Natalie Merchant, Leave Your Sleep, Nonesuch

The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a war on terrorism. You believe that if you are like the blind man who touched the tail of an elephant and said it was clear that the elephant was like a rope. Which is why I love the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, and Natalie Merchant. WTF you say?

The story of the Blind Men and the Elephant is one, like Stone Soup and Edwin Markham's epigram Outwitted, I have carried with me, and tried to apply in my life, from my very early years. It is, in essence, about keeping an open mind and trying to look at the larger picture (it's about more than that, OK, but if you carry a lesson away from it, that would be a good one).

So what does Natalie Merchant have to do with this? Well, among the children's poems she renders in song on Leave Your Sleep is The Blind Men and the Elephant, which as good as it is as a parable is even better rendered in a voice that I find immeasurably more diverse in its employment and interesting than her 10,000 Maniacs Days, especially given the world-jazzy arrangement of it here and the stellar instrumentals in support (true of every song on both disks, both her singing and the vast cast on the axes behind her).

And that's the program, a bunch of classic children's verses many of us heard as kids that Natalie Merchant was reading to her daughter and sometimes, quite naturally in the case of Natalie Merchant, singing, which possessed her somewhere along the way to think the stuff could become something like Leave Your Sleep. The result is, to me, an incredibly impressive and marvelously diverse collection, from Bleezer's Ice-Cream, which could be a Beatle's tune, to The Dancing Bear, which I could see, with only some slight adjustment, Gogol Bordello doing. The Peppery Man sounds like it's right out of the Delta, The Adventures of Isabel right out the bayou and Topsy-turvey-World right out of Kingston. The show don't end there either, mon. Griselda makes me think Janis Joplin working with Barry Gordy. This stuff doesn't need to be sold, it sells itself.

I'd add that while some of it is just fun, a lot of those verses we, people my age anyway, heard as kids had, like The Blind Men and the Elephant, a point worth packing in your kit. Besides the music, you get a mini book with all the poems and bios and pictures of all the poets. Shipped off to the proverbial desert island, I'd take this with me. Instead, I might go to sleep listening to The Land of Nod tonight, and dream sweetly.