Leave Your Sleep Natalie Merchant

• 1 Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience 05:10
• 2 Equestrienne 04:38
• 3 Calico Pie 02:41
• 4 Bleezer's Ice-Cream 05:17
• 5 It Makes a Change 03:31
• 6 The King of China's Daughter 02:39
• 7 The Dancing Bear 05:37
• 8 The Man in the Wilderness 03:44
• 9 maggie and milly and molly and may 04:08
• 10 If No One Ever Marries Me 02:21
• 11 The Sleepy Giant 03:19
• 12 The Peppery Man 05:05
• 13 The Blind Men and the Elephant 05:30
• 14 Adventures of Isabel 03:24
• 15 The Walloping Window Blind 04:17
• 16 Topsyturvey-World 05:09
• 17 The Janitor's Boy 03:52
• 18 Griselda 05:50
• 19 The Land of Nod 04:06
• 20 Vain and Careless 04:44
• 21 Crying, My Little One 02:27
• 22 Sweet and a Lullaby 03:05
• 23 I Saw a Ship A-Sailing 02:13
• 24 Autumn Lullaby 03:22
• 25 Spring and Fall: To a Young Child 03:06
• 26 Indian Names 05:50
• Total Runtime 01:45:05

Info for Leave Your Sleep

"This album captures so many magical moments, the best times I've ever had as a musician," declares singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant of Leave Your Sleep, her ambitious, two-disc Nonesuch debut. Merchant, celebrated solo artist and the one-time voice of 10,000 Maniacs, took on what could have been a daunting task; she's adapted 19th and 20th century British and American poetry--well-known and obscure work, anonymous rhymes, children's lullabies, all of it timeless material full of direct emotion--and fashioned new songs from these words. Among the poets she chose were Robert Graves, Charles Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The project, six years in the making, has clearly had a liberating effect on Merchant. Never has she sounded so free-spirited, so full of musical adventure, whether backed by small jazzy combos or elegant chamber ensembles. The tracks she's created range from exotic ("The King of China's Daughter") to earthy ("Peppery Man"), soothing ("I Saw A Ship A-Sailing") to swinging ("The Janitor's Boy"), mischievous ("It Makes A Change") to moving ("Spring and Fall"). The string arrangements are particularly stirring, recalling Joshua Rifkin's now-classic work on Judy Collins' Wildflowers.

There's plenty of child-like wonder, counterbalanced with grown-up sophistication. Says Merchant, "It was an exciting, new approach for me to work with rhythm and rhyme schemes created by other writers. The poems inspired vastly different musical settings with their themes that ranged from humorous and absurd to tragic, romantic, and deeply spiritual. Over the course of three years I wrote 40 of these poem-songs and 30 were eventually recorded.

Merchant co-produced Leave Your Sleep with Venezuelan musician-composer Andres Levin, a frequent collaborator of David Byrne and Arto Lindsay, and one of the creators of the eclectic Red Hot charity series. Over the course of a year's worth of exhilarating, musically shape-shifting sessions, they drew upon no less than 130 musicians from the varied worlds of, among other things, Cajun, country, jazz, chamber music, R&B, Celtic, and reggae. The revitalized Merchant explains, "I called on old friends and approached many new musicians I only knew through admiring their work... The sessions were recorded in live ensemble workshop settings that captured pure and authentic sounds played with incredibly fresh and spontaneous energy."

Leave Your Sleep is an inspired return for Merchant, her first studio album in seven years--an effort long awaited by her considerable fan base. It also marks her 25th year as a uniquely successful major-label artist, one whose work has consistently enjoyed equal measures of commercial and critical success. Though she has regularly lent her talents over the preceding years to the many non-profit causes she supports, Merchant actively returned to the concert stage, previewing material from Leave Your Sleep on a series of dates in the UK and continental Europe.

"Throughout her career, Natalie Merchant has thrived on exceeding only her own expectations. Her last album, 2003’s The House Carpenter’s Daughter, rooted in American and British Isles folk traditions, was a stepping stone toward Leave Your Sleep. Where the former's songs were made of originals and covers, the latter marries them in sung poetry and original music from various traditions.

Co-produced by Merchant and Andres Levin, the double-disc Leave Your Sleep contains 26 new songs recorded live in the studio. She used the poems, anonymous nursery rhymes, and lullabies of 19th and 20th century British and American writers as source material and set them to original music. Among the authors included are Ogden Nash, e.e. cummings, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, Edward Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mervyn Peake, Eleanor Farjeon, Nathalia Crane, and Robert Graves. Poetry is but one part of the story, however. Merchant composed music from across the genre spectrum: New Orleans swing on “Bleezer’s Ice Cream” (Jack Prelutsky) and Crane’s “The Janitor’s Boy” are performed by Merchant fronting the Wynton Marsalis Orchestra; the Yiddish folk music of “Dancing Bear” (Albert Bigelow Paine) pairs her with the Klezmatics; Peake’s “It Makes a Change” is performed by Medeski, Martin & Wood with a horn section; “If No One Ever Marries Me” (Laurence Alan-Tameda) is Appalachian backporch music with hammered dulcimer, banjo, upright bass, and guitar. “The Blind Men and the Elephant” (John Godfrey Saxe) is cabaret jazz played by Hazmat Modine with the Fairfield Four and the Ditty Bops on backing vocals. Stevenson’s “Land of Nod” is a gorgeous orchestral piece with a Celtic flavor. Speaking of Celtic, Rosetti’s “Crying, My Little One" is performed by Lunasa backing Merchant. Through it all, of course, is that voice, Merchant’s throaty trademark. It expresses itself emotionally, honestly, and precisely, without resorting to dramatic tropes to get meaning across. The album closes first with Hopkins' contemplative, melancholy “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” with a symphony orchestrated by Merchant and Sean O’Loughlin, and finally with Lydia Huntley Sigourney's haunting “Indian Names” by a string quartet accompanied by Joseph Fire Crow on Native American flutes, drums, rattles, and narrative, with chanting by Jennifer Kreisberg. It sends the set off much where it begins, illustrating poetry's ability to provide its own musical instruction, comfort, poignancy, and sense of wonder to the experience of everyday living. Merchant succeeds in spades; the extensive research and discipline pay off handsomely. Leave Your Sleep is easily her most ambitious work, yet because of that welcoming voice, it provides familiarity enough to gather listeners inside this world of sound." (Thom Jurek, AMG)

Natalie Merchant

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