There are multiple levels of parody at work in Village Voice cartoonist Ward Sutton’s “The Band Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb,” an inspired takeoff on last fall’s unlikely comic opus The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. I’m not sure if it’s the “Stoned Agin” T-shirt worn by God, the patchy stubble on Phil Collins’ head, or merely the appearance of the word “Sussudio,” but I found the strip hilarious.

“This piece was a fun chance to parody both Crumb, the underground comix legend, and Genesis, the ’70s-’80s band recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” Sutton wrote in a note to us.

Sutton is also still plying the extremely niche trade of illustrated book reviewer. Check out his Drawn to Read site, or the Barnes & Noble Review where his strips appear, if you don’t think comic art and literature are perpetually estranged cousins.

Source: Village Voice, Drawn to Read

Image courtesy of Ward Sutton.

This is a difficult six minutes, but it's a beautiful piece of documentary work...

From the director:

In 1999 Stevie Lee Fugate took his own life. His death was unexpected and devastating to his family. But rather than give in to despair, Stevie’s father chose to channel his grief into action. Over the past ten years Steve Fugate Sr. has walked almost 25,000 miles, and did it all with a sign over his head saying, simply, "Love Life." His mission is to teach his love for life to every person he meets, so that no other parent will lose a child to suicide.

LOVE LIFE: The Tale of Steve Fugate from Erin Henning on Vimeo.

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Sunday, April 25, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in Washington, D.C., and post them online the following Monday. We’re crazy about these publications, and we’d love it for all of our readers to get to know them better, too. So, every weekday until the conference, we’ll be posting mini-introductions to our complete list of 2010 nominees.

The following eight magazines are our 2010 nominees in the category of arts coverage.

A celebration of handmade objects and the people who create them, American Craft brings to life the work of glassblowers, woodworkers, jewelry makers, and artisans of all stripes. Published by the American Craft Council, it covers its inspiring subjects from workbench to gallery. www.americancraftmag.org

An arts magazine with a decidedly literary bent, The Believer covers books, film, music, and pop culture with barely contained intellectual glee. Part of the McSweeney’s empire founded by author Dave Eggers, it constantly finds new ways to showcase the creative impulse. www.believermag.com

The arts, culture, and fashion of the Middle Eastern region are fertile ground for the writers and artists of Bidoun, who traverse their territory with wit and irreverence. Whether they’re living in the region or are part of the diaspora, their dispatches are crucial intelligence. www.bidoun.com

Each issue of Creative Review is eye-popping, showing some of the best work from worldwide advertising, design, and visual culture. Its articles add depth to this dazzle, profiling scenes, people, and creative work that you wouldn’t hear about any other way. www.creativereview.co.uk

Esopus is a visual feast, showcasing the work of contemporary artists alongside critical writing, fiction, poetry, interviews, and even a themed CD. The very definition of “labor of love,” it comes out only twice a year, but it’s always worth the wait. www.esopusmag.com

Forget box-office battles and vapid celebrity chatter: Film Comment focuses its lens on cinema’s substance. Drawing on a deep, experienced pool of critics and feature writers, the magazine gets off the red carpet to explore the wonderfully diverse film omniverse. www.filmlinc.com/fcm/fcm.htm

Published in Ireland but covering the entire world of music, The Journal of Music uses actual musicians as writers. The resulting coverage, which runs the gamut from folk to classical to pop, is arresting reading for both casual fans and aficionados. www.journalofmusic.com

Poets & Writers is targeted at wordsmiths, yet appeals to anyone who loves to get lost in a bookstore. And if you’re yet another hopeful unpublished author—come on, admit it—you’ll find good advice on finding an agent and a deal. www.pw.org

Kind of makes you want to go out and paint a wall... In Rome...

(Thanks, Wooster Collective.)

