by: David Fricke (page 31-32)

Natalie Merchant does not look much like a hard-boiled rock & roll businesswoman -- not on this balmy fall evening, anyway. Sitting on the grass with her legs crossed in a small roadside park down the pike from Woodstock, N.Y., the 32-year-old singer wiggles her stockinged feet in the warm air, takes leisurely sips from a carrot-juice shake and keeps a maternal eye on a flock of wild turkeys strolling the perimeter of the field. When Merchant spies a neighborhood cat stalking the birds through some high weeds, she sounds the alarm. "Scat! You're an artificially introduced species,"Merchant yells at the tabby with a bright, girlish laugh. "Leave them alone."

But ask Merchant about the nuts and bolts of being on her own after 12 years with her former band, 10,000 Maniacs, and the steely underside of her soft-spoken demeanor shows through -- like the way she describes picking an accountant: "You look at what kind of furniture they have. You look at the objects on the desk. Ask to see a financial statement. And decide if it's readable.

"And whenever I would interview people," Merchant adds firmly, "I would look for a measure of respect. Will they provide me with information? Will they feel insulted if I request this information? Information is the most important element. I like full disclosure in everything. I don't like to be protected." It was not always thus. Merchant had just turned 21 when the Maniacs -- fresh out of the small college town of Jamestown, N.Y. -- signed with Elektra Records in the mid-'80s. She never even bothered to read the contract until she decided to go solo two years ago.

"I was young," Merchant says unapologetically. "Being taken out for a free dinner in a fancy Manhattan restaurant was more impressive than anything the person from the record company actually had to say. I was more involved with the price of an entree: 'An $18 plate of vegetables -- and I'm getting it for free. Where do I sign?'"

Having passed through late adolescence and well into womanhood within the hermetic, interdependent tangle of a rock band -- an otherwise all-male band, to boot -- Merchant is making the most of liberation. She personally funded the making of her hit solo debut, Tigerlily, and produced the album as well. Merchant also is chipping away at the eternal-ingenue image of her Maniac days. Recorded with an almost Shaker-like severity -- much of it live in the studio with a no-frills trio -- Tigerlily is a deceptively hushed mix. There are delicate elegies (the widower's prayer Beloved Wife, the escapist rhapsody Where I Go) and, in the stark out-of-love songs Jealousy and Seven Years, almost poisonous rage.

At the Bearsville Theater, near Woodstock, where she is rehearsing a touring band that includes guitarist Jennifer Turner and ex-Wallflowers drummer Peter Yanowitz from the Tigerlily sessions, Merchant turns the album's eight-minute centerpiece, I May Know the Word, into a bleak, bare-bones blues. Seated behind an electric piano, her fingers skating the keys with a spacey languor, she escalates the hesitant pleading of her studio vocal into something more heated and desperate, a far cry from her old, precocious flower-grrrl yelp.

"A lot of my contributions to the Maniacs were dark and provocative," Merchant says during a dinner break. "And sometimes I failed miserably in what I was trying to do. Songs like Hateful Hate and Tolerance -- I cringe now. But I think 'Jealousy' is a funny song," Merchant says. "Every time I've felt jealousy, I've had to laugh at myself. It's a measure of how civilized you are, how far you let an emotion like that play out.

"A friend of mine is a filmmaker," Merchant continues, "and I went to see her do a lecture. Her film had just been previewed, and she was saying that it had won awards in both the comedy and drama categories. And she thought that was really great, because in her opinion, life isn't just comic or tragic. The two exist side by side. That's how I think this record sounds."

For Merchant, the decision to leave the Maniacs, announced to the rest of the band during pre-production for the 1992 album Our Time in Eden, wasn't especially dramatic -- it was inevitable. "If you stumbled into a situation when you were 17 years old," she says, "and then looked at yourself when you were 30, wouldn't you think that no matter what you had done or learned from that situation,you wanted to try something new?

"I was a bitch a lot of the time," Merchant says, recalling her last years with the Maniacs (who have since regrouped with original guitarist John Lombardo and a new singer, Mary Ramsey). "I was like the snotty little sister. I spent most of the last tour in the back lounge of the bus with the door shut. That was no way to live.

"The thing was, I never had the creative independence most people have when they go away," she says. "Even when I went to college, I was so young that I lived at home. And when I went away, I went with the Maniacs. When I went away, Jamestown went with me."

Merchant still carries a bit of old Jamestown with her wherever she goes. Born of Sicilian working-class stock ("My grandfather worked in a factory that made crescent wrenches, and he never learned to read or write"), she came of age at a time when many of the town's historic landmarks were being bulldozed in the name of urban renewal, causing what Merchant calls "citywide amnesia." "I always thought of 10,000 Maniacs as a very nostalgic band," she says, "because during the time I was growing up, I was always being reminded that things had been better before."

As a teenager, Merchant fed her obsession with the history and artifacts of the Great Depression by making frequent visits to the local Daughters of the American Revolution thrift store. "I started buying old magazines, cotton day dresses and these satin, mothball-reeking gowns with the seams split and buttons missing," she says. "I was surrounded by all this evidence of how things had been.

"I like that film Brazil where all these people are living in the future, but it's littered with artifacts from the past," she says. "I like the look of a faded yellow piece of paper, the feel of a fabric that was woven by hand." Even now, Merchant concedes, she's not much of a modernist: "The Depression was before television, before franchised culture, and that's intriguing to me. There were still people living on the fringe. You look at the innocence of a lot of people in those old photographs -- it's their innocence in their relation to technology."

As a songwriter, Merchant lost her innocence years ago. The angry rendering of emotional treason in Tigerlily's Seven Years ("Damn you, betrayer/ How you lied") isn't much different from the slow-burn indignation underpinning the chorus of the Maniac's 1989 song Dust Bowl, which is about a single mother struggling to care for three children: "There's a new wind blowing, they say/It's gonna be a cold, cold one/ So brace yourself, my darlings/It won't bring anything much our way but more Dust Bowl days."

It was a quote, Merchant explains, from George Bush's 1989 inaugural address: "A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on." "I happened to see it," she says, "because I was flat on my back in the hospital, and there was nothing else on TV. The Republicans have made it one of their favorite pastimes to attack single mothers in this country. And I was raised by a single mother, so I take it very personally."