A Conversation with Natalie Merchant
From: National Endowment for the Arts
Series: Art Works Podcast
Length: 24:38
Natalie Merchant served as a judge for the NY State Poetry Out Loud competition in 2009, and she performed at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington DC that same year. She’s also spent six years working on a project that set 19th and 20th century American and British poems about childhood to music. Using the text from poets as disparate as Edward Lear, Mother Goose, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few, Merchant composed the music for 26 songs using the poetry as her lyrics and inspiration. The result was a two-CD set called Leave Your Sleep. I spoke with Natalie Merchant a couple of years back, when she has just finished recording Leave Your Sleep. We had used parts of the interview on the art works blog, but we had never released the whole interview. So, in this week of the POL finals, we reach into the archives to give you Natalie Merchant speaking candidly about poetry and the poems and the music that would become Leave Your Sleep.
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Related Pieces
Piece Description
Natalie Merchant served as a judge for the NY State Poetry Out Loud competition in 2009, and she performed at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington DC that same year. She’s also spent six years working on a project that set 19th and 20th century American and British poems about childhood to music. Using the text from poets as disparate as Edward Lear, Mother Goose, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few, Merchant composed the music for 26 songs using the poetry as her lyrics and inspiration. The result was a two-CD set called Leave Your Sleep. I spoke with Natalie Merchant a couple of years back, when she has just finished recording Leave Your Sleep. We had used parts of the interview on the art works blog, but we had never released the whole interview. So, in this week of the POL finals, we reach into the archives to give you Natalie Merchant speaking candidly about poetry and the poems and the music that would become Leave Your Sleep.
Transcript
Transcript of conversation with Natalie Merchant
Music up
Jo Reed: That was songwriter Natalie Merchant singing "Calico Cat", it’s from her double CD Leave Your Sleep. Welcome to Art Works, the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how art works. I'm your host Josephine Reed. This week poetry is on everyone’s mind, we just saw the national finals for the 2012 Poetry Out Loud Competition. A partnership of the NEA, the Poetry Foundation, and the State Arts Agencies, the Poetry Out Loud competition encourages high school students to to learn about great poetry through memorization, interpretation, and recitation.Out of a field of 365,000 students, Kristen Dupard, a high school senior from Mississippi, won the 2012 Poetry Out Loud competition. Dupard was among nine finalists and 53 state champions who competed in the seventh annual nationa...
Read the full transcript
Musical Works
| Title | Artist | Album | Label | Year | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Man in the Wilderness | Natalie Merchant (text anonymous) | Leave Your Sleep . | Nonesuch Records | 2009 | 00:00 |
| The Land of Nod | Natalie Merchant | Leave Your Sleep. | Nonesuch Records | 2009 | 00:00 |
| Calico Pie | Natalie Merchant (text by Edward Lear) | Leave Your Sleep . | Nonesuch Records | 2009 | 00:00 |
| The King of China's Daughter | Natalie Merchant (text anonymous) | Leave Your Sleep . | Nonesuch Records | 2009 | 00:00 |
| Spring and Fall: To a Young Child | Natalie Merchant (text Gerard Manley Hopkins) | Leave Your Sleep. | Nonesuch Records | 2009 | 00:00 |
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