Few artists would dare to pull off what did at the on Tuesday night. Merchant, whose last album of new material, “House Carpenter’s Daughter,” came out in 2003, and whose last album of original material, “Motherland,” came out in 2001, is touring in support of “Leave Your Sleep,” an ambitious collection of 26 songs that sets poems from the 19th and 20th centuries to music.
Given that Merchant hasn’t toured in years and she has a vast catalog to draw on, you would have thought she might throw in an older classic or two, such as “Jealousy,” early in her set. Instead, the entirety of her 100-minute set was from the new album. While some fans were clearly put off by her showcasing the new material, most stuck with it, and Merchant rewarded them with a double encore of seven chestnuts spanning her solo career and 10,000 Maniacs days.
Before each song, Merchant flashed a photo or sketch of the poet whose work she had adapted on the screen and gave a short spiel about their life and work. For instance, when talking about Jack Prelutsky, one of the few contemporary poets she adapted, she told of trying to get a photo from the poet as a young man; Prelutsky kept sending her current head shots, until days before the tour he sent her a shot from his beatnik days in Greenwich Village that was perfectly apropos.
The new material also allowed Merchant an opportunity to try on different characters and moods during her dreamlike set. During her performance of Prelutsky’s “Bleezer’s Ice-Cream,” she sung with a winsome grace. On “The Peppery Man,” a poem by Arthur Macy, Merchant displayed a sultry three-octave range, alternating between whispery highs and dark low notes. The audience was so enraptured you could hear Merchant clapping her hands against her thighs to keep time.
On Nathalia Crane’s “The Janitor’s Boy,” Merchant embraced a vaudeville-like sensibility that blended perfectly with the Dixieland-style piano. Her stage presence on E.E. Cummings “Maggie and Milly and Molly and May” was almost prayerful.
Merchant showed a playful side, as when she told a fan in the middle balcony early in her set that they were at the wrong show, commenting they should be flashing the “glow stick” at a Duran Duran show, then belting a line from “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Before doing Edward Lear’s “Calico Pie,” she brought a precocious six-year-old named Sam onstage, who elicited titters from the crowd when Merchant asked him something about babies and he said he didn’t know what pregnant meant. With some prompting from Merchant, Sam was able to read some of the quotes from Lear on the slides behind the stage.
Merchant’s backing band included fiddle, cello, double bass, accordion, and two acoustic guitars. Minus the electric and rock elements, she still jolted the crowd during the encore, starting with “Wonder.” When the audience started shouting requests, she joked they should “Leave it to the pros,” them promptly forgot the lyrics to “Don’t Talk,” which she laughingly completed with some prompting from the crowd.
Merchant’s ethereal voice, one of the most recognizable in rock and pop music, has lost none of its luster. During “River,” her homage to the late River Phoenix, she went from mournful dirge to wailing lament, seeming to rip the emotion from her small frame. Her second encore, “Kind and Generous,” seemed to both send-off and thank you to the audience for listening.
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Candace Horgan is a Denver freelance writer/photographer and regular contributor to Reverb. When not writing and shooting, she plays guitar and violin in Denver band the defCATS.
