Check it out at:

http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/calico.html

(Source: post of “Steve Palmer” at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/natalie-merchant)

BILLBOARD:
WEEK_____POSITION
#1_______ 17
#2_______ 54

Amazon UK:
this week: #76 (39 days in the top 100)

Check the website (http://www.nataliemerchant.com/calendar) for complete venue and ticket information.

The dates follow a series of high profile appearances, including:

PBS Newshour (http://to.pbs.org/cgDUK1)
TED.com (http://bit.ly/ciTGYX)
NPR’s Morning Edition (http://n.pr/d3R3K8)
The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/aAp45h)

TOUR DATES

July 12 Wellmont Theatre Montclair, NJ
July 13 Calvin Theatre Northampton, MA
July 15 Town Hall New York, NY
July 16 Town Hall New York, NY
July 18 Strathmore Bethesda, MD
July 19 Wang Theater Boston, MA
July 20 Merriam Theater Philadelphia, PA
July 22 Chicago Theater Chicago, IL
July 23 The Riverside Milwaukee, WI
July 24 The O’Shaughnessy Minneapolis, MN
July 26 Meijer Gardens Grand Rapids, MI
July 27 Michigan Theater Ann Arbor, MI
August 3 Ellie Caulkins Opera House Denver, CO
August 4 Red Butte Gardens Salt Lake City, UT
August 6 Chateau Ste. Michelle Seattle, WA
August 7 Maryhill Winery Portland, OR
August 9 Mountain Winery Saratoga, CA
August 10 Wells Fargo Center for the Arts Santa Rosa, CA
August 11 The Fox Theater Oakland, CA
August 3 The Orpheum Theatre Los Angeles, CA
August 14 Spreckels Theatre San Diego, CA
August 17 Dodge Theatre Phoenix, AZ
August 19 Winspear Opera House Dallas, TX
August 20 The Paramount Theatre Austin, TX
August 21 Verizon Wireless Theater Houston, TX
August 24 Ruth Eckerd Hall Clearwater, FL
August 25 Broward Center PAC Ft. Lauderdale, FL
August 27 Cobb Energy PAC Atlanta, GA
August 28 Ryman Auditorium Nashville, TN
August 30 Durham PAC Durham, NC
August 31 Ovens Auditorium Charlotte, NC
September 1 Peace Center Greenville, SC

Contributors are welcome, specially for touring info and pictures, if you want to have them shared to the world.

UPCOMING SHOWS

Saturday May 22  London HMV Hammersmith Apollo
Monday May 24  Manchester Lowry
Tuesday May 25  Gateshead Sage
Wednesday May 26  Edinburgh Usher Hall
Friday May 28  Birmingham Symphony Hall
Saturday May 29  Bristol Colston Hall

April 12 The NY Society for Ethical Culture, New York, NY
April 13 The NY Society for Ethical Culture, New York, NY
April 14 Barnes & Noble, Union Square, New York, NY
April 20 Harold Williams Auditorium at The Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA
April 22 The Aratani Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
April 24 Rubloff Auditorium at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
April 25 E-Town at the Boulder Theater, Boulder, CO
April 28 The Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA
April 30 Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.
May 1 PEN World Voices Festival, New York, NY

Please see the website calendar for more details and ticket information (http://www.nataliemerchant.com/calendar).

You may go to the website to listen to additional NEW music from Leave Your Sleep (http://www.nataliemerchant.com/l/leave-your-sleep) and watch a short documentary about Natalie and the new album (http://www.nataliemerchant.com/w/leave-your-sleep/leave-your-sleep-epk).

You might also be interested in listening to this online interview with Granta Magazine (http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Interview-Natalie-Merchant) and watching this performance Natalie gave for the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/music/celticconnections/2010/artists/natalie_merchant/).

Finally, look for Natalie’s performance at TED.com (www.ted.com) to air on April 9th!

A 2010 US nationwide summer tour to be announced soon!

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7074851.ece

Natalie Merchant on her most ambitious project ever
Natalie Merchant sold her house in Hawaii to fund an album of nonsense verse involving 130 musicians and old poems
Motherhood can affect the creative impulse in unpredictable ways. Nobody has been more surprised by the direction in which it has led her than Natalie Merchant, the American singer-songwriter and former leader of 10,000 Maniacs. For the past seven years, since the birth of her only child, Lucia, she has been researching, writing and recording Leave Your Sleep, a 26-track collection of songs based on old poems, lullabies and nonsense verse loosely themed around childhood.