Alex Masket is a severely autistic 23-year-old who lives with his family in the suburbs of New York City. Alex is functionally nonverbal, but he has been fortunate enough to have a family willing to do everything in their power to help him find his voice in other ways. As crucial as this support has proven to be, it is ultimately Alex’s extraordinary artistic gifts—and his equally extraordinary force of will in wielding them—that have led to the works built out of everything from Legos to duct tape. In our May-June 2010 issue, we feature an interview with Masket's parents, reprinted from the art journal Esopus. Here's a closer look at some of his work:

Start digging into where films nominated for “best cinematography” were shot, and a bit of a theme begins to emerge: Alberta, Alberta, Alberta. This is no coincidence, Kim Gray writes in our May-June issue: The province possesses spectacular natural light—capable of transforming all it touches into a visual feast, and inspiring filmmakers, photographers, artists, architects, and residents alike.

As far as films go, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) won the province one of its first Academy Awards for cinematography. Many awards and nominations would follow: Unforgiven (1992), Legends of the Fall (1994), Brokeback Mountain (2005), The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), to name a few. Check out the following trailers and clips to get a peek at what Gray calls “the marvel of Southern Alberta light.”

The film documentary William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe is about a remarkable man’s life and career: Kunstler, a defense lawyer, fought on the legal front lines of key civil rights and antiwar court cases in the ’60s and ’70s. The movie, directed by his daughters Emily and Sarah Kunstler, chronicles his unlikely trajectory from low-key family man to wild-haired radical, representing the Chicago Seven after the foment of the 1968 Democratic Convention. It also follows him as he takes on other less noble causes including that of avowed terrorist  El-Sayyid Nosair, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the murder of Israeli politician Rabbi Meir Kahane. (See a full article about the film in the May-June Utne Reader.)

The movie manages to be several things at once. It is an ode to a father’s life, yet it dares to question his motives. It is a documentary, but also a biography of a firebrand lawyer and a family memoir. And it traces several pivotal episodes in U.S. social history without feeling like a lecture.

I spoke with Emily Kunstler in March in a phone conversation that Sarah Kunstler later joined—Sarah having been delayed by a court appearance as, yes, a defense attorney. They discussed their unusual childhood, their deeply ingrained sense of social justice, and their cinematic portrait of their dad:

Your father was at the epicenter of some of the biggest cultural moments in modern U.S. history. When did you begin to get a sense of his importance and fame?

“Well, I don’t think we understood it in a larger context until much later, but when we were kids we certainly had an understanding of how he felt about himself. You know, we remember going around the corner with him to buy all of the major newspapers so we could bring them home to see if he was in them. (laughs) Or turning on the family television in the kitchen to watch him on the local news. So we knew something was different—but you know, when you’re a kid, it’s your only experience. You have no basis for comparison. It just sort of felt normal.

“Also, when he would walk us to school in the morning, you know, which was five blocks from our home, it would take us half an hour to get there because every 10 feet someone would stop him. As kids it was more of a frustration.” (laughs)

You say in the film that “when he spoke about his past, he was like a hero from legend.” Did you and your sister also believe for a time that he was a hero? And when did doubt begin to creep in?

“Well, the stories of the work that he did during the civil rights movement or the antiwar movement were our bedtime stories. And I think like most young children, you have this sense that your parents are all good and can do no harm. And it’s this real moment, I think, in adolescence when you realize that your parent is a human being.

“But I think that experience was a little bit exacerbated for Sarah and I because our father lived so much in the public eye. It wasn’t just something that was happening privately in our home. You know, when he started taking cases that got a lot of negative public attention was when Sarah and I started to question the choices that he was making, because of the impact those choices were having on our family. I mean, particularly the cases that made our lives the most difficult were the Central Park jogger case, which was a big case here in New York and in part nationally. It was when race relations were really polarized and a group of five adolescents, black kids, were accused of brutally raping a white woman in Central Park. And it played on a lot of the fears and cultural stereotypes of that particular time. So our father ended up defending one of these young men, and it just—no one really understood why he made that choice. No one was really supporting him during that period. But for him, he really saw that case as a throwback to the rape trials in the South; he saw the Central Park Five as the new Scottsboro boys.

