by: Greg Kot (section: Arts page: 8)

NEW YORK - The last time through Chicago, 10,000 Maniacs played at the Riviera, months before the grand old theater underwent a renovation that restored some of its original splendor.

As usual, the Maniacs' singer, Natalie Merchant, was a prim yet somehow enchanting presence that Halloween night in 1990; playful one minute as she distributed shopping bags with eye holes to the audience, mesmerizing the next as she whirled around the stage, caught up in the jazz-like flights of Rob Buck's guitar.

Yet during the encore, she saw fit to apologize to the audience for playing at such "an unsavory club."

Reminded of the remark, Merchant chuckles between sips of a Chinese herbal remedy. She's nursing a sore throat during a break in rehearsals for the band's recent appearance on Saturday Night Live at the NBC studios in midtown Manhattan.

"I kept waiting for a rat to crawl up the pipe in my dressing room," she says. "I like playing in theaters where you don't feel like your feet are going to stick to the floor; that's something we've always worked for.

"Anytime we've gone back to play clubs, which is very rare these days, it's smoky and loud and the stage is really rough, and I trip over nails."

If that doesn't sound like your typical rock 'n' roll attitude, 10,000 Maniacs - and Merchant in particular - never pretended to have one. Their electro-folk music sounds positively rustic next to much of today's more assaultive rock.

"I feel totally outside that," says Merchant, who will perform with the band at the Chicago Theatre on Nov. 29.

"At the same time, I don't feel like what we're doing is revolutionary or all that innovative.

"I feel 10,000 Maniacs is working in a really familiar vocabulary to anyone who knows anything about music. Our chord structures are very familiar, the melodies very familiar, the lyrics thoughtful and clever.

"A lot of other musicians making music now are responding to the barrage of media and technology they're confronted with every day.

"And I'm always trying to get away from that, trying to get to the core of how is this affecting me as a person, and what it's like when it's taken away."

10,000 Maniacs emerged a decade ago out of Jamestown, N.Y., a small industrial town since ravaged by recession. "So many bands come from cities, maybe that's why we're not a traditional rock band," Merchant says.

"One of the first songs I ever wrote was about my grandparents and the failure of the Social Security system." Merchant says while growing up in Westfield, a town of about 5,000 people outside Jamestown, her mother was a fan of symphonic music and her father was a jazz musician.

"There was a lot of jazz and classical records in the house, but I was always leaning toward early music - medieval, Renaissance, pre-Baroque," she says.

"My mother hated it. It's pretty funny when you have to rebel that way, and go backward. Now that I've gotten older, I'm much more interested in things written after the 1500s."

Merchant demonstrates her awareness by ticking off the names of the latest pop trends: "There's 'grunge,' 'industrial,' 'techno-pop,' 'rap,' 'hip-hop.' It's all so urban.

"Personally, there's so much noise I'm exposed to on a daily basis that music to me is something that transcends that. It's an organization of sounds that is pleasing to me on some emotional level. A lot of the music I'm exposed to out of curiosity is really disturbing because it reminds me of the things I'm trying to escape through music."

Which is not to say the Maniacs' music is escapist. There may be a soothing lilt to the melodies, but Merchant's lyrics frequently deal with social issues such as child abuse (What's the Matter Here?) and unwed mothers (Eat for Two), or react angrily to political developments (Hateful Hate, My Mother the War).

"Sometimes a singer just moaning or screaming can be more expressive than any amount of words that I could string together," she says. "Rage described in a scream - I've done that before, years ago; I screamed so much that people would run out of the club.

"I once wrote a song filled with rage called Don't Talk, which if I'm not in that state of mind on stage, it's really hard to do.

"Sometimes reading the newspaper that day can be enough fuel for the evening for me. But if I'm not stimulated to feel anger it's really hard to manufacture. And I couldn't imagine making an entire album of wrathful songs and then having to get up and project that every night. I think that kills people.

"You read about musicians who just die from being caught up in their own pain, the projection of their anger. I don't think I want to do that to myself."

There are bleak moments on Our Time in Eden (Elektra), the Maniacs' latest record, but they are balanced by a hard-won hopefulness.

Merchant's more impressionistic lyrics are better integrated with the arrangements, which for the first time make use of her evocative, idiosyncratic piano playing.

Rather than writing separately from the band, Merchant wrote many of her lyrics in direct response to the music played by guitarist Buck, drummer Jerome Augustyniak, keyboardist Dennis Drew and bassist Steven Gustafson.

"With previous records I'd always have something I wanted to write about and I didn't give a damn what the music was, and I had to live with the contradiction between the music and the lyrics," she says.

"A lot of this record was how I emotionally responded to living in New York, as I have for the last three years, and then going back to Jamestown and going to the country, and the contrast between those two worlds."

Songs such as Stockton Gala Days, How You've Grown and especially Gold Rush Brides evoke a different time, even a different century.

Not for nothing is Merchant occasionally referred to as rock's Emily Dickinson.

"I don't mind being compared to Emily Dickinson rather than certain other female performers," she says with a laugh.

"I'm really fascinated by history because I keep looking to the past to make some sense of the present. I feel like the medium we're working in, rock music, pop music, is very disposable, very concerned with the present.

"Three hundred years ago this city of Manhattan did not exist. Native Americans were living here. It was just a small island full of trees. That's easy to lose sight of standing in the middle of Rockefeller Plaza."

Certainly, the Maniacs' best songs resonate in a way that surpasses the momentariness of most pop. I'm Not the Man, about a Death Row inmate wrongly accused of murder, ends the new album on a haunting note.

"So much of the album is positive, it's like the heavy weight at the end," she says. "It's also to say that no matter how pleasant my life is, and has become over the years - because I feel extremely blessed to be able to do the work I do and live the lifestyle I do, to be an artist - it's important not to escape the fact that so many other people are experiencing pain in their own lives.

"Part of my role as an artist is to act as a voice for people who are voiceless, to be an honest interpreter of my time. Like Goldrush Bride - if books weren't published now of diaries of women who made the trek west, we wouldn't know. Or if Billie Holiday hadn't sung Strange Fruit in the '30s.... It's one of the most powerful pieces of popular music ever written.

"When people say to me I write songs influenced by the '60s, I'd say I'm more influenced by folk music, some of it hundreds of years old, and I'd point to Strange Fruit as one piece of popular music written before the '60s that made an indelible mark on me, because it told the truth."

Although these are grave concerns, her songs are hardly bogged down in the cerebral. "There's no test afterward," Merchant says with a laugh. What makes 10,000 Maniacs' music so alluring is how it conjures up a world of imagination, one where the distance between melancholy and hope, the past and the present, vanishes.