Merchant's Key

“Look at me! I’m a wreck!”

Natalie Merchant has every reason to be exhausted. Her first album in seven years, the mammoth 2 CD Leave Your Sleep has taken over five years to complete. Some 50 songs were written for the project and 35 were recorded before the final 26 were chosen, all of based on poetry from composers old and new; from Victorian Brits to contemporary Americans, from world-famous poets to the totally obscure, from Ogden Nash to ee cummings to Mother Goose.
“I found it liberating,” Merchant says, stroking her rather extravagant album art. “They weren’t my intimate thoughts and feelings that I had to reveal to the world. I was able to separate myself from these poems but at the same time identify myself through them. To find a set rhythm that I could respond to and be inspired by was revolutionary for me, revelatory. That was fun, painting the poems. It was like I was creating the sets, doing the make up. I had the costumes, the lighting, everything was theatrical in my mind.”
Leave Your Sleep, Merchant adds, began as a children’s introduction to poetry; “...but that started to change when my daughter started asking me to reveal the secrets of the universe at the age of four,” she laughs. “Why do we live? Why do we die? I realised that I had to address this serious side of childhood too, the loss of innocence and how childhood ends.”
With such a diverse starting point Leave Your Sleep naturally developed through many genres, from Dixieland to Reggae to Chinese folk.
“I chose poems that had very strong central characters, that were highly developed so that I could bring them further to life. Ebenezer Bleezer (of Jack Prelutsky’s ‘Bleezer’s Ice-Cream’) could have been anybody and he could have been anywhere, he was just an ice-cream man. Then I decided New Orleans mid ‘50s Crescent City soul and that’s where Ebenezer’s gonna live now.’
“I felt I had limitless possibilities,” she says of her 130-strong cast of musicians. “I could invite anybody and everybody said yes so that gave me a lot of confidence. Really, anything was possible.”
She’s only played a handful of shows since completing the record, but Merchant says the seven year touring gap won’t make it the least bit daunting for her to step onto the Whelan’s stage shortly after our interview. She explains; “It’s like I just walked out the stage door and walked right back in!”
With Irish blood on her mother’s side, the 46-year-old has more than a little affection for our fair shores; was it her idea to more or less debut the project in Ireland?
“Yeah, I was pushing for it! The Irish love poetry, they love language, they love music, this seemed to be something that could really appeal to them. Everyone was saying we have to focus on England but I said, ‘No, we have to go to Ireland!’’
“I’ve loved Irish and Celtic music since I was in my teens. I was a little bit of an oddball because I would go to the library and borrow the Alan Lomax field recordings of Irish singers,” she laughs, breaking into a few bars of impromptu Sean-nos, “I really loved in particular Dolores Keane when I was growing up.”
After 28 years of writing and recording, Merchant has no qualms about admitting that Leave Your Sleep is her proudest achievement to date; “It’s been a great challenge,” she beams. “I got an honorary doctorate degree last May from a University in New York and at the time I really felt I hadn’t earned it. I realised just in the last couple of weeks that I have.’
“This...” she smiles, stroking her album art again, “this is my thesis.”