, she also wrote River (based on the life and death of the late actor River Phoenix) and Beloved Wife.

"The songs came very quickly after I was free of 10,000 Maniacs," Merchant said. "It was the first time in my life that I didn't have to consider five other people - actually six, because I usually thought of my manager as well. Suddenly, I had no manager, I had no lawyer, I had no business manager, I had no band. I had a record company, that was it."

Trying to pull together a new band was at first unnerving.

"The title solo artist is a fallacy. Unless you're going to work with a group of machines, or you're the most versatile musician on the planet, you have to collaborate with somebody."

She was concerned that she wasn't well enough connected to find musicians with whom she wanted to work. But her network of musician friends yielded enough like-minded players to form a band.

"There was a very organic feel to it. The band came and lived with me and we all worked together for about five months. We tried to become a band that felt like it had been together for years."

Among the six musicians backing her on tour are percussionist Adrian Lopez Guevarra, who played on the songs Carnival and Where I Go.

The current leg of Merchant's tour will end before Christmas. In February, Merchant and the band will do a brief tour of Europe before returning to the U.S. She hopes to finish the Tigerlily tour next summer so that she can begin writing for her next album.

"I want to stop touring by next summer so I can write. I'd like to go to Europe to write. I think it would be really interesting to go somewhere different and not be distracted."

Most of her songs come from the heart. In River, she wrote:

Let the youth of America mourn
Include him in their prayers
Let his image linger on
Repeat it everywhere.

Merchant, a friend of the actor, feels press coverage of his drug-related death was insensitive.

"It was an accident, a horrible accident," she said. "If he was able to, I don't think there's anyone who would have regretted it more than River, because he really loved living. I just wish he had challenged himself in other ways than taking drugs."