The smoke, drug and caffeine-free Natalie Merchant isn't humourless - just a little suspicious.
By Stefan Herrick
NATALIE MERCHANT can smell a big, greasy rat, and the smell's coming from the White House. "I'm interested to know," she says suspiciously, "if there's something going on there that we should know about."
The former lead singer with 10,000 Maniacs is convinced Uncle Sam is up to no good over the bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. An Islamic group has allegedly claimed responsibility, but Merchant's not buying it.
"Has that been confirmed?" she asks. "I mean, I've been wondering whether it was an Islamist terrorist group or whether there is a possibility that there's someone in Kenya that's unhappy with America. I'm interested to know if it's all a smokescreen . . . "
Merchant, 34, is not someone you'd normally find filed under "Barrel Of Laughs". She has a reputation for being a bit humourless, a serious-issues woman who will talk your ear off about everything from teenage pregnancy to illiteracy to CIA intervention in Nicaragua.
But today she doesn't dwell on the serious stuff for long, and 10 minutes into the interview I'm wondering whether her reputation as a drudge is all a bit of a beat-up.
Merchant may well be a non-smoking, caffeine-free, strident vegetarian who doesn't dress her humour up in red noses and flashing lights, but it's still there - dry, subtle, easy to miss.
"My friends say I'm the funniest person I know," she says. "The only reason I can think of that I come across as humourless is that when I speak to journalists they want to talk about the content of my songs. I don't write a lot of trivial songs so it makes the conversation a little heavy."
Her new album, Ophelia, is unlikely to change that. Happily divorced from her old band since 1993, Merchant has grown increasingly daring. Musically, Ophelia is lush and complex, yet as radio-friendly as anything the Maniacs did. Lyrically, it has a twist, introducing several female archetypes and developing them through the album (Merchant also made a 20-minute film in which she appears as each archetype).
Conceptual? Not really, she says. "It reminds me of Ziggy Stardust, because every song in Ziggy Stardust wasn't about the life and times of Ziggy Stardust, just a couple of songs and the package, but it was enough to spark your imagination."
A couple of hours after this interview, Merchant is due to go on stage in Boston. She is one of the headliners at Lilith Fair, a travelling festival of women singers. (New Zealand's Bic Runga is also playing Lilith. "I've seen her a couple of times," says Merchant. "She's good.")
Holed up in a Holiday Inn, Merchant is spending quality time with her dog, which has been brought down from her home near Woodstock in upstate New York. She owns a four-bedroom, 19th-century house set in the forest with a swimming pool, and a recording studio in the garage.
"I'm really missing it," she says.
"We've been on the road since June and I sort of feel like I'm in a time capsule, like I've somehow missed summer. I'm especially missing my flowers. I have about half an acre of flowers. My friend calls them my perennial prison because they take up so much time and energy."
Merchant grew up as a working-class Catholic kid in Westfield, New York. Her parents split up when she was seven. During high school, Merchant moved in with a dope-smoking community of hippies. She loved the back-to-nature lifestyle, making puppets and tending the garden.
It was there that she was introduced to the music of Bob Dylan and the ideas of left-wing papers like The Nation and The Progressive, which opened her eyes to the notion "all is not as it seems".
Merchant met the Maniacs in 1981 when she was 17, and before she knew it she and the band were touring with REM. She and REM singer Michael Stipe were an item for a while, and despite some good-natured sniping about his cigarette habit, they remain good friends.
Merchant and the Maniacs were a team for 13 years and six million albums. But by 1991 she was feeling suffocated. "I wanted to take time off, to live and have things to write about and I couldn't really do that when I had five or six other people to consult about every move that I made." She gave two years' notice and left.
It wasn't a very rock'n'roll way to storm out, but then Merchant is one of the most un-rock'n'roll people alive.
"I've never been much of a rock'n'roller, that's true," she says.
"But what exactly is a rock'n'roller anyway? If being self-centred and immature are your definitions of a rock'n'roller, then those are qualities I really don't want to have."
Back to the bombings. Merchant wants to know "what the take on it is outside the United States". She's getting ready for a heavy conspiracy chat here, but pulls herself up short.
"I'm worried that what I want to talk about may cast me as a fuddy dud," she says.
As if, Natalie. As if.