Merchant rightly calls this “the most elaborate project I have ever completed or imagined”. It’s the biggest, most musically ambitious and most expensive album she has made in her 30-year career. With a cast of 130 musicians — ranging from members of the New York Philharmonic to the Irish folk band Lunasa — and a team of 20 arrangers and engineers working out of four studios in Europe and America, this project is way out of time, a personal Everest of the sort the modern music industry can’t or won’t finance any more.

Indeed, Merchant, 46, has paid for it herself, out of savings and the proceeds of the sale of her house in Hawaii. It is licensed to Warner’s Nonesuch label for distribution purposes, but she owns it outright. And, praise be, her boldness and enterprise have been rewarded and, ahead of the record’s release next month, acclaimed.

The campaign to promote Leave Your Sleep began before Christmas. Merchant has previewed tracks at semi-secret gigs and given introductory talks ahead of a full European tour in May. Joe Boyd, the record producer and connoisseur of vintage American music, has hailed it as “a miraculous album, fearlessly staking out new ground…as richly American as Charles Ives or Rodgers and Hammerstein”.

It offers a dizzying tour d’horizon of musical styles, taking in klezmer, chamber orchestral, jazz, blues and folk. Among the featured artists are the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the jazz-funk trio Medeski Martin & Wood and the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York. Yet this was not Merchant’s original plan.

It started out in low-key fashion, as an exercise in upscale childcare; but, like Topsy, it growed.

Having decided to give up performing in 2003, after the release of her last album, The House Carpenter’s Daughter, and “spending 27 years on a tour bus”, Merchant retreated to her 50-acre farmstead in upstate New York — where she now lives for most of the year with her Spanish husband — to become a full-time, hands-on mother. Having grown up herself in a house with no television, she liked the notion of simple, homespun entertainment.

“The idea came from having a child and the renewed interest in language that comes with being responsible for teaching someone English,” she explains. “I had to take this little creature from cooing and grunting and crying to a six-year-old who asks me, ‘Mama, what is beyond outer space?’”

Friends told her that “my voice was the only thing that really calmed their children down”, so she started to adapt a collection of lullabies for Lucia, “because I didn’t have the time to write any lyrics. Melodies came easily to me, three a day, but I’d rather shovel manure than write lyrics”.

As Lucia got older, Merchant began to investigate the Mother Goose rhymes: “The more rhymes I heard, the more songs I wrote.” Then she got hooked on children’s literature of the 19th and early 20th century — “the golden era of the genre” — and, with the participation of Lucia, “who was my muse in this, she knows all the words to every song”, Leave Your Sleep began to take shape.

For Merchant, it was a long and enjoyable learning curve. “I wasn’t a huge fan of poetry before. I didn’t have the patience for it. I didn’t like to hear it recited.” She was excited by the stories behind the poems and the eccentric characters who wrote them — some well known, including Edward Lear, Ogden Nash and ee cummings, many obscure and largely forgotten, such as Nathalia Crane, a 10-year-old prodigy from Brooklyn.

The Victorian author of Topsy-Turvy World, William Brighty Rands, a sometime preacher from Brixton, in south London, with his 20 pseudonyms and two separate households, intrigued her, but a real favourite was Charles E Carryl, a 19th-century stockbroker whose nonsense poem The Walloping Window Blind briefly earned him a reputation as America’s answer to Lewis Carroll. Like many of these gentlemen rhymers, Carryl’s life was blighted by tragedy — disease and family deaths. “I felt a strange kinship for my co-writers, even though they weren’t around and, by my standards, had often lived lives of unimaginable suffering.

Merchant constructed charts for every song, pinned them to the wall of her office, sought permissions from literary estates, hunted down sepia photographs and immersed herself in the smallest details of distant lives. She laughs heartily at the recollection of one of her picture researchers telling her: “Even the Germans don’t have a word for the organisational skills that you have!”

