by: Johanna Schneller (p. 46-50)

Natalie Merchant has a cold. She wafts into a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, two months into a nationwide concert tour to promote Tigerlily, her first solo album since she left 10,000 Maniacs, the alterna-pop band she fronted for 12 years. In a shiny black dress and boots, with her brown eyes steaming like big mugs of coffee, she's more petite than the robust figure she cuts on video. "I'm feeling pretty spacey," she says, "so this could be an interesting evening."

Undoubtedly. Possessed of the clearest voice in pop music, Merchant, 32, writes subtle songs about longing and loss that make you dance and ache at the same time. At every stop along the tour, brown-haired girls in their own shiny dresses sway their hips and spin as she spins. Though Merchant wrote the lyrics for most of the Maniacs' tunes (including Hey Jack Kerouac, These Are Days and Like the Weather), Tigerlily sounds rounder, richer, more resonant. "Her music works its way into you slowly," says R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, an old friend of Merchant's. "You have to hear a song six or eight times before it grabs you, and then it doesn't let you go."

"She wants as much meaning in as few notes as possible," says Jennifer Turner, who plays guitar on Tigerlily and on tour (as part of her audition, Merchant had her play at an old-folks home near Merchant's 10-acre spread outside Woodstock, N.Y.). Making Tigerlily "made all the musicians crazy," says Turner. Merchant politely dismissed veteran producer Paul Fox to produce the album herself. In the initial stages of writing and recording, there was arguing, "a lot of weirdness." Turner "would get intimidated, because Natalie can really prove a point. Then, in the studio, the concept jelled -- it all came together." The first single, Carnival, turned into Merchant's first-ever Top 10 single, and Tigerlily has gone platinum.

Despite her publicist's pitch -- "Natalie's ready to lighten up. She's really very funny" - in person, Merchant is serene but serious. Within seconds of shaking hands, we're talking about Camus and Anne Frank and the Dalai Lama. She bristles at personal questions -- when I ask, "Are you in love now?" she says: "What? No comment" -- but her cultural rambles know no bounds.

When Merchant's considerable humor surfaces, it's often in obscure places. "Onstage, she'll rattle off a really funny joke about 17th-century art - three people in the audience will know what she's talking about," Turner says. Or dark places. Merchant's parents divorced when she was 7, and though she says her father "would listen to Jim Croce all the time, which made me really feel bad for him, because it was such sad music," she can't keep from laughing as she adds, "Then Jim Croce died, which made it worse."

Merchant grew up in economically depressed Jamestown, N.Y.; her mother, Anne, raised her and her three siblings by painting houses and working as a secretary at a local college. But the house was culturally alive: Anne and her second husband, an artist, banned television and steered the kids toward music and books and exploring outdoors.

At 16, she started singing in bars with four older local guys. They called themselves 10,000 Maniacs, and though they never had a lot in common, their music - an odd mixture of sprightly tunes and serious themes (poverty, betrayal, media seduction) - developed a loyal following. While the guys continued living in Jamestown, Merchant moved to Manhattan and started palling around with the likes of Michael Stipe, actor River Phoenix (whom Merchant eulogizes in the song River on Tigerlily) and composer Philip Glass, with whom she does an annual benefit for Tibet House. Stipe acknowledges that her music had a "profound influence" on him. "She can be topical without being demagogical," he says. "I don't know that I have that capacity myself. I certainly mimicked it for a while, from about '86 to '90". Sometime around the release of 10,000 Maniacs' 1992 album, Our Time in Eden, Merchant gave her bandmates two years' notice, recorded MTV Unplugged with them (the Maniacs' most successful album) and left.

Now here she sits, eyes roving the menu for something a vegetarian can eat: an hors d'oeuvre without shrimp, a bowl of soup without fish stock. We abandon the first restaurant and wander around Japantown peering into windows and reading menus. After a few blocks, Merchant says: "I have a new theory about eating: Don't go to the best Japanese restaurant. Go to the nearest one." She picks one, grills the waiter and settles on corn soup, steamed soybeans and copious cups of green tea, which she huddles over like a vaporizer. "This is America, for Christ's sake," she says in mock annoyance. "If I was in Romania, I would make concessions. But I know there's vegetables in this town, and I want some of 'em."

What if I'd ordered bacon and eggs?

[Laughs] I don't care if it looks fleshy, but if it smells bad, yeah, I am appalled.

Would you have said anything?

Nah.

Would you, in the past?

Only to my lovers. I didn't want to press my lips against somebody who had a lump of flesh passing through theirs recently.

Did they go along with that?

I always broke up with nonvegetarians. It's like if someone smokes cigarettes and you don't, you don't want to taste that in their mouth.

Yeah, the particular combo of cigarettes and beer reminds me of my teenage years.

