Thursday, May 13, 2010

Leave Your Sleep: CD by Natalie Merchant

Here's a paragraph from Natalie Merchant's Introduction to her new 2 CD set Leave Your Sleep:

"This collection of songs represents parts of a long conversation I've had with my daughter during her first six years of her life.  It documents our word-of-mouth tradition in the poems, stories, and songs that I found to delight and teach her.   I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems off their flat, yellowed pages and brought them to life for her.   I willed into being this parade of witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese princess and a janitor's boy, and so many others.   I tried to show her that speech could be the most delightful toy in her possession and that her mother tongue is rich with musical rhythms and rhymes.   I gave her parables with lessons in human nature and bits of nonsense to challenge the natural order of things and sharpen her wit.   these poems speak of so many things: longing and sadness, joy and beauty, hope and disillusionment.   Grave or absurd, these are the things that make a childhood, that time when we wake up to the great wonders and small terrors of this beautiful-horrible world of ours." 

Buy it!  A very unique work of music!



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