Natalie Merchant, Ghost Ghost: Setting Poems to Music
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By Rocco Staino -- School Library Journal, 04/19/2010
Natalie Merchant and the Brooklyn indie band Ghost Ghost have each made a musical contribution to National Poetry Month that may also help teachers and librarians expose their students to poets and their poems.
Merchant, who was lead singer in the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs before going solo in 1993, released her latest album “Leave Your Sleep” (Nonesuch, 2010) on April 13th. The 26-track album is based on a collection of songs adapted from poems by Jack Prelutsky, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, e.e. cummings, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and is inspired by Merchant’s desire to expose her young daughter to complex poetry. The singer/songwriter says poetry has a larger and more vivid life when it’s set to music.
“Leave Your Sleep is the most elaborate project I have ever completed or even imagined,” Merchant explains. “Nearly seven years ago I set out to create a piece of work I hoped could capture the universal experience of childhood through poetry and music.” The album spans the musical spectrum—and includes jigs, jazz, and klezmer. In addition to setting Lear’s “Calico Pie” and Prelutsky’s “Bleezer’s Ice Cream” to music, she researched more obscure Victorian and early-20th-century poets who were children themselves or who wrote for children. One includes “Janitor Boy,” written by child prodigy Nathalia Crane in 1923 at the age of 10. The somber poem “Spring and Fall to a Young Child” by the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, explains death to a child, and is also set to music.
Meanwhile, the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay was inspiration for three hipster members of the indie band Ghost Ghost, who used the poet’s life as the theme of their album “No Clothes on Ragged Island.” The album is the result of the RPM Challenge, where musicians are asked to compose and record 10 songs or 35 minutes of music during the 28 days of February. It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days. Or like February Album Writing Month, which encourages artists to write 14 new songs in February.
The band, composed of two English majors from Middlebury College, used events from the poet’s life as inspiration for their 10 songs, all of which were composed on February 21st, one day shy of Millay’s 118th birthday.
In 1923, Millay was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (Harper, 1923), and her public appearance drew thousands of people. Recently, the band was invited to perform their song Prize from the album at the induction of Millay into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. The song was inspired by Millay entering her poem "Renascence" into a poetry contest for The Lyric Year, a literary magazine that resulted in Millay carrying on an epistolary love affair with the editor Ferdinand Earle.
More music and information on both albums may be found at the Natalie Merchant and Ghost Ghost Web sites.
