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"When I sing, if I'm really involved in it, it's about as close to seeing someone in a state of ecstacy as you can get. For someone to have that kind of understanding of who I am, it's almost like they've seen me in the sibyl state, when I have my eyes closed and I'm completely involved in the music.

"That's how I've seen Van Morrison, and that's the way I think of him, but I know he gets up every morning, has a crap, reads the paper probably, takes the dog for a walk; I know there's that part of his life. But sometimes when I've seen him on stage, it's almost like a shamanistic state, a trance state, when he's really 'on'. It can't be like that every time, but it happens.

"It's not like I worship at the feet of Van Morrison, but I respect and appreciate that he's one of those people who can do that, and maybe that's how people feel about me as a performer."

Natalie Merchant is attempting to explain exactly what it is that makes grown men and women want to chain themselves to her ankles in slavish devotion. Anyone who's ever attended a 10,000 Maniacs concert will be aware of this phenomenon. You can see it in the way the tall, dazed young man at the front gingerly proffers a bunch of flowers after the performance, or in the way the wispy young girls in cardigans mime along to every word. Most of all, you see it in the way the sad tossers near the stage shout the New Man equivalent of "Spit on me Natalie!" whenever she comes into view.

It's not just that she's beautiful, although she assuredly is, with dark skin and deep brown eyes and a smile so warm you almost tingle. And though that voice is unparalleled, one couldn't attribute her appeal to it alone. She mentions a "personal element", and this probably comes nearer the truth. Few performers project such a strong self-image as Natalie Merchant.

Yet she is frequently misrepresented - alleged to be dour, reserved and cranky, or worse, some kind of saintly 'hello trees, hello birds' earthmother, never far from a divining rod or a couple of moon crystals. The unpretentious, intelligent, humorous woman I meet in a hotel room in London is completely at odds with this picture.

She laughs a lot, for a start, not polite, school-girl giggles, but great big dirty laughs. She is frank in conversation without being excessively earnest, and in fact it is only when the subject of her public persona is broached that she frowns a little and lowers her voice.

"A couple of years ago I stopped reading any interviews or reviews, because I became really frustrated with how people were misrepresenting me, and it made me angry sometimes. Especially the British press, trying to project me as a little eccentric. I remember a British journalist came to the States with me, and I was feeling a case of bronchitis coming on - I was subject to chronic bronchitis - and I went to the health-food store and bought fifty dollars worth of herbal remedies. It didn't seem like an extravagance to me to buy vitamin C, Goldenseal, Garlic tablets; it's what I usually do when I'm sick!" she smiles. "But when he wrote in his article, it was like I was some kind of witch, or it was some potion I was gonna take...

"I thought that in Britain, holistic medicine had pretty deep roots, I'd been to homeopaths and osteopaths here, and I'd studied the Alexander technique for a while. I thought, 'England's pretty hip to that', but when I read that article... I dunno, I guess people get what they want to out of reading those articles. That's frustrating - that, and the deterioration of my health, when we tour."

10,000 Maniacs toured so extensively for the In My Tribe album that Natalie was required to spend a week in hospital, and two or three months at home recuperating. Blind Man's Zoo was accompanied by another lengthy tour, and the band decided to take a year off in which to attend to private matters. Assorted Maniacs got married, produced offspring, bought property, and then embarked on a year of writing and pre-production, finally recording their shining new opus Our Time In Eden in a week and a half.

Our Time In Eden is, as all the best publications would put it a splendid return to form. It's an album that at least equals In My Tribe and The Wishing Chair, and most importantly, it's an album that enables the listener to bury the stodgy Blind Man's Zoo in that dusty, seldom-visited region of the mind usually reserved for embarrassing vodka-related experiences. Our Time In Eden leaves behind the Big World Issues of Blind Man's Zoo in favour of something much more introspective and personal.

"It's definitely a more inward than outward record for me, lyrically," agrees Natalie. "But even the music, not just the lyrics, is more atmospheric. It's not really pinned down to an obvious verse-chorus structure.

"While we were writing, even up until recording, we were still debating with the producer and amongst ourselves about what was the chorus and what was the verse. Like in Eden I just sing 'oooh', like," (warbles helpfully) "'oooooooooh...' which used to be the word 'move', and there was all this debate! I thought that was the chorus, and the producer is saying 'you can't have a chorus that's just 'oooh' and I said, 'but why can't you?'. We engaged in a lot of discussion on how to describe the different parts of the songs, especially when there was so much ambiguity. We decided in the end that was a good thing, because when people listen to the songs they're not thinking 'right, that's the second verse, ooh, nice double chorus at the end, that got me very excited…', they're thinking 'I like this song, I like this part, that is the part that makes me feel more excited than the other parts'.

"I think part of the joy of being an untrained pop or folk musician is that you're not bogged down by theory, although I'd love to be able to read and write music, and know the language."

The awkward artist-fan relationship is still another source of frustration for her. "Most people I meet at a party or after a concert, I shake hands and they say, 'I really enjoy your music', and I could hear that a million times and it'd mean the same thing every time. I feel really flattered and it reconfirms what I do for a living, that it has some validity for people's lives, but I still want to take that person aside and go 'let's go out to dinner and talk!'. Sometimes I do, sometimes I'll just grab ten people from the backstage area and go for a walk with them. Because I feel so unfulfilled with that 'l really like your music' stuff. The worst is when they just hand me little ticket stubs and want me to put my name on them. I wanna meet people!" she exclaims with a mock pout, "I don't want to sign my name! I sign my names on cheques and contracts and I want to meet people, not leave inkblots all over the world!"