Any time I have a beer I feel like I'm 13 years old and at a party at someone's house, and we're listening to Boston, and I'm thinking: Why am I here? Nobody likes me! These people are so stupid! I started hanging out with college boys when I was 14, so I really got bored with people my own age. I was precocious, really interested in music. I learned a lot about music from them.

So you weren't a lonely yearner when it came to boyfriends?

I yearned a piece [laughs]. I was of the "I'd rather be alone than be with these boys" mentality. But I would fixate on someone who was unworthy of me. I would never approach them or anything, and then it would turn out that they work in a gas station now.

I connected with a couple of the older guys who went to school in New York and Philadelphia. One of the guys I really liked - much to my parents' and his parents' distress, because he was 21 and I was 15 - went to NYU. He was somebody I could talk to. And hang out with and listen to music. And he could tell me about life outside this town of 3,000 people that I felt completely trapped in.

Did you grow up thinking you were beautiful?

No, no. I had a pixie haircut, I was slightly overweight. Women would come up to me at the public pool and say, "Could you go get my son out of the bathroom?" and I would burst into tears. I had lice when I was 4, and they cut all my hair off.

Does that color how you look at other people?

I definitely notice people for their physical beauty, but that's pretty transparent. If someone isn't behaving beautifully, they don't appear beautiful to me anymore. I always sided with the underdog in school, the oppressed ones, the poor girls or the obese or homely girls, the timid girls. I actually sought out people. I was like Miss Lonely Hearts. For a while I covered the Janis Ian song At Seventeen [the wallflower's anthem]. It was just so...oooh, it really struck a chord.

How do you feel about your looks now?

I'm comfortable now. At 16, I said, "OK, this is what God gave me." I want to be as beautiful as I am. And I became very conscious of health - I became a vegetarian. A lot of the people I started spending time with were aware of alternative medicine and Eastern disciplines like yoga. And then I started doing modeling for drawing classes.

What's it like to pose nude?

It was a good discipline. A lot of time to think. I have a good ability to just take my brain somewhere else. I'm extremely easily startled, so I can get into a frame of mind where I'm just not 100 percent there [laughs]. And when you're modeling, there's just the sound of pencils scratching on paper. It's very peaceful. When 10,000 Maniacs started, we weren't making very much money, and I could make pretty good money modeling. On this tour, several of us really like to draw and paint, and on days off we'll just sit around a big table and draw. I have this arts-and-crafts lady in me that I can't suppress.

You say you're shy. How could you model nude?

I was shy in different ways, like conversationally shy, socially shy. Also, it's a bit anti-social in our culture to take your clothes off in a room full of people and stand totally motionless for an hour and a half. Or to get in front of a crowd of people and improvise lyrics and dance around like a madwoman. That felt more comfortable to me than when record-company executives started taking us to dinner. I would sit like a mute. They called me the idiot savant.

Have you ever shown or sold your art?

No. I tried to do a series of illustrations for the Tigerlily package, but at the last minute I bailed out and said, "Put a picture on it." A picture is just a photograph of my face. My drawings are a little area that is not open to scrutiny. I always feel like they're unformed, undershaped or something.

Do you hang them at home?

Not a single one [laughs]. And I have hundreds of 'em.

How involved are you in making your videos?

I used to get involved. But I would visualize something in my head and it never came out that way. I don't look at videos as high art. I think at best they're forgettable. Music is something that takes me to a private place of visions, and I don't like having anybody interfere with that. I very rarely watch MTV. There's some innovative filmmaking going on, but there's a lot of imagination destruction going on, too.

You grew up poor. Does money change things?

It changes everything. If things hadn't gone my way, what would I be doing today? The most confining thing I can imagine is having someone tell me: "You have to be in this building from this hour to this hour, and you have to do this while you're here. And I'm going to be watching you to make sure you do it." I wouldn't be able to listen to myself. To be a gentlewoman farmer is a fantasy of mine. Return to a time when, as much as I want, I could be ruled by the seasons, ruled by an internal clock based on the rising and setting of the sun. You can't do that unless you have money now. If I didn't have the money, where would I go? Join a commune, go live with the Krishnas? The day that I became a self-supporting artist, I became free.

You say, "I'm an artist" very unselfconsciously.

Well, I make stuff. I make something from nothing. Poet -- that's a new one. I've just come to terms with that one.

How did it feel?

It felt good.

What, musically, do you hope to explore next?

Well, lyrically I've always wanted to write in a more impressionistic style and not be so concerned with the meaning of the songs. Not as literal. Some lyric writing is beautiful for its intrinsic value: The words sound interesting together. I've been keeping track of my dreams since I was a teen-ager. I have notebooks full of dream imagery, and I feel like I'm so much freer in my unconscious mind.

How many notebooks do you have?

All the writing that I've done since I was probably 16 is as tall as I am, if you stack all the journals together.

I bet you always use the same kind.

