Natalie Merchant's Leave Your Sleep encourages listeners to awaken

The former Maniac talks motherhood, meter, and music

By Joanna McNaney
Published: April 16th, 2010 | 10:30am

It’s been seven years since Natalie Merchant released a studio album, but the former lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs and long-time solo artist has hardly been twiddling her thumbs. Merchant has been busy raising a daughter and conceiving one of the most ambitious musical projects in years, Leave Your Sleep (Nonesuch), which features 26 poems set to music.

While Merchant’s 2003 album The House Carpenter’s Daughter (Myth America) demonstrated her seamless ability to transition from more mainstream pop to traditional music, the latest release (a two-disc set) takes her folk-inspired inclinations several steps further.

Leave Your Sleep confidently spans the globe, showcasing a wide variety of musical genres—from Cajun and Dixieland to Celtic and Balkan, among others. “There are instruments on this record I’m sure a lot of people in America have never heard before,” she says. “They're traditions from other countries that are vibrant and rich.”

The album features what Merchant calls “some of the best players in America,” including the Wynton Marsalis Quintet, Lúnasa, the Klezmatics, and members of the New York Philharmonic.

When asked if she would pick her favorite collaboration of the bunch, Merchant confesses, “It’s hard to pick out superlatives, but I’d have to say the string dates we did for ‘Spring and Fall: to a young child’ was the most moving.”

As if collaborating with a myriad of renowned performers in multi-genres wasn’t enough, the lyrics of the album are comprised entirely of poems—some penned by famous writers and some anonymous—all of which Merchant says, “related [to her] like a family portrait.”

As far as Merchant’s actual family portrait is concerned, motherhood played an integral role in forming the new album. She explains, “Part of this project was to write an anthology of poetry through music that would introduce my daughter to pure, unadulterated musical styles from different points in the world.”

When asking what pulled her towards specific poems for the album, she says she was, “drawn to poems that had strong central characters—evoking archetypes for childhood,” including "The Sleepy Giant" and "The Dancing Bear." Appropriately, Merchant says the unifying theme of Leave Your Sleep is childhood.

As far as touring is concerned, she admits, “I’ve been talking to my manager about my threshold for pain—the pain of being away from my daughter. It’s a big commitment to tour. I didn’t do it for seven years because I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.”

Recently, however, she’s been presenting scaled-back performances of the album in Europe and the UK, including at the recent TED2010 conference. Her current line-up includes a couple guitarists and a cellist, but the band will expand this summer to represent the full sound of the new record.

For now, Merchant suggests approaching the album as if it were an anthology from which listeners can “pick and choose what suits [his or her] mood at that moment.” So, prepare to be whisked away from the gadgetry of the modern world and enter into the rich musical landscapes of Leave Your Sleep, knowing that whichever song you happen to choose, you are in the most capable hands.

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Natalie Merchant official site

Nonesuch