“It turns out in the end that his position was vindicated—they were all exonerated, actually, after my father passed away, sadly. But I think for him it wasn’t really about innocence, it was about standing up for the unpopular, and protecting the rights of someone who had been vilified in the media and convicted before they ever saw the inside of a courtroom. So that trial was difficult for us, and maybe even more so than that was his defense of El Sayyid Nosair, because we had protesters in front of our house for over four months. Coming and going as a kid, with that experience, was pretty heavy. You know, we had our windows shot out, my father received bullets in the mail, he had death threats regularly. We couldn’t walk to school by ourselves; we were escorted.

“The most important thing for a kid, I think, for a young adolescent, was to feel that they are safe in their own home. And we certainly didn’t have that during that period.”

At that point in your lives, did you ever wish your father had a low-key, uncontroversial profession?

“I think definitely. I don’t know how specifically we thought about it. We were definitely raised with a belief in right to counsel. We thought that everybody deserved a lawyer. We really felt that. I mean, we believed in innocent until proven guilty. We had an unusual education from a young age about the inner workings of the criminal justice system. But we didn’t know why our dad had to be that lawyer—especially when it made our family so uncomfortable. And he was an established attorney—I’m sure he could have found something else quite easily. (laughs) So yeah, it was less like a political difference that we had with him at that young age. It was more just not understanding why he would make choices that would put the family at risk.”

You say in the film that your father became “radicalized” by the Chicago Seven trial. Why did this event radicalize him?

“It was one of the first trials where politics were really brought into the courtroom. I think before that trial it was really the lawyer who would dictate how the trial would run, would impose their theory of the case. This trial flipped it on its head—our father teamed up with his clients, and they really directed the show, and he allowed them to put their politics on trial. So it was a revolutionary period in general, but it was also this sort of revolutionary concept in the courtroom, to try a case this way.

“He was in his 50s, and he completely embraced the hippie movement, the antiwar movement, and I think probably began to feel like himself for the first time during that period.”

Was it the way that trial played out, with Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in the courtroom, that radicalized him?

“Oh, yeah. It was that—it was the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale, it was utterly shocking to him. More than that, it was the assassination of Fred Hampton. I think that he really—he had seen the government participate in great harm in the past, but I think that moment really brought it home for him, to see that the government would really stop at nothing. I mean, he saw how they were trying to do it inside a courtroom, but to have that happen in the middle of the trial, in Chicago, was pretty heavy.”

“I mean, there’s the clip in our film of our father saying, ‘I killed him. I killed him. All of the white people of America killed Fred Hampton, because we stood by, racists all of us.’ I think he really felt that. He really felt like we’re all responsible for the world that we live in, and that if we’re not working to improve the situation we are complicit in it.”

When Sarah confronted your father on local television, what was the pretext of that interview? Did he know that she was going to confront him?

“You know, I don’t remember exactly how it happened. I think they asked him to be on a television show, and he just brought us with him to the show. And they thought it sounded like a fun idea. (laughs) So I think it was kind of casual the way that it all came together. I certainly didn’t know that she would confront him. But it’s not as if he didn’t encourage us to question him, and to question the world we lived in. We did all the time. He loved when we would show any interest in the work that he was doing, whether it was positive or negative. It wasn’t as if that was an unusual moment, but it certainly was unusual in the sense that it was broadcast to millions. (laughs) I think she was referring specifically to the Nosair case when she asked him that question, and you know, probably what she wanted to say was a lot stronger, but that was what she was able to ask. I believe she asked if he ever wanted to get out of a case once he committed himself to it.

“She also in that clip says that she’ll never become a lawyer.”

I was going to bring that up. So what happened?