The Peppery Man introduced her to Arthur Macy, a scion of a Nantucket whaling family who moved to Detroit, joined the Union army, was wounded and taken prisoner at Gettysburg, then spent the rest of the war making up rhymes to cheer his peers. He later moved to Boston to work for a bank, while continuing to burble verse in the evenings for the entertainment of friends at his gentlemen’s club. “Why did these gentlemen like to write nonsense so much?” Merchant asks.

Not all of them did, of course. Amid the Calico Pies and TopsyTurvy Worlds, there is real poetic heft on Leave Your Sleep. The ee cummings poem Maggie and Milly and Molly and May appealed to the country-born Merchant’s sense of “children discovering themselves through nature and solitude”. Her big discovery was Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian Catholic whose poem about autumnal destruction, Spring and Fall, is the album’s crowning musical moment. “The first time I read it, it made me cry and I didn’t know why,” she recalls. “It really touched my core.”

When Merchant read a letter from Hopkins to his friend Robert Bridges suggesting that Spring and Fall “‘deserves a plainsong melody’, it felt like he was reaching out to me through time and space. He died [just before he turned] 45. I’ve just turned 46”.

The song, which has a stately orchestral arrangement by Nick Wollage, George Martin’s protégé, is sublimely moving — and not the sort of thing you would expect to appeal to a small child. Wrong. “Lucia sat with me in the car the other day, talking about Spring and Fall and all the people she knew who had passed away.”

Although Leave Your Sleep has been made for adults, it remains a linchpin in Lucia’s upbringing, which Merchant oversees with a fierce, old-fashioned protectiveness — movies, for example, are largely anathema to their household.

“The world they portray is so much scarier now. I wouldn’t take my child to see a Harry Potter film, or Where the Wild Things Are, or any of the Tim Burton movies, such as Alice. You have such a tiny moment in your life now when you can be innocent. That might be a quaint notion, but I really believe in it. My daughter has only seen one movie in a movie theatre. It’s too overwhelming. Until she was five, she was traumatised by Winnie the Pooh bending over and pulling a seam. She’s a sensitive child.”

Just like her mother, perhaps, who has brought a more restrained vocal sensibility to bear on this material than we have heard on her earlier work. Motherhood and poetry seem to have softened Merchant’s declamatory edge. “It’s amazing to sing so quietly and have every word be heard after years of yelling over a backbeat. That was fun, but I always felt that when I tried to sing more forcefully, I became shrill. I like the breathy, throaty quality I can achieve now.”

Despite her claim to be “a bit nervous about presenting the new songs in a stripped-down setting”, you sense that Merchant is more confident than she’s ever been. In fact, she’s on a mission. “I hope I can open people’s minds to the power of poetry. I feel like someone who’s fresh out of rehab who wants everyone to be sober.”

Leave Your Sleep is out on Nonesuch on April 13

About 50 songs were written for the project, 35 were recorded and 26 chosen, all based on poetry from composers old and new, from e e cummings to Mother Goose. The recording features 130 musicians.

With Irish blood on her mother’s side, the 46-year-old insisted she debut the project in Ireland. “Everyone was saying we have to focus on England, but I said, ‘No, we have to go to Ireland!’’, she tells Hot Press.

Read the full interview with Natalie Merchant in the issue of Hot Press published today (Paul Weller cover)

Natalie Merchant, whose Nonesuch debut album, Leave Your Sleep, is due out on April 13 (available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store), will perform songs from the album at the PEN World Voices Festival’s PEN Cabaret at New York City’s (Le) Poisson Rouge on May 1. This year’s PEN Cabaret will also include appearances by Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, Chilean story master Ariel Dorfman, and Georgian writer and performance artist Irakli Kakabadze. The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature takes place April 26 through May 2.

Author Salman Rushdie joined the PEN American Center today to announce the program for the sixth annual festival. Highlights of the festival’s myriad events include: readings by Rushdie and many others; discussions about global warming, war reporting, and more; conversations with writers like Richard Ford and Roddy Doyle; a “translation slam”; a unique one-on-one between Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem; and a lecture by Sherman Alexie examining the roles and responsibilities of writers in the digital age.

Steven L. Isenberg, Executive Director of the PEN American Center says, “This year’s program exemplifies the vibrancy and power of literature, and the convictions, imagination, and skill that capture attention and keep us reading.”

