Tune in to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to catch Natalie Merchant perform the song "Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience" off her new album, Leave Your Sleep, tonight on NBC. She is in Los Angeles for two sold-out shows on her current US tour. There's an interview with Merchant in MusicOMH, which calls Leave Your Sleep "a phenomenally ambitious and creative project." The St. Petersburg Times calls it "fun, educating and enlightening."
Tune in to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to catch Natalie Merchant perform the song "Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience," the opening track off her recently released Nonesuch debut album, Leave Your Sleep. The show's other guests include Jennifer Lopez and Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford; it all begins tonight at 11:35 PM ET on NBC. For more information, visit nbc.com.
Merchant was in Los Angeles yesterday for a sold-out performance at The Getty Center's Harold Williams Auditorium. She performs another sold-out set in Los Angeles tomorrow night at the Aratani/Japan America Theatre with proceeds going to support free cultural programs at the Los Angeles Central Library. It's a fitting cause for a project so steeped in the power of poetry, as it features the work of more than two dozen poets that Merchant set to music. The concerts are part of a nation-wide tour that began over two nights in New York City last week to mark the release of Leave Your Sleep and includes additional stops in Chicago, Boulder, Cambridge, and Washington, before returning to New York for the PEN World Voices Festival's PEN Cabaret. For further details on these upcoming performances, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
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Next month, the tour heads to Europe, where the Financial Times recently gave the album a perfect five stars, and MusicOMH features an interview with Merchant, in which she discusses the impetus for this project and her years-long effort to bring it to life, culminating in what OMH interviewer Ben Urdang calls "an incredible looking" finished package.
"Leave Your Sleep is a phenomenally ambitious and creative project," Urdang concludes, "through which she has looked to these poets to help her comprehend the growing up of her child and her own development into being a mother. The words of others may have provided her with the answers she needed. Her gift to those with similar questions is to turn those words into song."
You'll find the interview at musicomh.com.
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Detroit Free Press reviewer Martin Bandyke says "hats off to Merchant for putting a truly impressive amount of thought and effort into this elaborate concept album," asserting that "many moments will charm and delight, starting with her magical adaptation of Cummings' 'maggie and milly and molly and may.'" Read more at freep.com.
Florida's St. Petersburg Times says the album "is accessible and fun, educating and enlightening. And the 46-year-old's sexy midrange coo still smolders, one of the most distinctive voices around." Times pop music critic Sean Daly, whose review also appears in the Denver Post, cites Merchant's "clever arrangements" and calls out the track "It Makes a Change" in particular as "sublime." Read more at tampabay.com.
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