“Well, I think we all say a lot of things when we’re 15 that maybe don’t remain true into adulthood. But we were raised with a sense of the importance of having a deep commitment to social justice, and the value of that, and the value of that work. We didn’t know how that would manifest in our own lives, but we knew that whatever paths we took, that would be our focus.

“So Sarah saw that a great way to be an advocate is within the legal system, and we also saw that a great way to be an advocate is through making movies. Sarah and I for the past 10 years have been making documentaries, short films, about injustice in the American criminal justice system.

“So, essentially, our father taught us how to use the media—our father taught us the importance of being a good storyteller, whether it’s with a video camera or inside a courtroom.”

Had Sarah previously confronted your father in private with the sort of questions that she raised in the televised interview?

“I think we would more ask questions about the cases he was taking and didn’t necessarily—I can’t remember a time. But I didn’t remember that happening until I saw the footage. So it’s hard to say. But we always gave him a hard time. I do remember that. I remember more a general theme than the specific moments.”

There are some moments when interview subjects are clearly a bit unnerved a bit that they are speaking to the daughters of someone they’re criticizing. Did you face difficulty in getting some of these subjects on camera and convincing them that you were making an even-handed film?

“Everyone who participated in the film did so enthusiastically, even if they had reservations. I mean, there were people who refused to participate, period, and that was more of a difficulty. We realized early on that we couldn’t disguise who we were. We had this idea that we wanted to make this film with this sort of journalistic balance, you know, have this even split between the positive and the negative and have the audience decide for themselves. And then people started saying no to us. I mean, being our father’s daughters was sort of a blessing and a curse in this process, because it gave us tremendous access to a lot of people who wouldn’t have spoken to us otherwise, but it also closed some doors. So we thought, well, maybe we can send in our producer, who can do the interview, because people give interviews to other people, just not us. (laughs) But then we realized that it was important that people were speaking to us, that this was our journey and the most important criticisms and questions were going to come from us.”

Did you learn new things about your father, or reach new understandings about him, in the process of making the film?

“Definitely. Well, first of all we got to build an adult relationship with him, which is something that we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do otherwise. And I don’t think we’ll ever agree with every choice he made, but we definitely have a greater understanding of his motivation. I think toward the end of his life, when he was taking the cases that we were most critical of, he’d gotten to a point in his career where he really had absolutely no trust in the government and in the court system—at all. I mean, he had seen his friends assassinated, he had suffered many defeats. And some victories, but you know, he felt that basically the system just chewed people up and spit them out, and that the role for him to play was to stand up next to people who were either brutalized or ignored and make people pay attention to them in a different way, in the hopes that their rights would be protected.

“He really saw his unpopular clients as sort of canaries in the coal mine. He thought that rights were most likely to be violated when people were vilified, and that where their rights were violated everybody else’s rights could be violated, and that it would set a legal precedent for that to happen and continue to happen.”

Even when he took on questionable clients, it seems that it was still mainly about principle, not money. Is that your perception?

“Oh, it was never about money. Maybe it was about fame. A combination of fame and principle, I think. There were some cases that he took for money. When we were interviewing Jimmy Breslin—Jimmy Breslin’s been around in New York, covering a lot of our father’s work for years, so we asked him about the mafia cases, because Sarah and I were a little obsessed with those for a while. And he got really frustrated with us, because we were so interested in these mafia cases, but that’s what bought us sneakers, that’s what put food on the table—Larry Davis wasn’t paying. (laughs) He was a provider, and he did have to take some cases that paid. But none of his political work and most of his criminal work did not pay. Our family was primarily supported by his speaking engagements.”

There are a lot of  important historical moments in your film—the Freedom Riders, the Chicago conspiracy trial, Attica, Wounded Knee—that I’m afraid have fallen off the radar for a lot of Americans, or never made it onto their radar in the first place. Do you have some hope that your film provides a window into this history?

