by: Donna Freydkin
ATLANTA (CNN) -- Natalie Merchant is a woman on a mission.
She's sold 14 million albums, by her own count. She's become a household name, first as frontwoman for the dreamy pop band 10,000 Maniacs and then as a mightily successful solo performer.
Now, Merchant's objective is simply to change the world.
"I feel like the spirit of philanthropy comes from being a good citizen," she tells CNN Interactive, "of trying to be aware and know that there are people in the world much less fortunate than you, (people) who need help."
At the end of a yearlong tour in support of her multi-platinum 1998 album Ophelia, Merchant is putting her money where her mouth is. She's scheduled to cap the global trek with four benefit shows, June 8 through 12, at New York's Neil Simon Theater. Proceeds are to go to Riverkeeper, the Association to Benefit Children, Doctors Without Borders and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The Recording Industry Association of America and l'enfant terrible Marilyn Manson recently have taken pains to insist there's no connection between dark pop music and such violence as the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado. But Merchant takes a different stance. While censorship is wrong, she says, so is the level of violence in the various entertainment media, especially television.
When her tour ends in June, Merchant is to finish a live album, slated for a late fall release. And no, after co-headlining 52 shows with Sarah McLachlan last year, she's not doing the Lilith Fair tour this year. Instead, she's planning to start work on a new album.
In the meantime, her vocals can be heard on the Chieftains' Tears Of Stone album, out since February.
And Merchant's priority now, she says, is her philanthropy -- with a focus on children's rights, human rights and ecological organizations. After greeting friends, kids and a few Tibetan monks backstage, Merchant took some time off to discuss life, liberty and the pursuit of empathy.
Q: Do you feel celebrities have an obligation to reach out to others?
Merchant: "I feel we all have the obligation, myself. I want to live in a more humane, civilized society, and I feel like the only way we're going to achieve that is if we all take it upon ourselves. I just wish we could be a more caring society. I feel like we're social Darwinists who believe that everyone has to make it on their own. But the reality is that we all don't start out on the same footing."
Q: Do you consider music an effective medium for communication and change?
Merchant: "My sister works in an inner-city school in Greenville, South Carolina, and she brought many of her at-risk kids to our show yesterday to the sound-check. It was amazing how these kids opened up with music. Music teaches so much about focus and concentration and group dynamics and appreciation for subtlety and beauty. And that's being taken away from schools."
Q: So do you consider yourself a role model?
Merchant: "I'm in the public eye. I've sold 14 million records -- so 14 million individuals have bought my records and have sat down and intimately listened to them. And if I think about that many people paying attention to me, I'd better say something worthwhile. I do have a personal ideology when it comes to the work that I do and the art that I make. And it's based on just wanting to say something that has substance and to try to move people with music -- and give them an idea of the glimpse I have into what's possible for us."
Q: What do you want to be remembered for?
Merchant: "I just want to be known as a good songwriter who wrote songs that were enduring. I hope my music gives people a glimpse of how empathetic we were and how desirous we were of a better society."
Q: What do you think of all the recent finger-pointing, especially comments that music has to bear some of the responsibility for Littleton?
Merchant: "They should point to the gun manufacturers with the other hand, and if they had three hands, they could reserve one for the legislatures for allowing these weapons to be out there. I do agree that television, especially, is overwrought with violence. I can't watch it most of the time."
"That kind of violence is dangerous to me, to be beamed out via satellite to the rest of the country. Since I don't watch television very much, when I do check in, I'm horrified. But I don't think it took a massacre in a high school in America for me to see that there's too much violence or that children aren't being taught to use their own judgment when they watch television."
Q: Who's responsible for what kids see -- the entertainment industry or parents?
Merchant: "I don't believe in censorship, but I think parents have a really important responsibility to try to interpret that information, or just to filter it -- and not let children see what they're not prepared to see."