Natalie Merchant

Leave Your Sleep [book with CD]

About this Album

Natalie Merchant has teamed up with award-winning children's book illustrator Barbara McClintock for a new picture book based on Leave Your Sleep, Merchant's double-album of classic children's poetry adapted to music. Frances Foster Books, an imprint of Farrar Straus Giroux and Macmillan Children's Publishing Group will publish this beautiful hard cover, 48-page, full-color book including a CD with 19 songs, available in bookstores and in the Nonesuch Store on November 13, 2012. Watch a video about the piece below and take a look inside the book at nonesuch.com/media.

"When Frances Foster contacted me with the plan to transform this collection of songs into a picture book for children I was intrigued," Merchant writes in the introduction to the book. "But when she suggested that Barbara McClintock be the illustrator, I was thrilled. Her work has delighted and charmed me for many years; it is of the greatest technical quality yet deeply soulful. I've always had a love for picture books; their illustrations, poems and stories create and preserve an enchanted place of innocence we move through as children but can return to as adults. My hope is that this collaborative book of poems, pictures and music will provide many enchanted hours to children eager for beauty and the sort of adventure that happens between the pages of a book and the words of a song."

Leave Your Sleep opens the door to a wondrous world filled with witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and dancing bears, featuring a selection ranging from the beloved (e.e. cummings, Edward Lear, and Jack Prelutsky) to the undiscovered (the young Nathalia Crane). Merchant's musical renderings, selected from her highly praised album, share the stage with Barbara McClintock's richly imagined art to create a memorable reading, looking, and listening experience.