by: Steve Pond (pages 80-82)

1. SOMETIMES SHE'D RATHER DO THE BUMP THAN TALK POLITICS. Natalie Merchant has a reputation. A reputation as pop music's Spacey Young Woman with a Conscience: part hippie waif, part humorless political firebrand, twirling center stage in her baby-doll thrift-shop dresses as she sings tuneful but occasionally strident songs about child abuse, illiteracy, the environment. Sure, the records she made with her band, 10,000 Maniacs, were strong enough to make the group a favorite on college radio and the alternative charts, but the reputation stuck. Hell, even Maniacs keyboardist Dennis Drew admits it: "Natalie," he says, "has had bouts of self-righteousness in the past." So when the group (which also includes bassist Steven Gustafson, guitarist Rob Buck and drummer Jerome Augustyniak) got a chance to play the MTV Inaugural Ball early this year, everyone figured that Merchant would use the opportunity to speak out on one liberal cause or another. But the woman is close to thirty now, she's been making music professionalism for more than ten years, and she's started to relax and enjoy what happens when a onetime cult band suddenly finds itself in the mainstream. So she went to the Inaugural Ball in a short red dress with bell sleeves, took the stage with longtime friend and big-time rock star Michael Stipe (from R.E.M.), sang a pair of her own songs and a version of the tender but silly Sixties chestnut To Sir With Love, and reveled in the experience.

"When Michael and I were singing," says Mercant, "there was such genuine excitement about the event and affection for each other. I was thinking, God, this is not a school gymnasium in Louisville, Kentucky. Here we are singing on national TV at the President's Inaugural Ball. And I thought, 'What should we do?'"

Merchant duty noted the gravity of the situation, pondered the possibilities and made a decision. "I thought, I know," she says, grinning. "Let's do the bump!" Which, in front of the President's daughter and a nationwide TV audience, is precisely what she did.

2. SHE HANGS OUT WITH BIG STARS. Well, this isn't exactly accurate. Actually Merchant hangs out in the vicinity, of big stars. Take those Inaugural festivities. "I don't go to a lot of star-studded events," she insists, "so that was very unusual to be meeting Robert De Niro and be sitting at the same table with Anjelica Huston. I felt like, How did I get here? And do I belong here? And I kept saying, 'I don't belong here.'"

But she does belong, sort of: After all, she's the vocal and visual centerpiece of a band whose new record, Our Time in Eden, is nearing platinum with the help of singles like These Are Days and Candy Everybody Wants, the latter a sly tune about the way the media pander to the audience's basest instincts. But the songs are more personal and the politics subtler this time around. There's a newfound sense of relaxation in the band, which formed in the early Eighties at a community college in Jamestown, New York, and recorded and toured steadily for the next ten years, before taking a couple of years off prior to making the new album.

During the hiatus, Merchant took piano lessons and volunteered at a Harlem day-care center for homeless kids. But now her group is touring, selling records, playing benefit shows with the likes of Paul McCartney and finding itself in the kinds of places frequented by famous people. Some of those people are even fans: According to the MTV ball's emcee, Dennis Miller, 10,000 Maniacs are Chelsea Clinton's favorite band.

"I think Dennis Miller made that up," says Merchant quickly, adding that she didn't ask Chelsea. "I didn't want to bother her, so I didn't say hello. I mean, she's at the most awkward part of her life. She just wants to hide in her room, okay?" Merchant laughs. "When I was Chelsea's age, I was thinking about how awful it was to be growing breasts. I mean, the last thing I would want to do is be out in front of millions of people on television."

3. SHE APPEARS IN FRONT OF MILUONS OF PEOPLE ON TELEVISION. And not just on MTV, The Tonight Show, Letterman and Saturday Night Live, either. Those shows may have drawn the band's original constituency, but things have changed. "We're the only band that goes from college rock to adult contemporary," says Drew of the broader audience they've reached with the new album. "I don't know how we did it, but we did."

And to keep doing it, their singer has been showing up in odd places - like, for instance, on the stool next to Regis and Kathie Lee. "That was very unusual," she understates. "I'd never seen Regis and Kathie Lee. People would say 'l can't believe you're doing Regis and Kathie Lee,' and I'd say, 'It's just a morning program.' Then they'd say 'You don't know what's going to happen to you when you get on it.'"

They were right, she admits. "From what I understand, that show is a big thing for many Americans. And I've run into a lot of women in supermarkets who recognize me now, who never ever would have before. I think that's so cool."

4. SHE'S TRADED IN HER BABY-DOLL DRESSES FOR DESIGNER OUTFITS. The designer is Christian Francis Roth. She first wore his smartly tailored clothes, designed with her input, at a much-remarked-upon Carnegie Hall show in 1992, though she doesn't understand why people made a big deal out of her new look. Then again, she knows it was a big deal for her to loosen up enough to not only get a designer, but also to allow herself to be fussed over by makeup artists. "I used to say, 'Please make me look like I'm not wearing makeup,'" she says. "And now it's okay. I'm a performer, you can put lipstick on me. I used to be, 'No Stylist!' And now I say, 'Okay, let's see what clothes she has.'"

Which is not to say she's out cruising the boutiques. "I hate shopping," she says with a laugh. "I always feel completely inferior to the women who are selling the clothes. I was with a stylist shopping for clothes for a video once, and the saleswoman was saying, 'Well, I could give you this, but it's the last one we have left, and it's my size. You know I have a twenty-four-inch waist, and I don't think it's going to fit you.' And my friend the stylist said, 'Well, I have a child.' And I said, 'I have a career.'" She breaks up. "'So you can keep your twenty-four-inch waist, and we'll got to another store!'"

5. SHE SAYS SHE'S MISUNDERSTOOD. This gets back to that reputation of hers. Merchant tries not to read most of her press, but she knows what's coming when, say, a journalist shows up and says, "I thought you'd hate me because I'm wearing leather shoes." ("I'm sensible," insists Merchant, a vegetarian who does avoid leather jackets and the like. "Have you ever tried wearing plastic shoes in New York in the winter?")

But the old images die hard, even though her music is more popular and probably better than ever. "People have a very distorted picture of her," says Drew. "The real story of what is happening now is not that she's different from the rest of us, or eccentric. It's that we're all getting along better than we have since the very early days. She just really opened up, and we felt closer to her because of that."

Adds Merchant with a sigh, "I think there's been such a mountain of press trying to reinforce this fabrication of who Natalie Merchant is. They think that I live this almost convent-style life, and that all I do is read Victorian poetry and braid my hair. And the 'hippie waif' thing - I mean, I've never owned a piece of tie-dye, and I got dragged to a Grateful Dead concert once and fell asleep. And then people say, 'You lived in New York City for three years, and you worked in Harlem?' l think, Why should that surprise you? Why should you have any preconceived notion of who I am, anyway?"

Maybe because, in spite of everything, Natalie Merchant has become a rock star - and rock star, even ones who do things on their own terms, send out messages whether or not they're making speeches.

"For the longest time, I didn't think I was sending out any message," she concedes. "I thought of myself as a singer-songwriter, I didn't see my self as a performer. And now I know that I'm not just a singer, I'm a performer. I'm beginning to see myself as someone who needs to project further."