Natalie Merchant - Leave Your Sleep

NM is eclectic and an acquired taste for many. I enjoy everything she does IMO she is a gem and a tremendous singer/songwriter.

If you haven't already done so, check out her most recent (2023) album Keep Your Courage - really great music and fantastic sound. I have the record, but it sounds excellent in the streaming realm as well. 

On Leave Your Sleep, I've used the track The Peppery Man as a demo many times; expansive soundstage and eerily "present" sounding vocals.

HUGE Natalie Merchant fan here!  Have everything on vinyl & CD that she has ever done.  Also have had the pleasure of seeing her a couple of times in concert.

Absolutely fabulous!!!

Our time in Eden is one of my favs.

I’m a big 10,000 Maniacs fan, saw them in concert in the early 90s before she left the group. “Leave Your Sleep” is a great album but also check out “The House Carpenter's Daughter” if you like traditional folk music. 

Our Time in Eden is analogous to the Polices Synchronicity: after that apex, there was really no higher each band could have gone. 

I kinda hopped off the train after Motherland, but jumped back on when I heard Butterfly. 

Big 10,000 Maniacs fan, so when she came out with the album/cd "Tigerlilly" I was mesmerized as I sat and listened to her very sorrowful voice on the song RIVER (written for her dear friend River Pheonix). Truly amazing (turn it way up :-)

I'm a big Natalie Merchant fan. I've seen her live a few times and it's always different. I have all her solo albums, and the ones with 10,000 Maniacs. As the first responder above said, she is an acquired taste. Many of her albums are a little dark (Motherland) but worth buying. Once you listen, you will likely fall under her spell. She had a big gap between albums, but I have never been disappointed by any of her material and look forward to the next one.

I remember when she came on Saturday Night Live right after leaving 10KM. Huge reception and celebration. Then she sort of disappeared from the mainstream.

For a long time she was an artist in Residence at the New York City Head Start program and she was kind of out of active music production for that time. You know I've been listening to 10,000 Maniacs since probably 1990 or 91 and I really don't see Natalie merchandise and acquired taste. I mean she's not like a Bjork or a Lori Anderson or something similar. She's pretty mainstream when it comes to composition and delivery. Yes her voice is non-traditional but it's definitely not niche

Although I have not heard Leave Your Sleep, I’ve always liked the sound of her voice going back to The 10,000 Maniacs days.  I enjoyed her solos and harmonizing on the Cowboy Junkies Trinity Revisited CD, and her cover of Because The Night on the Cover Me CD was extremely good.

She'll never equal or surpass Tiger Lilly, which brought massive attention from the Ultra Woke Crowd which dragged her down back to obscurity.

The Tiger Lilly DVD-A is superb both in content and production.

Apparently she now lives in upstate NY with no electricity and washing her clothes in the river. She doesn't like guns and Republicans.

Totally agree about "Tigerlily"!

Mobile Fidelity did a 2LP, 45RPM, Limited Edition, 180 Gram version of this and it's the best I've heard.  Highly recommended.

I own the newly re-released MFSL Tigerlily, it’s an amazing album and well worth the price.

I have the original MFSL/Tigerlily/45RPM. It's a great album for sure. I have "Paradise And Theft" also, which has different versions of some of the songs found on Tigerlily. From memory, the SQ was every bit as good and more open as I recall. May revisit today.

@slaw...it’s called "Paradise Is There" (The New Tigerlily Recordings), I have that also.  It is indeed well done.

The MOFI came out originally in 2007 and was OOP, but they re-released more copies of it just recently.

Thanks for the correction @mofimadness, you are correct 😉🥴

NM is a good example of an artist that regularly has well recorded and produced work. That is often overlooked in the audiophile community, “the quality of the recording makes a huge impact of the overall quality of sound”. That has been my experience while evaluating how well my audio system is sounding.