Leave Your Sleep

Locations
Call Number: Youth-CD Popular Merchant Leave
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch

Compact discs.
Part I. Nursery rhyme of innocence and experience -- Equestrienne -- Calico pie -- Bleezer's ice-cream -- It makes a change -- The king of China's daughter -- The dancing bear -- The man in the wilderness -- Maggie and Milly and Molly and May -- If no one ever marries me -- The sleepy giant -- The peppery man -- The blind men and the elephant -- Part II. Adventures of Isabel -- The walloping window blind -- Topsyturvy-world -- The janitor's boy -- Griselda -- The land of Nod -- Vain and careless -- Crying, my little one -- Sweet and a lullaby -- I saw a ship a-sailing -- Autumn lullaby -- Spring and fall: to a young child -- Indian names.
Performed by Natalie Merchant..
Leave Your Sleep contains 26 new songs recorded live in the studio. Merchant used the poems, anonymous nursery rhymes, and lullabies of 19th and 20th century British and American writers as source material and set them to original music. Among the authors included are Ogden Nash, e.e. cummings, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, Edward Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mervyn Peake, Eleanor Farjeon, Nathalia Crane, and Robert Graves. --Imbd.com.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Recommended submitted by klickitat on August 6, 2012, 7:23pm Although not marketed as a "children's album," Natalie's Merchant's 2010 album Leave Your Sleep was inspired solely by poetry written for children or by children. Merchant, who began the project as a way of documenting her "word-of-mouth tradition [...] to delight and teach" her young daughter, collected a diverse set of poems that span several centuries and cultures.While some subject matter might prove too mature, frightening, or dense* for young children, older elementary through high school students should be able to enjoy the album in its entirety. The album would be well used in schools to teach poetry as a genre. Public libraries are advised to add the album to their World or Folk collections and provide metadata that indicates its relation to children's literature. The album consists of two compact discs (1 hour, 53 minutes) along with a companion hardcover book that provides the complete poems and brief author biographies. (iTunes sells the digital edition with a PDF version of the book.)

*"Spring and Fall: to a Young Child" explains death, "The Sleeping Giant" talks about little boys being eaten whole, and "Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience" concerns the inevitable loss of innocence as we age.