10,000 Maniacs' new year tour will feature support from The Wallflowers, a band that includes Bob Dylan's son Jacob in its line-up. Now there's someone worth meeting, surely? She shakes her head.

"I'm sure if I met Bob I'd say the things people say to me, like, 'I really respect you as an artist," she sighs. "I don't like to meet people because I'm terrified they'll disappoint me. I'd feel like a teenager meeting Frank Sinatra. And he'd probably go" (adopts surprisingly convincing Dylanesque drawl) "'Heeey, thanks a lot, thanks for bringing my son on tour...', or something like that.

"It'll be great on this tour because we're bringing Amanda Kramer who's playing keyboards, and Mary Ramsay who's playing viola and violin. Some female companionship at last, someone to call at nine o'clock in the morning and go 'Are you ready for adventure? Let's go!'. And The Wallflowers haven't travelled very much so they're very excited about touring. They bring their dogs and their soccer balls with them - they say they're going to teach me to play soccer - and I think this'll be more like the atmosphere I've always wanted on tour."

There is something irresistibly natural about Natalie Merchant. It's what makes 10,000 Maniacs so exhilarating in performance, and it's in the way she speaks, whether recounting childhood memories ("I was more accustomed to playing by myself in the woods, swimming streams, building forts out of twigs, having campfires and foraging for wild berries than I was with spending time with other children my own age. I was more of a little wood nymph than the kind of girl who would go to the YWCA after school and play ping pong,") or dissolving into laughter at the way every journalist asks her whether she plans to have children.

"Is it that obvious that my biological clock is ticking?!" she chuckles. Perhaps it's because you give the impression of being particularly maternal. "I am, and it's very frustrating for people who aren't children," she laughs. "I'm always trying to mother everyone. I just called a friend in the States who's really sick and didn't have anyone to take care of him, and I had to call my office and say 'Now, my friend Peter is very sick, and this is what you have to do…'. Even from here I'm trying to mother people.

"I'm a good aunt and I'm aunt to a lot of people who aren't even biologically connected to me. I adore children, I find them so inspiring, and I love to listen to them talk. I love to ask them absurd questions and listen to their absurd answers. Like, 'what do mermaids eat?', 'clouds, Natalie', wow, great! But I always get around to the fact that it's a huge responsibility and I'm not ready for it. I'd be cheating the child and myself out of everything I could be right now.

"I've made 28 years without getting pregnant, I feel totally in control of my organs, and when I decide to have a baby, I'm looking forward to the amount of unprotected sex I'm gonna get to have! I think that's the greatest part about thinking about having a child too. I don't imagine pregnancy's too wonderful, but I bet getting pregnant is going to be a lot of fun. Because, y'know, to not get pregnant for all these years I've been sexually active - 16 - has taken a lot of the fun out of it."

The subject of pregnancy leads inevitably to the topic of abortion. "I'm glad I haven't ever gotten pregnant because I don't know how I would deal with it. In your country it's pretty much 'get pregnant and have the child', isn't it? There isn't much of an option. I remember a few months ago what was happening to that poor girl who had been raped.

"No woman wants to abort her child. No woman has ever wanted to have an abortion. That's the main question people can't answer even in the States. Why don't people accept that it's a very personal decision? I think that's the main reason I would oppose any anti-abortionists, because I feel it's such an intensely personal decision. To force women to have babies they're not prepared to have..." her voice trails off. "I don't think any woman would use abortion as a form of birth control, and every woman I know who's aborted a child has felt intense misery and self-loathing and anger and depression, and on top of that they don't need to feel guilty, and feel that guilt heaped on top of them by other people.

"If it's made illegal in my country, after it's been legal since 1972, people will seek them out anyway. The strategy that's really getting frightening in the United States is the assault upon medical professionals who will perform abortions - people throwing blood on their houses, harassing their children in school. Their tactics are not very Christian.

"I can see how vehemently opposed they are, and why they are, but why don't they do the same sort of protest when it comes to capital punishment? It seems like all human life is precious except their exceptions. It's a very complicated world and I think the genetic engineering that's going on is making it even more complicated. I remember reading an article just a while ago by a woman who has a Downs Syndrome child, and she said that with the ability to check in the womb whether someone has a Downs syndrome child, people are more often than not aborting. She was claiming that we're talking about the extinction of a species of human being. I never thought of it like that, even though I worked with Downs Syndrome children when I was younger, and I learned so much from them. There are just so many questions," she continues. "They're finding that injecting fetal tissue into the brains of people who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease is working to reduce the effects of the disease, and yet there's all sorts of legislation to make it illegal to use that tissue. I can see both sides of every single one of those arguments, and I feel, I can't make those decisions for other people."

Natalie Merchant wraps a huge green jumper around her compact body and huddles closer to the electric heater.

"I remember when I was younger," she begins, "when the band would have a lull my mother would say, 'Well, why don't you apply down at Super Duper?' Oh, it was like this huge threat" she laughs, "and when my mom would say 'why don't you apply down at Super Duper', which was this huge store near where I lived, I'd immediately call up Dennis Drew, saying 'We gotta tour, my mother wants me to apply at Super Duper!'. I finally went to apply anyway, and they had me take a lie-detector test, and I wouldn't consent because I had in my youth been quite an avid shoplifter. I didn't have any money and I wanted records so I used to steal them. And I thought, what if they ask in the lie detector test if I've ever shoplifted?! I hadn't for a couple of years, but I was in such a panic that they were going to ask me questions about it. And now," she concludes, "to be able to do something I enjoy and not have to take a lie detector test to do it is really great."

Fame must be pretty great too.

"I'm not famous," she laughs. "Famous people walk down the street with sunglasses on, and can't go into restaurants without making reservations under a pseudonym. And they only become famous because people like you write about them.