A Child’s Garden of Verse, Adults Allowed

Apr 20, 2010 Boys With Guitars, CD Reviews, Reviews
Posted by tdouglas woomble

Natalie Merchant
Leave Your Sleep
Nonesuch. 26 Tracks.
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Seven long years have passed since Natalie Merchant last put out a solo record. Hold those cries of “slacker” though, if you please. In concept, execution and, well, sheer volume, her new release, Leave Your Sleep, leaves little doubt as to what the former 10,000 Maniacs frontwoman has been up to all that time.

As she explains in the introduction to the 80-page book that accompanies this 26-song double-CD collection, Merchant, now 46, has been raising a daughter. That alone is enough to preoccupy anybody, but she’s also been schooling her progeny in the imagination-fuelling properties of poetry. It’s from these lessons that she takes her inspiration for Leave Your Sleep, which sets verse by ee cummings, Ogden Nash and many others to music written mostly by Merchant, in a dizzying array of musical styles, and performed by more than 100 guest musicians including Wynton Marsalis and members of the New York Philharmonic. Whew! I’m exhausted just writing that sentence.

Divided into two chapters, “Leave Your Supper” and “Leave Your Sleep,” the project brims with the fanciful tales that enchant, and sometimes terrify, the very young. There are ravenous giants, talking animals, exotic locales, cautionary tales and comforting lullabies. “Supper” whets the appetite with some flavorful rhymes, among them Edward Lear’s “Calico Pie,” fashioned into a jaunty country jig. Jack Prelutsky’s “Bleezer’s Ice-Cream” becomes a New Orleans jazz romp with stellar trumpet accompaniment by Marsalis. Here Merchant reels off the odd flavors on offer at a hilariously well-stocked ice cream parlor. (“Avocado, Brussels sprout, periwinkle, sauerkraut…cotton candy, carrot, custard, cauliflower, cola, mustard.”) The music jibes perfectly with Prelutsky’s playful word-flow and entices listeners to check out more works by the former Children’s Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Disc two continues the expansive musical exploration as Merchant marries Celtic folk to the surreal nautical voyage detailed in “The Walloping Window Blind” (Charles Edward Carryl) and even gives reggae a go on “Topsyturvey World.” This short, whimsical verse by William Brighty Rands imagines how upside-down our lives would be if “a pony rode his master” and “a gentleman was a lady.” The latter example betrays the poem’s 19th-century origins, but as sung by the famously p.c. Merchant, Rands’ final stanza sounds like a friendly call for tolerance: “If any or all of these wonders/Should ever come about/I should not consider them blunders/For I should be Inside-Out!”

Don’t get the wrong idea, however, about the project’s target audience. While the poems evoke childlike wonder, this is no kids’ record. There’s a scholarly sophistication to the enterprise that should hit the sweet spot for the average middle-aged NPR listener. If anything, it may be a bit too studied. The book, consisting mainly of textbook-style biographies of the poets, is informative but a long slog. And of the myriad musical genres Merchant attempts, a few seem more like museum pieces than pop songs. (The Renaissance Fair ballad “Equestrienne” and the klezmer folker “The Dancing Bear” are particularly fusty.) But by and large Leave Your Sleep is an immensely pleasurable experience, chock full of audacious surprises and held together by Merchant’s honeyed vocal tone, which has only grown richer over time. One hopes she doesn’t take seven more years to complete her next project, but if she does, it will surely be worth the wait.