by: James Hebert

She has felt the Earth move, and the message it sent to Natalie Merchant was this: Forget about a beach house in Malibu.

Not long ago, the singer-songwriter and former 10,000 Maniacs leader suffered through an earthquake in L.A., an event that inspired her to write San Andreas Fault. The song -- which opens her first solo album, Tigerlily -- piercingly examines the attractions and afflictions of life in California, airing such sentiments as, "O promised land, o wicked ground/build a dream, tear it down."

"It just seems like an unstable place to build a foundation, in a metaphorical but also in a true sense," explains Merchant, speaking from a hotel room in seismically safe Milwaukee. "To build a home in a place that you know may slide into the ocean, or burn, or shake into a crevice in the ground . . . "

If she were not so unfailingly courteous -- meaning, if she were not Natalie Merchant -- this confirmed Easterner might finish the sentence with a phrase incorporating words like "misguided," "delusional" and "what in the &$#% were they thinking?" Yet lately, Merchant has willingly flirted with earth-shaking changes of her own.

For the first time since age 17, she has gone solo, quitting the highly successful Maniacs to make her own album and hit the road for a tour that includes Monday's sold-out date at Copley Symphony Hall. She's spurred by a force that seems as gently inexorable as the creeping of the continental plates: her faith in her own songs and voice.

"Music is most effective for me when it's written from a spiritual place and addresses a spiritual place inside of me," says Merchant, who just turned 32. "If it can soothe me or inspire me, or call up in me an emotion that I couldn't find in any other way except through art or my own life ..." She pauses, then seems to reach a small insight: "I guess that's what it is: It transfers one person's emotional experience into another."

Bright light

To cynics, such navel-gazing might play straight into Merchant's popular image as an earnest, hypersensitive poetess, forever on the side of the righteous.

It's true that some of her best-known songs -- Maniacs hits like What's the Matter Here?, Eat for Two and Candy Everybody Wants -- have explored such non-Top 40 topics as child abuse and teen pregnancy.

When, in response to a question about her L.A. experience, Merchant mentions no fewer than three literary works, she seems to be the woman she so archly describes in the Tigerlily song Jealousy: "Is she bright, so well read/Are there novels by her bed?"

But in conversation, Merchant is quick to a laugh, and not above such spontaneous antics as voicing her imitation of a hackneyed hard-rock guitar solo. "BAAAAAABBBYYYYYY!!," she mocks in a soprano screech, then snickers. "I HATE that! I can't stand it."

The topic at hand is her new band, particularly her guitarist, Jennifer Turner, whom Merchant admires for understanding "what it is to let a song breathe and let the vocal part take over."

For Tigerlily, Merchant set out to recruit a female guitarist -- a reaction to 13 years as the only woman in a band that hailed from her hometown of Jamestown, N.Y.

Strange brew

Merchant left 10,000 Maniacs at the height of its success -- the group's Unplugged album sold 2 million copies -- because she felt her ideas being stifled. She gave her bandmates two years' notice, then went into semi-seclusion at her home near Woodstock, N.Y., before starting the new group.

"I think there's more of an open dialogue and spirit of experimentation with this group of people," she says, and a listen to Tigerlily bears that out. It's a less obviously pop-geared record, with some songs stripped down to Merchant's piano and expressive voice.

The brooding and percussive Carnival, a recent Top 10 single, exhibits Merchant's newly freed sense of invention. For the song's end, Merchant and two band members collected street sounds outside their New York studio.

"I had headphones on and was carrying this tiny microphone around," she recounts. "And every time they heard conversation that sounded weird, they would call me over -- but they weren't that subtle about it. So people would look at me and walk away!"

It's quite the opposite of what happens onstage, where Merchant finds she can "open my arms to my audience, smile at them, and suddenly 3,000 people feel good." She believes that "the expression of a woman's voice is a rare thing on the planet" -- one reason she's a Joan Osborne fan. Osborne's music "seems very blues-based to me, which is definitely pretty spiritual music," Merchant says.