Interview: Natalie Merchant, musician

Published on Friday 16 April 2010 02:09

A FEW weeks ago Natalie Merchant was pondering what the promotional sticker should say on the package of her new album, Leave Your Sleep. She was worried that "the P-word," as she put it, might deter potential listeners.

The P-word? What unseemly term could Merchant, one of pop's most kindly and conscientious voices for nearly three decades, possibly need to hide behind an initial? "Poetry," she says.

The word does not appear on the sticker. Yet poetry is inseparable from Leave Your Sleep, Merchant's first album since 2003. In the 1980s and 1990s, when she was lead singer for 10,000 Maniacs and released solo albums, Merchant wrote her own lyrics – about such topics as utopian communes, faith healing and the daze of materialism – on albums of thoughtful yet somehow million-selling folk-pop. But for Leave Your Sleep, Merchant decided to set other people's poetry to music: poems from Victorian England and Jazz Age America, from EE Cummings and Mother Goose (the album title is also from a Mother Goose rhyme).

Merchant, 46, is sitting at her computer in her neat, sunny home office in the Hudson Valley, New York, where a Tibetan thangka painting of Tara, the goddess of compassion, hangs over a bed. A small keyboard and a microphone sit on a table. Merchant composed most of the album there, using her computer's elementary recording programme, GarageBand.

Bookshelves and containers hold the other makings of Leave Your Sleep. There are proofs of the album package; Merchant chose a book designer, David Pearson, rather than a CD art director. There are poetry books along with biographies, literary criticism and histories, some with tabs attached to pages Merchant might want to revisit. As she talks about the poets, bubbling over with biographical details, she pulls out old editions for show-and-tell.

Poetry isn't the only thing that makes Leave Your Sleep difficult to sum up on a sticker. So does music that leaps across more than a dozen idioms, from Appalachian to orchestral to jazz. Leave Your Sleep is also an album about childhood, but not a children's album. The project had its beginnings in the poems Merchant read to her daughter, Lucia, whose birth in 2003 led to what Merchant has called a "maternity leave" from her pop career.

She didn't stop working. She spent a year archiving and indexing her lyrics, videos and memorabilia for her extensive website, nataliemerchant.com. She wrote and recorded some 20 songs of her own, in versions polished enough for an album, and she wrote music to 50 poems for what started as a lullaby album and grew into Leave Your Sleep.

"I was breastfeeding six hours a day, and I felt this burst of creative energy," she recalls. "In my mind I had all these visions of projects I wanted to do and things I wanted to make, but I couldn't leave my chair, and I had my hands full. So I just put a tape recorder next to the chair where I was nursing, and I would start singing into it, and that's where the first songs came from. I didn't really have time to focus on writing lyrics."

The poems she chose encompass lullaby, elegy, fantasy, nonsense and tall tales, often with plucky heroines like Griselda, a ravenous girl whose story is set to jovial Memphis soul, or Isabel in Ogden Nash's Adventures of Isabel, who overpowers a witch and a giant to a Cajun tune.

"I narrowed the field to poetry that related to motherhood or childhood, because that's the world I was living in," Merchant says. "Some people see that as a valid place of exploration and others just think it's trivial – 'Oh, another female artist has gone off and had a kid and wants to tell us about it.' But it's about being human to me." Luckily, Leave Your Sleep is not the kind of perky singalong, lullaby collection or instructional ditties that are generally classified as a children's album. Its songs touch on sombre topics, like war and death, as well as more whimsical ones. Through the years Merchant has generally stayed serious and thoughtful, but Leave Your Sleep often has a twinkle in its eye. It also has melodies that often sound as natural as folk songs, while the poetry led Merchant far afield musically. "With some of the music I really contradicted the subject matter or the time that the poet wrote," she says. "Other times I tried to align myself with what they had written and who they were." That led, for instance, to having a Chinese traditional ensemble accompany the Chinoiserie of The King of China's Daughter, but also to setting a Victorian English fancy, Topsyturvey-World, to reggae. Other songs dip into bluegrass, klezmer, Baroque, R&B, American Indian chant and Celtic music.

