by: Roger Catlin (page 11D)

It has been three years since 10,000 Maniacs has had a new album, and in that time lead singer Natalie Merchant has admittedly become a little detached from the rock scene.

"When I listen to the radio, I just listen to National Public Radio," she says over the phone from Burlington, Vt., where the band was playing the third date in an abbreviated tour.

During the break since 1989's Blind Man's Zoo, she has traveled extensively and taken advantage of her new home in Manhattan, where she has become a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attended concerts - few of which were rock shows.

So when she happened on the MTV Music Video Awards program recently, "I couldn't believe what I was seeing," she says. "They were totally ... disgusting!"

"I shouldn't say that, for political reasons," she adds. MTV after all, still has the power to make or break new albums, and the Maniacs were about to release their new album, Our Time in Eden. But she couldn't keep still.

"It was so male-oriented. The only female artist represented was En Vogue, which seemed like a creation by men," Merchant went on.

Thankfully, she says, there's still an audience for the Maniacs in trend-crazy alternative radio. "It's a compliment that the college stations don't consider us too mainstream. But at the same time, I like people to hear our music wherever it's played."

There are rays of hope, as when a band of friends, with whom they shared their first national tour in 1985, became sudden superstars after a long career.

"I was so excited when R.E.M.'s record was so widely accepted," Merchant says. "It was great to go into a 7-Eleven at 1 in the morning and hear Losing My Religion. It's like: There is intelligent life in the world! It's trying to contact me!

The Maniacs' new album may well be their breakthrough. Released late last month, it earned a four-star review in Rolling Stone.

Writing all the songs before entering the studio brought vitality to the recordings, Merchant said.

Playing the new songs before audiences, Merchant says, "was almost like testing them to see if people would respond to them and also excite us about recording them to take them out of the sterile environment of a rehearsal space.

"It was wonderful to see people dancing and listening. That's what we're seeing on this tour, too, because the album hasn't come out yet," she says. "It's almost like being a new band, at the beginning, in our formative years, when we'd play to uninitiated crowds every night. The only difference is now, every third or fourth song is a song people know."

And the Maniacs have amassed a number of favorites over the years, especially from their second album, In My Tribe, a commercial breakthrough in 1987. A lot of old concert standards have to be dropped to make way for the new material, which is tough to do, Merchant says with a sigh, because "I've liked every song we've ever recorded - except Peace Train, which I was opposed to recording in the beginning. That's the only song I don't miss particularly."

Our Time in Eden, both the recording and the tour, is marked by additional musicians for the first time. Traveling with the band are a viola player and an additional keyboardist who also plays acoustic guitar. The lead singer and lyricist is excited about the extra musicians, if only for the company.

The songs on Eden seem immediately less issue-oriented, but Merchant says that has never been her approach anyway.

"The way I've always approached the more serious lyric writing was not through discussing large issues with grandiose language," she says. "If there was a political aspect, it was filtered down to a human level."

Poison in the Well, the surprisingly prophetic song that came out about the time of the Valdez oil spill in Alaska, is, for example, ultimately about a family's response to toxic dumping, she says.

Copyright (c) 1992, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, OH