“We really hope so. It’s one of the reasons that we’re doing such a big educational push with the film, because the stories that you mentioned are not typically taught in public high schools across the country. And if they are mentioned, they spend like an hour here or a day there and it’s not really part of the history. So we’ve been working to put together together some educational companion material and are really trying to get the film in any way we can in the hands of high schools, colleges, and law schools across the country.”

Frankly, it educated me a bit to be reminded of these episodes in history.

“It helps to see it all together and to draw connections between those movements. At the very least our father’s life is a great storytelling vehicle for these major moments in American social history of the last 60 years. He moved in and out of these worlds.”

What do you think your dad’s reaction would be to your film?

“I mean, he was his own favorite subject, so I think in that sense he would be happy about any film that focused on him. But I think that he would love that we made the choice to commit four years of our lives to getting to know him better and understanding him—and in a sense sort of bringing him back to life, and bringing his story to generations of people that have never heard of him. So I think he’d be thrilled. I think he would have loved to be at all of our Q&As across the country.

“His favorite thing was talking to young people, and inspiring young people, and really motivating people to make choices in their own lives, to take personal risks to stand up for what they believe in. So hopefully this movie will continue to do that for him.”

You’re doing Q&As across the country? 

“Yeah. We’ve been in over 35 film festivals; we opened theatrically in over 25 cities. So in the last year there’s been a lot of travel with the film."

What were some of the common themes at the Q&A sessions?

“It brought some of the most interesting people out of the woodwork. We’ve had former FBI agents come to screenings. We’ve had clients of our father’s, long-lost relatives—it’s been really a mix. It’s interesting, because our father, although he toward the end of his life was deeply suspicious of the government, he always had faith in the jury system. He always had faith in people, in humanity, and he really felt if you exposed people to a truth that they could change their mind, they could evolve and come to a different conclusion. So we hope that our film can reach people on a similar level, that people can come to it—I mean, our father is someone who provoked extreme feelings in everybody. People liked him or they hated him. And we hope that this film will help people get a nuanced view, and maybe have their own transformation in their thinking.

“We’ve experienced this with audience members. People have really been grateful that we were able to tell such a balanced film from such a personal perspective. I think the greatest fear is that being his daughters, we wouldn’t be able to do that. But Sarah and I felt like it almost gave us the power to do that, because if we can be critical and we can raise questions, then we can raise questions that other people can’t. And in doing that we give the audience permission to have their own questions and to see shades of gray—to not have to see things in these broad strokes.”

[At this point Sarah Kunstler joins the conversation.]

Sarah, what type of law do you practice?

Sarah: “I practice primarily criminal law in federal court in Manhattan.”

When did you decide it was OK to become a lawyer? On television as a girl, you said you’d never become one.

Sarah: “I think at that point, for Emily and I, we just wanted to be nothing like our dad. We wanted to forge paths that were completely independent of his. So saying we weren’t going to be lawyers, we were going to be people who act, was like ‘We’re going to have independence from you and do our own thing.’ But at the same time we learned social responsibility from our parents. We were imbued with a sense that we still have that it’s our responsibility to go out into the world and fight for justice and make change, and I think that somewhere along the way I figured out that being a lawyer was a way to do that. I mean, I could do it on my own, separately from him. I don’t know exactly when I decided—it was definitely long after he had died. I know that I applied to law school around the time that Emily and I made a film about a racist drug bust in Tulia, Texas.

“Our first film exposed a racist drug bust that imprisoned over 20 percent of the black population of this town in the Texas panhandle. ... How a town that tiny needed 46 drug dealers is beyond me. But it ended up that the basis for their arrest was the work of one undercover officer whose story and credibility kind of unraveled.

“They initially received sentences of 99 to 300 years in prison—Gov. Rick Perry eventually overturned all the convictions. Emily and I made a documentary about it that helped expose the injustice. It was simultaneously kind of the beginning of our film career and part of my decision to go to law school and be a lawyer. To me, the two things are linked—they’re both different forms of advocacy. They’re different ways of telling a story and bringing a truth either to an audience or to a jury, and trying to right a wrong. It led me to pursue social justice work as both a filmmaker and a lawyer.”