Instead of having one band try to approximate them all, Merchant called on specialists: the Klezmatics; the Irish band Lunasa; Wynton Marsalis; the Fairfield Four gospel singers; the jazz-funk jam band Medeski, Martin & Wood; and members of the New York Philharmonic. The project eventually involved more than 100 musicians and ended up as a 26-song double album (there's also a one-CD version). Andres Levin, who produced the album with Merchant, cheerfully describes it as "this monstrous vision, this bigger-than-life project". The musicians and Merchant performed as a live group in the studio, under tight time constraints. Some had heard the songs in advance; some had not. "We had each set of players and musicians for 24 hours, sometimes less," Levin says. "An Irish band would show up, and we'd have one full day to not only bring to life this idea that was demoed, but also get a take and make a swift decision about whether it's working or not."

In an era of dwindling album sales and budgets to match, the mere existence of Leave Your Sleep is as far-fetched as some of the fantasies Merchant sings. The album would have been an anomaly even in the flush bygone days of the recording business, since the music barely grazes current radio formats. Now it's almost unimaginable for an independent musician to work on that scale.

But during her 17 years on a major label, Elektra, Merchant had multimillion-selling albums – her 1995 Tigerlily is certified as quintuple platinum – and she toured diligently. Her final studio album for Elektra, the 2001 Motherland, sold a relatively disappointing half a million copies, and her experience at the label left her demoralised, she says, by the time her contract expired in 2002. Constant touring had also worn her down. "I didn't intend to make records anymore," she says. "I didn't know what to do anymore."

In 2003, the year she turned 40, Merchant married Daniel de la Calle, a Spanish documentary filmmaker. Shortly before their daughter was born, she started her own label, Myth America, to release The House Carpenter's Daughter, an album of folk songs she had played on a summer tour in 2000. It came from four days of live-in-the-studio sessions she held to document her road-tested band. But she didn't want to run a label; Myth America, she says, now "exists only on paper". As late as 2008, when she re-emerged with a handful of performances, she wasn't sure what she would do with her poetry project.

"There really is not a record label in the world that would have listened to me, listened to those demos and said, 'All right, we'll give you $700,000, Natalie,' " she says with a laugh. "There was a budget, and then we just exceeded it, and there was another budget, and we exceeded it. It ended up just being astronomical." In the end she financed Leave Your Sleep herself and brought the completed songs to Nonesuch Records, where she now has a two-album contract.

Accompanying the album is a hardback 80-page book with photographs and poetry texts, extensively researched and annotated. Merchant lovingly points out details like the "aerodynamic facial hair" of Charles E Carryl – the stockbroker behind two songs, The Sleepy Giant and The Walloping Window Blind – and the carnation in the mouth of a rakish Jack Prelutsky, who was a Greenwich Village folkie in the 1960s and was named the US Children's Poet Laureate of 2006.

"Once I picked the poems, I wanted to know more about these people, because I had never collaborated with dead people or strangers," Merchant says. "I've spent so much time looking at these photographs. Who are you people?"

She's well acquainted with them now: a child prodigy (Nathalia Crane, described in 1925 as "the baby Browning of Brooklyn"); a 19th-century crusader for American Indian rights (Lydia Huntley Sigourney); a preacher and secret bigamist whose two families met at his funeral (William Brighty Rands); and an Englishwoman who turned down being named a dame of the British Empire (Eleanor Farjeon), saying, "I do not want to become different from the milkman." Merchant and researchers tracked down rights to the poems, racking up huge legal fees. Merchant also drew dozens of illustrations of characters in the poems. "For me there's a narrative that flows through it," she says. "The secret agenda of this project – which I will now make public – is that it's supposed to be a multimedia theatre production."

Merchant has other aspirations. The songs she has been writing since 2001 await release in some form. And she found a cloistered convent in the south of Spain where she could stay and write music for liturgical texts. "I wanted to live inside the walls," she says. "It's definitely a way of life that will pass from the earth. I imagine it must be like being in the company of people from another century."

In the meantime she's touring again: shows in the US and Europe, including dates with literary pedigrees, like the PEN World Voices Festival in Greenwich Village and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Those audiences, she can be sure, won't be daunted by the P-word.

&#149 Leave Your Sleep is out this week on Nonesuch. Natalie Merchant plays the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on 5 May.