Natalie Merchant was a million miles from 10,000 Maniacs and one show away from co-headlining the travelling chickfest that is Lillith Fair when BERNARD ZUEL dropped in.
We're sitting in a sunless courtyard behind the Ulster Performing Arts Theatre, a deco theatre in the tiny town of Kingston, upstate New York. The wind off the hills behind us has picked up and Natalie Merchant pulls the cardigan around herself, wrapping her arms around her chest.
On the edge of the Catskills, Woodstock is a few kilometres away and somewhere "over there" a few kilometres is Merchant's home, a house with views of trees, trees and a few more trees. Kingston, on the other hand, is a depressed, run-down town where the industries have moved on, as have most of its young people. Merchant is rehearsing her band for her American tour that will include co-headlining the hugely successful all-female Lillith Fair tour with Sarah McLachlan. But the first show of the tour will be here in Kingston, a benefit concert for the town's Meals-on-Wheels and school-age childcare services for indigent locals. Merchant always wears her heart on her sleeve.
"Every time I see that Hudson River, I despair," she says. "It looks beautiful but I know it's toxic. That's my river, that's what I see every day." She pauses, turns away with a downcast look, saying: "I sound like the usual bummer I do in interviews."
She needn't worry. Unlike some of the grandstanding musicians who mouth the "we love the environment/save a tree for me" line, Merchant really works for her causes, angry at the money spent on Colombia to fight the "drug war" when the administrator of the local Meals-on-Wheels service can't afford a heater for his office. So why should she sound chipper all the time?
Anway, she does laugh you know. Sure, not often. Not with a huge belly laugh, but there is a sense of humour lurking under there. Check out the video for Kind and Generous with Merchant dressed in high-sheen, circus-girl clothes, like a four-year-old let loose in the dress-up box. It's one indication that Ophelia, her second solo album, is not what you might have expected after the four million-plus selling Tigerlily.
"I don't think anyone's life is totally comic or tragic," she says. "It wasn't, 'I am in a happy place, so I will write a happy album'. I'm in the same place I've always been, wide open to other people's experiences and my own.
"People always ask with a new album, 'What does this album say?' I am trying to articulate what it says, and it's I'm human and human beings fascinate me, and my life fascinates me and I'm telling you about it. I'm telling you about other people's lives. I think I'm a better storyteller than a confessional poet, even though I use first-person pronouns. It's my ability to listen to people when they tell me their stories, and I re-tell their stories.
"I want people to internalise these stories so when they sing the song they're saying, 'you've been so kind to me, I want to thank you'. It's great putting those words in other people's mouths."
Ophelia is out now through Warner Music.