10,000 Maniacs started their own Christian Burial Records, which produced a five-song EP Human Conflict, and an LP, Secrets of the I Ching. With isolated Jamestown as base for their East Coast touring, they literally sold the records from the back of their bus.

In the U.K., influential DJ John Peel played them on his show, after which the band's momentum built quickly. Last year they played gigs throughout Europe at a time when most Americans hadn't even heard their records. For a band supposedly part of an American reawakening, breaking first in Europe seems like a contradiction in terms. The group's sound draws heavily on folk, bluegrass, and country roots at a time when Britain has also experienced a revival of interest in traditional music. Guitarist John Lombardo lists some of his favorite English "folk/punk" bands: the Men They Couldn't Hang, the Boothill Foot-Tappers, the Pogues. He also mentions older artists: Sandy Denny, Country Gazette, and, in particular, Fairport Convention, whose producer, Joe Boyd, also produced the new 10,000 Maniacs LP The Wishing Chair, on Elektra.

Coincidentally, this year Boyd also produced R. E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. Natalie: "We independently thought of him at the same time. He's in demand now. When we were in the studio, the Violent Femmes and the Washington Squares also called him up. Everyone compares us to R.E.M. anyway, and we were afraid people were going to say we followed them into the studio. In fact, we used the same studio. If you look on the record, we also used the same mastering, engineering, even the same tape boy. That's evidence that we are not the same band. The albums sound totally different!"

At 21, Natalie's intellect leaves her bored with the endless categorizations. When the band began playing six years ago in a factory loft in Jamestown, it was not The Next Big Thing that mattered.

Her interest in writing grew spontaneously from her singing. "I don't feel like I've been influenced by other bands. I'm influenced by the people I meet, the things I see. The main thing I looked for when I joined this band was to make enough money to go to school. But I think traveling has been better. I have a lot of free time; you wait four hours for a sound check or you ride eight hours on a bus. I keep a journal on the road, then when I get home I piece things together, try to remember what I've seen. And I write lots of letters. Real interesting people write to the information address that we put on our records. We've had letters from Poland, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany."

Natalie's lyrics, which cover such themes as social hypocrisy, nuclear war, and human rights, display a maturity that belies her age. In the music, they are often hidden by upbeat melodies and danceable, lightly acoustic beats.

"When we play we have the attitude that we're not going to storm around, wear black shrouds, and say,'life's miserable, and we want to kill ourselves.' That's not the way we feel. We feel really privileged to lead the kind of lives that we do. When we perform, it's a celebration. People aren't going to understand what I'm saying anyway, with the way sound systems are and the way that I sing, so I'd prefer that there's a division between our live performance and our recorded one. When it's recorded you have the lyric sheet and the message is there."

Just mention "the new authenticity" around 10,000 Maniacs. Go ahead. I dare you. 10,000 Maniacs are simply playing the music they enjoy and are happy to have found an audience for it. Within rock's stifling climate of premeditated commercialism, here's the big revival: it's an organic approach to listener rapport, like this--you like us, we like you.