Natlie Merchant's Leave Your Sleep tour brought her to Florida this week. The Sun Sentinel witnessed "a new Natalie Merchant ... burnished with the amber glow of something special," the songs of the new album proved "magical." The Broward New Times calls them "delicate, dreamy songs with multigenerational appeal." Tampa's Creative Loafing says Merchant "made it seem as if the poems had been waiting for her music all along."
Natlie Merchant and her band were in Florida this week, performing songs from her Nonesuch debut album, Leave Your Sleep. They head to the Cobb Energy PAC in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, and then to the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on Saturday. In anticipation of Saturday’s show, The Tennessean writes: “It’s quite an understatement to call Natalie Merchant’s first album in seven years, Leave Your Sleep, a pleasant surprise.”
---
The Sun Sentinel's Ben Crandell was left with several impressions after Wednesday's show at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale. First was of the presence of "a new Natalie Merchant. Always a cerebral and spiritual force in pop music, she's now burnished with the amber glow of something special. A confidence, a contentment, a conversion ... Merchant seems well-pleased with the transition to a new place as an artist and human being."
Crandell describes the music of Leave Your Sleep as "witty and mischievous, sad and lonely dissections of childhood and young adulthood ... both magical and a welcome challenge." Furthermore, there was Merchant's singing. "The voice, which carries one of the most distinctive styles in pop music," says Crandell, "has lost none of its power and versatility."
Read the complete article at sun-sentinel.com.
In advance of that show, Broward New Times writer Lee Zimmerman spoke with Merchant and describes Leave Your Sleep as "an ambitious double album that culls the verses of revered British and American authors and poets ... and incorporates those verses into a series of delicate, dreamy songs with multigenerational appeal." Read the article and interview with Merchant at browardpalmbeach.com.
---
Creative Loafing, reviewing Merchant's Tampa show earlier this week, describes her as "one of pop music’s most original minds." Reviewer David Warner says the music she's written for Leave Your Sleep is "surprisingly rich and varied," and in concert, "she made it seem as if the poems had been waiting for her music all along." Read the review at creativeloafing.com.
---
In advance of this coming Wednesday's tour closer at the Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina, Merchant spoke with the Spartanburg Herald Journal's Tim Kimzey about the new album and about raising her daughter, who inspired the album, in upstate New York, where the two enjoy such things as gardening together, "'planting seeds and watching them grow.'" Kimzey makes a connection between such fertile pastimes and Merchant's having set the poetry of others to her own music. "Merchant has done the same with her latest collection of songs," he writes, "taking the words from writers before her, and putting them back into the ground to blossom once more, while possibly introducing a new audience to them." You can read the article at goupstate.com.
- Log in to post comments
