by: Peter Howell

Natalie Merchant of folk-pop band 10,000 Maniacs thinks so carefully before speaking that it almost seems her words hover in the air before they reach your ears.

In the space of a half-hour interview, she can drop weighty science on topics that range from God to Sinead O'Connor to the L.A. riots, all in the measured tones of a particularly brainy university professor.

Merchant is completely unconcerned about such trifles as self-image. She wears a bulky, unflattering winter coat both for the interview and photo session - the hotel room is cold - and there's little makeup on her porcelain-smooth skin.

With all that serious intent, it comes as a shock when she reveals she doesn't think much about the dream-like, Bible-referenced lyrics she writes for her band, which performs Tuesday at Massey Hall.

"I look at the lyrics as secondary to the music," she says.

"They're something a journalist can write about and a songwriter and lyricist can discuss. It's hard to write about music; it's a lot easier to write about lyrics."

Despite the fact that she's one of the most literate of pop stars - she actually reads the news sections of newspapers, and she listens to radio public affairs programs - Merchant is repelled by society's fascination with quips and comments made by celebrities.

"I think people pay way too much attention to people like me," she says.

"And I'm on the low end of the star spectrum - Madonna is on the other. I feel I should just stay home and gag myself."

She and her fellow band members - guitarist Robert Buck, bassist Steve Gustafson, keyboardist Dennis Drew and drummer Jerome Augustyniak - actually did just that for a year, after the rigors of touring behind their star-making 1989 album, Blind Man's Zoo.

"We took a year off, much needed. I think we probably would have broken up if we hadn't done that. We just toured too much, which is the quickest way to destroy any friendship, when you're in a bus with someone for eight months of the year."

It wasn't like it was in the early, sleeping-on-floors days of the Maniacs, Merchant adds, allowing herself the tiny vanity of expressing alarm about reaching age 29.

"I miss being younger and having extra energy."

The Maniacs, who've been together for 11 years, hail from the tiny community of Jamestown, N.Y., and have risen to the point where "we're bigger than Fleetwood Mac in Portugal."

"It's true," Merchant laughs at the absurdity of the comparison.

"When we play in Portugal we sell a lot of records there and get played on the radio all the time. And they tell us, 'You're bigger than Fleetwood Mac, you're the Fleetwood Mac of Portugal.'

"It's kind of a joke around the band."

With that kind of popularity, the Maniacs would have to be crazy not to put out another album. They returned to the studio to make the recently released Our Time In Eden, a record on which the band tries harder to have fun - they use James Brown's horn players to spice up a few songs - while Merchant makes more of a conscious effort to impart meaning through emotion, avoiding the more direct polemics of Blind Man's Zoo.

New song Tolerance, for example, comments on the L.A. riots in a manner that could be read many different ways:

"There's something seething in the air we're breathing. We learn slash and burn is the method to use. Set a flame, burn it new. We're overpowered...."

"I should have called the song, Intolerance," Merchant says, reflecting on the lyrics.

"There's a lot of people walking around in the United States with T-shirts reading Zero Tolerance. I think they mean zero tolerance to drugs, but it has become like a slogan of the right wing.

"Zero tolerance with people who engage in sex with people of the same sex. Zero tolerance for different beliefs, different races, different tongues.... It's like an epidemic of intolerance now in the United States."

She expresses sympathy for Irish singer Sinead O'Connor, who a couple of days before the interview had been booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in New York. It was fall-out from O'Connor tearing up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.

But Merchant's sympathy - she agrees that the Catholic Church is too male-dominated for its own good - is tempered with regret about the bluntness of O'Connor's public outbursts.

"She's attempting pretty radical reform in a very brief period of time. Tearing up a picture of the Pope is a very complicated gesture - it's too complicated. It's like making a 'sound bite' gesture, and it's just such a complicated issue."

But anything to do with religion causes problems, Merchant finds. She loaded up Our Time In Eden with biblical song titles and lyrics (Noah's Dove, Eden, Jezebel) yet she's dismayed by all the religious questions she's been getting from interviewers.

"I'm going to leave it alone in the future, because I'm getting a lot of questions about it. Do you believe in God? Are you a religious person?

"They're very involved questions, and they take a long time to answer. I could spend an entire evening, or an entire year, talking to you about spiritual matters, organized religion and my concept of God."