This year PEN celebrates the 50th anniversary of its campaigns on behalf of persecuted writers. For five decades PEN has been instrumental in freeing hundreds of writers imprisoned for their words, and today PEN continues to fight for writers around the globe. To highlight this ongoing work—and as a reminder that the silencing of writers in one country robs the entire world of their voices—there will be an empty chair onstage at each of this year’s Festival programs, dedicated to one of our colleagues currently in prison somewhere in the world.

For a full schedule of Festival events and a complete list of participating authors, visit pen.org/festival. For more upcoming appearances from Natalie Merchant, including a free event at the Barnes & Noble in New York’s Union Square and a European tour, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.

======================

Hello,

Leave Your Sleep CD PRE-ORDER

I’m so pleased and proud to announce the release of my new album Leave Your Sleep on April 13th, 2010 through Nonesuch Records. After working toward this release date for the past six years, I am very excited to share these songs with you.

My website, www.nataliemerchant.com, has been completely redesigned and although it had its launch on January 4th, we have waited until now to notify everyone while the site passed through a testing phase. Please feel free to visit now. You will be able to read more about this new album, listen to a growing number of tracks from it (as well as every other song in my catalogue), and watch a selection of video clips from Leave Your Sleep and the archives.

The Nonesuch Store (www.nonesuch.com/albums/leave-your-sleep) is featuring an exclusive pre-sale which includes a limited-edition print of a photo taken by Mark Seliger, signed by me and available on the first 500 orders only.

Tour dates for May in the UK and Europe are currently posted on the website calendar. A series of April album release events (concerts, presentations and signings) for New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles will be announced very soon.

Take Care,

Natalie Merchant

By Phil Drew
The Record

“I’m upstate New York born and bred,” says folk-rocker Natalie Merchant, a native of Jamestown on the state’s western Southern Tier. “Apart from a little stop in L. A., and I lived in London for awhile, I lived the first two decades of my life in western New York, and the last 20 years in the Hudson Valley.”

She’s understandably reticent to be any more specific than that about her current residence, given her pop celebrity. Suffice it to say home is well within the broadcast footprint of public radio station WAMC and its numerous affiliates. “I’ve been listening to them for 20 years, and I send some cash in every fund drive that I can,” Merchant says. “I just think it’s a wonderful station, an incredible resource for the community.”

Even more valuable than the occasional monetary pledge, Merchant has donated her services as a fundraiser to the public broadcaster. A year ago, she performed a solo concert at WAMC’s performing arts space in Albany, “The Linda” — and next week, she will undertake another benefit for the member-supported station, this time at a larger venue — Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. That she has had so much time to devote to helping out Northeast Public Radio reflects her lifestyle of late.

Though Merchant — formerly lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs (“What’s The Matter Here,” “These Are Days”), who launched a solo career a decade and a half ago — continues to make concert appearances, it has been six years since her last new studio recording, the last being an independent release on her signature label Myth America of a collection of contemporary and traditional folk music, entitled “The House Carpenter’s Daughter.”

In the interim, she took a four-year hiatus to raise a daughter, and a significant chunk of her time was also spent on her passion for poetry — laying the foundation of her latest recording, “Leave Your Sleep” on the prestigious Nonesuch label, due out in April. Her Troy concert comes at a fortuitous moment.

“I don’t expect to be on the cover of Rolling Stone with this record,” she says. “I don’t imagine Rolling Stone readers are the only audience for it.”

“Leave Your Sleep” is a departure both lyrically and musically from Merchant’s earlier work. She decided to set some of the poetry she loves to music. “Since I’ve been raising my daughter and exposing her to language and poetry, I decided to focus on poetry for and about children” — nursery rhymes and nonsense, lullabies and Victorian romantic verse.

She drew from a wide range of poets, Edward Lear and Ogden Nash, e.e. cummings and Christina Rosetti, Robert Louis Stevenson and Gerard Manley Hopkins — and a host of lesser-known writers.

Her musical palette for setting this material drew from folk traditions from Celtic to Chinese, early music to reggae, Cajun to chamber music. Freed of being a lyricist for a change, “I thought of myself as an illustrator, and I wanted to illustrate the poems with music, to bring people into a certain space and time to appreciate it,” she says. And she drew on her own considerable resources and connections in the music business to pull in more than 100 collaborators on the recording, from Wynton Marsalis and his Quartet to members of the New York Philharmonic.