Always [smiles]. Those marbleized composition books you buy for $1.75 at Wal-Mart. I paste my own graphics on the front, to cover over the big white "My name is/Subject" lines. They're great, because I don't get too attached to making them perfect. I always use the same kind of pen, too, a flowing ink pen.

What kind of graphics?

Oh, all sorts of things. Postcards I collected -- I collected just about everything you can collect when I lived in Jamestown, because there wasn't anything else to do. I have probably 300 "National Geographics". I would pillage the ones that had broken spines, especially the ones from the '30s. There's something really beautiful about the printing technique of "National Geographics" in the '30s. So a lot of them have Spanish women playing guitars or Japanese women pulling squids out of buckets [laughs].

My journals are all filed away in a big box. The early ones are embarrassing now. I've made arrangements with my closest friend that if I die, he's supposed to destroy my 5-foot, 1-inch stack of scribblings before anybody gets to the house -- burn them ritually in a barrel in the backyard.

Do your notebooks menton any recurring dreams?

Tooth dreams. Loose teeth, missing teeth, too many teeth, rotting teeth. I think it has to do with aging and vanity. Also the tactile sensation I remember as a child when I would have a loose tooth: spending months of your childhood wiggling around loose teeth, sticking your tongue in the holes.

Those kinds of memories can be incredibly vivid.

We're a generatlon of people whose childhood memories can be evoked in exact duplication. We all played with the same toys, listened to the same music, watched the same TV shows. We are a franchise. It would be fascinating to interview women of our generation, of all different social strata, about Barbie. I always find that a Barbie conversation opens you, because then you find out who the spoiled rich girls were. [Mock airy voice] "Oh, did you have the Barbie camper?" [Mock bitter voice] "No, I couldn't afford the Barbie camper." If a girl was poor -- my grandma used to hand-make my Barble clothes, and I would be really embarrassed if other people saw that they were crocheted.

Or, what sort of sexual fantasy did you play out with your Barbie and your brother's G.I. Joe? And did you chew on the shoes? I had a plastic-chewing obsession as a kid. I got the best chews out of Barbie pumps.

You say you needed to get away from 10,000 Maniacs to realize your potential, but Tigerlily doesn't feel that different from the music you made with them.

Well, I consciously didn't want to make too big of a departure for the first album. I didn't want to force it. I think there's unlimited possibilities with bass guitar, piano and vocals. The only limiting element is the people who are collaborating, if they are limited in themselves.

And I was doing it with the same group of people for so long. When you're in a band, it's sort of like being in a family. You can't say, "I'd rather that you not be my mother." You have to put up with the inadequacies or whatever you feel is making the family not function properly.

Wait: "limited," "inadequacies"? Sounds like you don't really admire the other Maniacs.

We're just different from each other. It wasn't a relationship full of animosity -- it was more like everyone acknowledged that we'd grown separate ways, but we still worked together. For the last four years, I lived 350 miles away from them. Don't you have friends that have different interests, motivations and passions, and you just grow apart?

But it's not always mutual.

Well, I came to a certain point where I decided I couldn't stay in a situation I was unhappy with just because I didn't want to rock someone's boat. Music is a lot like sex. If you're having sex with someone who doesn't inspire you, then what are you doing it for? A secure situation? Do you have a nice house, a nice car, some beautiful children? Is there something really substantial that you're staying in this relationship for, even though your body's withering [laughs], looking less and less attractive to anyone and to yourself?

Do the band members resent you?

I don't know. I really don't.

You've been castigated for writing "message songs." Why?

Those nasty message songs. Why should pop music be about anything. It's just silly, because all pop music has a message of some sort. The message might be "I have my girl in my car, and I feel really good 'cause the sun's out and we're driving fast." I think it's aesthetic prejudice. That's my new phrase. A lot of people have decided that rock music is about one thing only: sex. And I think that a lot of music came from there, but some of it has evolved to other places.

With the last 10,000 Maniacs record, people said I was turning away from political writing. But I decided maybe I could inspire people to become familiar with what's beautiful about their lives. Even the title Our Time in Eden clobbered people over the head: If we open our eyes and discover what paradise we can have here, then maybe that's what I as an artist can do to make an impact. Rather than pointing to all this injustice all the time. And being referred to as self-righteous, as I've been accused of over the years.

A lot of Tigerlily was about loss or change, confusion, indecision, inability to change. You have to really care about something to be affected by its loss. So I'm also celebrating having loved something, having something to lose. It sounds so Hallmark card-y to say, but it's reality.

So, what's your idea of fun?

Fun? A great meal. Good company. I like being somewhere there's fascinating things to look at. I'm very easily entertained. If you weren't here, I'd be sketching this symbol [lifts a Japanese spice jar from the table] in my notebook for about a half-hour. When that got boring, I'd...I just find a lot of things fascinating that other people wouldn't. Gardening. Working hard with my hands. Cleaning my house. To me, that's recreational. Time to think.

You never hire someone else to clean your house?