incoming: natalie merchant

[Nonesuch, April 12]

Natalie Merchant’s first studio album in eight years is by far her most ambitious project to date. Having spent over five years researching poems by or for children, or simply about the childhood experience, Natalie set about composing melodies and music to fit them to, recording around fifty songs over the course of a year with a huge array of collaborators.

Among the 130 musicians who contributed to the album are The Ditty Bops and Katell Keineg, jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood, Grammy-winning klezmer band The Klezmatics, the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York, blues and roots band Hazmat Modine, traditional Irish folk band Lúnasa and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.

A whopping twenty-six tracks made the final cut, originating from poets as obscure as Nathalia Crane and Laurence Alma-Tadema to perennial favourites like Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti and e.e. cummings.

Tracklist:
CD1
01 Adventures Of Isabel [Ogden Nash]
02 Nursery Rhyme Of Innocence & Experience [Charles Causley]
03 Equestrienne [Rachel Field]
04 The Walloping Window Blind [Charles E. Carryl]
05 Calico Pie [Edward Lear]
06 Topsyturvey-World [William Brighty Rands]
07 Bleezer’s Ice Cream [Jack Prelutsky]
08 The Janitor’s Boy [Nathalia Crane]
09 Griselda [Eleanor Farjeon]
10 It Makes A Change [Mervyn Peake]
11 The King Of China’s Daughter [Anon]
12 The Land Of Nod [Robert Louis Stevenson]
13 The Dancing Bear [Albert Bigelow Paine]

CD2
01 Vain & Careless [Robert Graves]
02 Crying, My Little One [Christina Rossetti]
03 The Man In The Wilderness [Mother Goose]
04 maggie and milly and molly and may [e.e. cummings]
05 Sweet & A Lullaby [Anon]
06 I Saw A Ship A-Sailing [Anon]
07 If No One Ever Marries Me [Laurence Alma-Tadema]
08 Autumn Lullaby [Anon]
09 The Sleepy Giant [Charles E. Carryl]
10 The Peppery Man [Arthur Macy]
11 Spring & Fall: to a young child [Gerard Manley Hopkins]
12 The Blind Men & The Elephant [John Godfry Saxe]
13 Indian Names [Lydia Huntley Sigourney]

Natalie Merchant website
Label website

Written by: Alan Pedder

Tags: leave your sleep, natalie merchant

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