“I had a lot of fun,” says Merchant. “There’s a lot of almost cartoonish elements to it. People have told me it sounds more like a film soundtrack than a pop album. It’s not a pop album, but it has some pop aspects.” And the recording has also drawn considerable interest from an unexpected quarter: “What’s interesting is, I’m getting response from either the poets themselves or the heirs of the poets,” she says.

She’s been invited to speak and perform at places like Hopkins’ old stomping grounds at Britain’s Trinity College on a forthcoming European mini-tour. In April, she will set off on a brief bi-coastal swing taking in the likes of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty Museum in LA; “I’m trying to integrate spaces that have some significance in the literary world,” she says.

She has no intent of launching a major promotional tour. Her Troy concert will feature some of her new material, but will also draw on her extensive catalogue. And she plans not to stray too far from home. “I stayed home for five and a half years and didn’t go anywhere. But my daughter’s old enough to understand what I’m doing when I go out on the road. But she’s still in school, and I have no intention of being away for more than a few weeks at a time.”

Natalie Merchant will perform Saturday at 7:30 p.m. , with opening act Elvis Perkins, at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, in a benefit for WAMC, northeast Public Radio. For information, contact the box office at 273-0038 or online at wwew.troymusichall.org.

Natalie Merchant
JOE BREEN
Whelan’s, Dublin

Natalie Merchant could never be accused of playing it safe. The American singer-songwriters sold-out show at Whelan’s this week walked a tightrope of forgotten lyrics, songs started and stopped and then started again, and some of the dodgiest hand balletics you are likely to see this side of a 1960s psychedelic movie. Yet when she finished her two hours onstage she was still the apple of everyone’s eye – and rightly so.
Merchant possesses one of the great signature voices of rock, folk or whatever genre she applies it to. It can be warm and comforting, empathetic and intelligent, or strident and defiant, and sometimes all of that and more. Her onstage personality is more problematic: a touch of the diva here and there, and a constant search for that rapturous moment. This can lead to bizarre behaviour, as when she halted a song complaining that the overhead air conditioner had put her off. But when it does come together, and this happened more often than not, her voice makes time stand still.

This show was a trailer for future major events, including a concert in a larger Dublin venue and the April release of Leave Your Sleep , Merchant’s first studio album since 2003. For this project, she has dispensed with her own haunting songs in favour of setting to music the work of a number of poets. In other hands, this kind of mixed media has promised more than it delivered, but the simple beauty of her adaptation of the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ee cummings and Robert Graves augurs well for the album.

She was accompanied by two acoustic guitarists, Gabriel Gordon and Erik Della Penna, as well as a cellist. In particular, Della Penna’s spare, elegant playing is a perfect foil for Merchant’s intensity, and the guitarists impressed on well-worn classics such as Carnival, Build Yourself A Levee and Motherland , the title track of her 2001 album, which closed the show.

Throughout, almost like a motif, Merchant asked whether Lúnasa, the Irish traditional band with whom she has recorded, had arrived yet. She waited in vain, but Susan McKeown, a Dublin-born singer who has gained a considerable reputation in the US, did come onstage to perform a stirring duet and add gloss to an interesting night.

All Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs (with Natalie in line-up)

1987.11.20 Late Night with David Letterman – Don’t Talk

1989.06.23 Late Night with David Letterman – Trouble Me
1992.11.19 Late Night with David Letterman – Few And Far Between
1993.06.23 Late Night with David Letterman – Stockton Gala Days
1993.11.04 Late Show with David Letterman – Because The Night with Rob Buck
1994.02.06 Late Show with David Letterman – Everyday is Like Sunday
1995.07.07 Late Show with David Letterman – Carnival
1995.12.19 Late Show with David Letterman – Wonder
1996.05.13 Late Show with David Letterman – Jealousy
1998.05.18 Late Show with David Letterman – Kind & Generous
1998.12.14 Late Show with David Letterman – Life Is Sweet
1998.12.15 Late Show with David Letterman – Way Over Yonder… with Billy Bragg
1999.10.28 Late Show with David Letterman – Carnival
2001.11.12 Late Show with David Letterman – Just Can’t Last
2001.11.13 Late Show with David Letterman – Build A Levee
2004.08.03 Late Show with David Letterman – Sally Ann