Times Online
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