by Jeff Spevak

Surprisingly, Natalie Merchant has registered at her New York City hotel under her own name. She's not one of the 10,000 Maniacs, her identity for many years. And she's not hiding behind an alias as so many famous musicians do.

"I just came as a private citizen" Merchant says, dismissing a suggestion that her double-platinum solo album, Tigerlily, has lifted her to star level: a level that attracts the kind of weird, knife wielding, homeless stalker that Madonna had been testifying against in court the previous week.

"I don't really attract rabid-type fans," Merchant says in a subdued, introvert's voice. But, she adds, "I also think I don't ask for a lot of attention. Madonna based a career on attention. I think attention was most important to her, and music second."

Merchant had settled in at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a few telephone interviews the morning after the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. She is much in demand these days; the new album has sold 2 million copies and her show Saturday at the Auditorium Center is sold out.

Surprisingly chatty, thoughtful and apparently thoroughly suntanned after a South Pacific vacation, Western New York's most visible and enigmatic pop-music export was willing to throw open the hotel-room curtains and shed some light on her - umm, should we say difficult to fathom? - personality.

In fact, people familiar with her Bohemian-chanteuse vegetarian reputation will be surprised to read that Natalie Merchant laughs and makes jokes that regular folks can understand.

She had no official function at the Hall of Fame ceremonies the night before. She was attending - as she put it - as a private citizen, watching legends such as David Bowie, the Velvet Underground and Gladys Knight and the Pips getting recognized after years in the business.

Her favorite moment came when Harry Belafonte introduced new inductee Pete Seeger, who held up his award in one hand and his banjo in the other, then walked off without a word. She was reminded of a chance encounter a few years ago.

"I was waiting for a commuter train - this was in upstate New York - and I heard this old man on the opposite side of the platform yell, 'the train's coming over here,'" recalls Merchant. "And I thought to myself, 'that sounds like Pete Seeger.' And, my God, it was Pete Seeger. We ended up sitting together on the train. He told me all kinds of stories about Woody Guthrie, the labor movement, the miners."

Imagine Merchant as the 25-year-old voice of a popular rock band, sitting on a train alongside a folk legend. Two different generations of social conscience riding the rails together. Then imagine Merchant sitting in the Hall of Fame audience, her new album far outselling everyone accepting awards on the stage that night. It all seems to have left Merchant in a reflective mood.

"So many of the people they inducted aren't alive anymore," she says, mentioning one of last year's inductees, Frank Zappa. "So many people had widows and orphans accepting the awards. It makes me sad, sometimes, when I see these musicians and how old they are. It's the same for pop musicians and athletic stars, that they do their best work when they're younger."

And Merchant suggests she's no exception. "I feel like I'm doing my best work now," she says. "Some day there will be a young girl in the audience who will feel sad when I'm old."

It may seem as though she's reached that point, but, in fact, Merchant is only 32. She grew up in Jamestown, about 100 miles southwest of Rochester. She was a 16-year-old kid in an advanced placement program, obsessed with art rocker Brian Eno, when she first met the rest of the Maniacs at the local community college radio station.

She distills the story of her time as a Maniac and her departure two years ago with concise phrases that come from much practice:

"We shared a lot of experiences, but I was always separate," she says. "From the beginning, I was five to 12 years younger than everyone else in the band. I felt like I was in another generation.

"Sometimes that makes it work. Everybody brings their own influences to the table. But I felt it wasn't going to work for another album. I felt like we were all holding each other back. Twelve years is a long time in a small group of collaboration."

Her major preparation for Tigerlily was reading "All You Need to Know About the Music Business": 415 textbook-deep pages on picking lawyers, copyrights, songwriter royalties and superstar touring aimed at protecting, as Merchant says, "artists who were ripped off by the fountain pen."

"I sacrificed a certain period of my creative life to be a business-head," she says. "I'm an adult now. I want to be in control of my life. People seem to think artists are like helpless children that need constant guidance; I don't feel I have to be deemed an imbecile and a child because I am an artist.

"I learned how to be a musician from being in 10,000 Maniacs. I think the thing that keeps me from being embarrassed from some of the things we did earlier is I see the progression. I was a 17-year old girl who grew up sheltered in a rural town."

Perhaps Tigerlily is a metaphor for that progression. She has moved from the protected, hothouse environment of 10,000 Maniacs to Natalie Merchant: business tiger. Most important to Merchant, the subdued, introvert's voice of Tigerlily is what she wanted.

"I think it's pure," she says. "I think the record company respected the fact that I didn't want it hyped. I didn't want it to be 'the long-awaited solo release of the decade.' I think the kind of record this is, and the type of artist I am, people who like my type of record would see through that campaign."

Certainly her core audience has been built from her days with 10,000 Maniacs, a group whose modest roots include nights playing the tiny stage at Richmond's, back when the downtown club was called Schatzee's, and later the old Jazzberry's.

"I was just happy not being at home with my mother working in a grocery store," Merchant says, noting with irony, "I couldn't even get a job as a checkout girl in a grocery store. I was young and untalented and uneducated and frightened of the world, but at the same time I was very curious about the world."

"I would sleep on someone's floor and eat baked potatoes. I lived on $3,000 a year for several years. I always told myself 'One day I'll have a platinum record, a vacation in the South Pacific and my own house.' But it always seemed an unobtainable dream."

Merchant not only learned how to be a musician during those years with the Maniacs, but she also developed her unique stage presence: dark, gypsy like and alien, whirling around onstage, falling into herself like a black hole - and equally distant.

There was a show in Buffalo, for example, where she read aloud some letters from friends. While Merchant says she can't recall ever doing quite that, she addresses the question anyway.

"When you're just starting out, you don't have a lot of material, so you fill time any way you can," she says. "People are always coming up to me and telling me, '... and then you were dripping wax on your arm and holding a picture of Tom Cruise.' Or, 'You were holding a gyroscope in one hand and a bird in the other....'"

Judging by her appearance last September at the Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum little has changed. As Booker T. & the MG's played Green Onions, a whirling Merchant appeared beneath a spotlight at the side of the stage. A review in this newspaper described her as looking as though someone had "dropped a hornet's nest on her head."

"I wanted to do it when Bob Dylan was out there," says Merchant, "but I was advised against it. They said, 'Don't do it. He'll hit you on the head with his guitar and walk off.'"

Merchant's reputation for lecturing an inattentive audience is also well established. "A few years ago, we took Tracy Chapman out as our opening act, and everybody would talk through her whole set," she recalls. "Then I would come out and say, 'Isn't it wonderful that you'll be able to tell your friends that two years ago you saw Tracy Chapman and talked through her entire performance?'"

So she carries into her solo career that old reputation of onstage oddball, as well as the new resentment that came her way when she left 10,000 Maniacs.

"I think other people judge me harshly," says Merchant. "They're looking at an illusion that's been created by other people. I'm basically a writer and a performer. I want people to know me through my music and let that be the end of it. Maybe people judge me harshly because of my reticence to discuss my personal life. They think I lead this cloistered life, that I don't eat pizza and listen to Led Zeppelin. They see that a lot of my lyrics have serious content and assume that I don't enjoy life."

In fact, Merchant says, she does enjoy life. With a house in the Catskills, Tigerlily beyond platinum and an exotic South Pacific vacation, the unobtainable dreams have materialized. "The constant refrain of the vacation was: I have a great life, and I get to go back to work to a job that I like," she admits. "I said that as I was hiking in the rain forest, and as we sat on the beach watching the sun rise. It's very pleasurable to be naked in the sun this time of year."