It's not hard to understand why a guy like L. Brent BozeII III would find Natalie Merchant so galling. (It’s not just the splendid poetry of her name, as redolent of Old World romance as his is of musty privilege.) Bozell is chairman of the Media Research Center, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, and in a recent column in the New York Post, he derisively crowned Merchant "the popular-music queen of Political Correctness." Among her many sins, Bozell lists the fact that she is pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-environment and "against industrial toxic waste." He takes Merchant’s own honest admission that she is troubled by the recording industry's use of plastic and hurls it back at her. "Hypocrisy," he concludes, "is the least of her worries. She is an ingrate. The free-enterprise system that she condemns has made her rich and famous."

Merchant has heard all this before. "You can’t please them," she says in her soft whisper of a voice. "You just can’t please them. They’ll take a shot at Courtney Love, and they’ll take a shot at me."

Indeed, besides music, gender and friendship with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, the two women have little in common. While Love seems to live on the brink of personal disaster, baiting audience members and taking swings at fellow musicians, Merchant is the model of quiet, serious activism. "I don’t have a lot of patience for people who are frivolous and wasteful," admits Merchant whose idea of rebellion as an adolescent was to sneak off to Mass behind the backs of her free-thinking parents. A kind of anti-Charles Barkley, she once told Vogue, "I think everybody who's in the public eye should be conscious of being a role model."

If Merchant has a vice, it is perhaps the high-minded seriousness that, in the not-so-old days when she was the lead singer and songwriter for 10,000 Maniacs, could make her seem, in the words of Musician magazine's J.D. Considine, "dour, principled and a little cold around the edges."

But a hypocrite? Come on. For most of her 31 years, Merchant has woven community service into the fabric of her daily life, an astonishing feat given the demands of her schedule. Between making Blind Man's Zoo and Our Time in Eden with 10,000 Maniacs, Merchant became a regular visitor to a nursery in a Harlem homeless center, stopping in at least once and often twice a week. "I tried to be consistent," she says, "because I felt that the kids needed that."

Merchant recently bought an old wooden house in a small town near Woodstock, NY. It has four bedrooms and 10 wooded acres for her dog and two cats to explore. The Hudson River is a pleasant 10-minute walk away. While the house has a pool and a home recording studio, Merchant eschews the kind of extravagance usually associated with pop stardom. She cuts her own grass, does her laundry at the local Laundromat and works as a volunteer in the library afterschool program. "I bought a home, and I became part of this community," she explains. "I feel like if everybody focused on the community in which they live ... well, that would be a good start."

A good start is something Merchant herself is hoping for. In June, two years after she ended her 12-year partnership with 10,000 Maniacs, she released Tigerlily, her first solo album. It entered the Billboard album chart at No. 13, and in just 12 weeks had sold more than one million copies, a total that is sure to rise by the time she and her band have finished their three-month, projected 58-show tour this fall.

The 11 songs on Tigerlily are more personal than anything Merchant wrote with 10,000 Maniacs. There's Beloved Wife, a heartrending song placed in the mouth of her grandfather, who died of grief two days after his wife. Two of the songs, The Letter and Seven Years look at past relationships with a mixture of self-recrimination and celebration, while San Andreas Fault contemplates the unstable foundation on which Los Angeles was built, both literally and metaphorically.

While most of the arrangements are spare and meditative, Carnival, the album's first single, is a nifty piece of urban funk that finds Merchant questioning the sensual lure of cities: Have I been / hypnotized / mesmerized / by what my eyes have found / in that great street carnival. The flip side of Carnival is the lilting Where I Go, a song of praise to the restorative power of nature, inspired by Merchant's visits to the Hudson.

Having decided to produce Tigerlily herself (see below), Merchant tackled the role with characteristic thoroughness. "My bedside reading was Everything You Need to Know About the Music Business," she says. "It was time to make a second start, and I wanted all my decisions to be educated ones."

She started by handpicking her musicians and bringing them to live in her house (she did their laundry too!). "I envisioned a small band of young musicians that would be interested in devoting a year of their lives to an experiment," she says. "I dreamed of living and working in a communal setting."

She set about systematically overhauling other aspects of her life. Seeking what she terms a "more equitable gender balance in my life," she hired women whenever possible. "I’ve hired a female lawyer, a half-female accounting team, a half-female management team. I have a female sound technician, and I’d like to get a female lighting designer," she told the LA Times. She points with special satisfaction to the fact that she is exploding a musical stereotype by hiring a woman, Jennifer Turner, as her lead guitarist.

Turner's presence pleases her for other reasons. "I wanted to have a girlfriend in my band," she says. "I wanted to have someone with whom I could have the kind of conversations women have, the kind of sympathetic feeling women have. It felt lonesome, all those years [with 10,000 Maniacs], because there were no women around.'

Even the name Merchant has given her new publishing company - Indian Love Bride - carries a message of female independence. "I liked the way the words contradicted the 10,000 Maniacs' publishing company, which was Christian Burial Music," she says. "And, also, a musicologist friend of mine who spends a lot of time in India told me that a love bride is a woman who refuses to be involved in an arranged marriage and marries for love. That's how I felt. There was a lot of security in staying with the Maniacs, and to leave was to go into territory that was pretty unknown. But it was something I felt I needed to do to make myself happy and more fulfilled, creatively."

