Natalie Merchant left 10,000 Maniacs – the band she had fronted for 12 years – in 1993 and subsequently enjoyed a successful solo career, producing four critically-acclaimed studio albums over the next decade. Then? Well, suffice to say that Leave Your Sleep, her fifth studio record, arrives after a gap of seven years. Understandably so! A double CD of 26 masterfully-produced original tracks, Leave Your Sleep is an extraordinarily ambitious project.
It’s also a radical departure for the songwriter who sets the poetry of other writers to music. It’s a delight to hear Merchant’s lustrous voice wrapped around the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Graves, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, e.e. cummings and Ogden Nash.. Musically, the scope is vast – it’s no wonder Merchant’s been working on Leave Your Sleep for such a long time.
“I really wanted to experiment,” she writes in her sleeve-notes. “So I called on some of the most accomplished musicians in Cajun, blue grass, reggae, chamber and early music, jazz, and R&B, as well as Chinese and Celtic folk.”
She’s as good as her word, with Katell Keinig and Lúnasa rubbing shoulders with The Klezmatics and The Chinese Music Ensemble of New York. With Leave Your Sleep, Merchant has taken the timeless appeal of the nursery rhyme and made it her own. Beguiling.