Natalie Merchant: Leave Your Sleep

Seven years after her last album singer/songwriter Natalie Merchant breaks through with her latest project titled Leave Your Sleep, a two-disk carefully chosen collection of British and American poems set to music. At first the task would appear daunting to even the most prolific of musicians, but it inherently seems that if anyone could pull it off successfully, it would be Merchant.

Written over a period of seven years--and mainly inspired by Merchant's daughter, she is quick to shy away from labeling it as a children's album even though it continuously sounds so. The innocent sensibility does not by any means reflect the sophisticated arrangements, but by the poems themselves, the voices of the poets. Working with titles such as, "The Sleepy Giant," " The Man in the Wilderness," and "The Land of Nod," Merchant matches the simplicity of the words with appropriate tempos and lush orchestrations sometimes heart-wrenching by their beauty. By and by what the album does above all is present the poems with a new sensibility and demonstrates her integrity to be true to her art. Thoroughly researching even the most obscure of poets, Merchant makes no apologies that this album is about the celebration of the power of words and what they can convey. "I thought for some time about aging and making the transition into a mature artist, Merchant says. Indeed she is successful. Merchant manifestly is an artist that gracefully manages a new phase in her life.

Leave Your Sleep is not to be taken lightly. It is a brutally honest portrayal of Love, Motherhood, and Death as if we were to discover those ideas for the first time, and plays to our vulnerabilities ans sense of childhood. The album sparks with touching vignettes, among those "Vain and Careless," "If No One Ever Marries Me," "Equestrian," and "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child."

If there was a criticism to be made, it is seemingly gone are the days of Natalie Merchant break-out artist and coda of 10,000 Maniacs, but in its place an artist that explores new sides to her musicianship and life experience. In any case, Merchant fans are sure to satiate their appetite with the new material and be impressed.