The urge to create has driven Merchant all her life. She was born in Jamestown, a small city in western New York. Her parents, who married while in their teens, were, by her description, "working class." She still remembers having to walk to the front of the school dining room to collect her free lunch voucher.

But Jamestown was an inspiring place, remote enough still, in the wake of the '60s, to attract a large community of artists, independent thinkers and free spirits. Many of them gathered around Jamestown Community College, where Merchant's mother, Ann, was a secretary in the art department. "I spent most of my summers in her office," recalls Merchant fondly, "going off with whoever had free time. That might mean working in a photo lab for a few hours, working on a sculpture or working with graphic artists. There was an amazing woman from Sweden who came for one semester. I really loved her. And one of my mother's best friends was a psychologist, an unmarried young woman psychologist. Those were my role models."

When Merchant left high school at the age of 16 to take advanced placement courses at Jamestown, she had no idea what a strange turn her life was about to take. "I hadn't even chosen what college I was going to go to," she says. "I knew that I wanted to be involved in the visual arts in some form. I think if I had to be in the work force. I’d probably have been a teacher." At Jamestown she met Steven Gustafson and Dennis Drew, who worked at the college radio station and played bass and keyboards, respectively, in a local band called Still Life. The band soon changed its name to 10,000 Maniacs in homage to a cult horror movie, 2,000 Maniacs, and began enticing the shy 17-year-oid to join them. "The first five times I went to see 10,000 Maniacs, I wasn't in the band," she told People magazine. "But they saw me sitting there and said, 'C'mon up and sing.' I did that for the next five shows. They kept luring me up onstage, and I kind of liked it."

The Maniacs graduated quickly from bar band to recording artists, signing with Elektra Records in 1984. By setting smart, serious lyrics over jangling, jazz-tinged folk, they became college radio stars and anticipated a great deal of what we now call alternative music. The band's creative pinnacle may have been 1987's In My Tribe. One of that album's best tracks is What's the Matter Here? an honest and complicated song about witnessing child abuse next door. Three of the band's five albums went platinum, including its last, 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged.

But by 1991 Merchant had begun to feel stifled, partly because she was the only woman in the band. "We accomplished a lot of great things together," she told Billboard recently, "but there I was with people from the exact same town I was born in, and all I wanted to do since I was 15 was escape from that town." She wanted the chance to make her own creative choices. Whatever misgivings she may have had about her decision evaporated as she worked on Unplugged. . "It was my introduction to working with new musicians and experimenting with song arrangement," she says. "The Unplugged album taught me that a single live performance could be very, very powerful. I tried to record Tigerlily in that spirit."

Behind the Scenes - The Producer

Though she can play down the risks now that she has a hit album on her hands, Natalie Merchant was certainly taking a chance when she chose to produce her first solo album, Tigerlily. As a rule, even the most experienced artists are delighted to have a producers input. Today’s hottest producers - guys like Butch Vig, who worked with Nirvana, Freedy Johnston and Soul Aslyum, and Don Was, who produced the latest records by the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan - are more sought after than any session guitarist.

A record's producer is the equivalent of a movie's director. He - and on curiously rare occasions, she - is the creative mastermind, chosen by either the artist or the record company to get the best performance possible out of the artist. Depending on the artist, that can mean different things, anything from telling the singer to cut loose on a high C to making sure the drummer gets to the studio sober:

• Jeff Holmes of the Floating Men says their producer, former E Street Band bassist Garry Tallent, kept telling him, "Enunciate, Jeff, enunciate."
• T Bone Burnett, who produced Counting Crows August and Everything After, persuaded the band to follow the Band’s example by renting a big house in which to both live and record.
• While Joey Ramone praises his producer Daniel Rey as the "latest in a long line of fifth Ramones", the original "fifth member" of any band was George Martin. The "fifth Beatle" oversaw 22 No. 1 hits, more than any producer in history. Part of Martin’s job was to manage egos as strong as Lennon’s and McCartney's, but he made some very specific musical contributions too. He wrote and played the baroque piano solo on In My Life, ingeniously recording it at half speed, then playing it back at double speed, a trick that not only restored it to the right pitch but also lent it a distinctive harpsichord-like sound.

Producers set about their work in different ways. "I've worked with some" says Merchant, "who spend a lot their time reading the newspaper while you're working and some who want to pretty much replace the band with studio musicians and make comments about your lyrics."

Matching producer and artist is a crucial and largely intuitive step in the recording process. What works for one artist may not work for another. "I have a hard time in the studio. I tend to tense up and not give a very free performance," admits Grooves Eight cover artist Jill Sobule, who, after making albums with heavyweights Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson, blossomed when she worked with her old buddy Brad Jones in his home studio. "Brad knows me really well. He made me feel like I was just doing a demo. He'd tell me, ‘This is just a warm-up’. Then it would be the one we’d use."