Emily, you say in the film that you and Sarah have “always been a team.” Did making this film and digging deeper you’re your shared family history bring you closer?

Emily: “Oh, definitely. I think Sarah and I have never been as close as we are now. It’s a very difficult and painful process in any artistic endeavor—and having gone through that with my sister was a really wonderful experience. I mean, it’s not always peaceful here. There’s screaming, there’s yelling, we’re very emotional like our father was, but at the end of the day we always end friends, and it’s very important for us not to sustain conflict. And you know, it’s great, because who can you trust more than your sister who’s been your co-conspirator since birth? So we really had complete trust in the other one throughout this process.”

It’s clear from the film that you were already playing with film and media as kids. Did either of you have early inklings that you wanted to be a filmmaker?

Sarah: “You know, we didn’t remember making those videos until we were amassing material to make the film. But when I look at that, what I see is two little girls engaging their father in the way they see him engaging with the world—and also making fun of it. I think more than anything else it kind of shows our awareness of The William Kunstler, and a kind of humor at who that person was.”

Emily: “In addition to the stuff that’s in the film, we always had recording devices, we always had cameras, we were always interested in documenting things. There’s one photograph in the film where we each have like three voice recorders and a camera, so I think it’s definitely something that we were interested in. So I definitely can see a common thread of interest from that period. And all of his major press conferences he did on the front stoop of our house. So we saw how important it was to communicate a message to the outside world, and what kind of power that gave you. I think we definitely took that to heart, and you can see that in the work we do today.”

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe will be shown on the PBS documentary series POV starting June 22, and it is available on DVD from New Video. www.disturbingtheuniverse.com.

Image by Jesse Ferguson.

Pop singers have often thought of themselves as poets of sorts, and Natalie Merchant is no exception: She considers herself a “writer of verse” whose words often happen to be accompanied by music. Merchant’s new album Leave Your Sleep will probably help burnish her poetry credentials—but ironically, the words on this album, for a change, are not her own: The album is a collection of 26 historical poems set to a wide range of music styles, from reggae and the blues to folk and Chinese traditional music. (Read a review in the May-June Utne Reader.) Although the poems are in her own description by, for, or about children, Leave Your Sleep doesn’t present itself as a children’s album but rather one that can be enjoyed by all ages.

I spoke with Merchant in early March as she was putting the finishing touches on the album’s elaborate packaging, which includes an 80-page booklet. Our free-ranging conversation touched on her motherhood (she had a daughter in 2003), the magic of music, and why she may run off to live in a convent for her next album.

Your last studio album, The House Carpenter’s Daughter, was a fairly low-key folk album put out on your own label.

“Yeah, we made that in two days.”

Now you’re doing a massive project involving more than a hundred musicians and a wide range of musical styles. How did you shift from this very DIY ethic to this big production?

“Well, it took six years. The thing that was great about The House Carpenter’s Daughter, the way we were able to record with such spontaneity, is that we toured for the whole summer. But the research for that record took about six months, because I wanted to do folk music that I wasn’t familiar with yet. So I did a lot of research at the public library at Lincoln Center and took a lot of the material from books. So I had a small introduction to that process.

“The individual recording sessions for this one, for Leave Your Sleep, were actually done pretty quickly. There was a lot of preproduction involved. I probably spent a year writing, a year demoing, and then about six months organizing all the sessions—and then a year recording and about five months to mix and master. And then the research for the book was ongoing. I had three research assistants just finding information about the poets, because some of them were so obscure. I had a copyright researcher, and I had two lawyers doing clearances and a picture researcher. That was my team. (laughs)

“So it was like there were hidden aspects to this. Calling Wynton Marsalis and saying ‘Wynton, could you do me a favor and write an arrangement for “Janitor’s Boy” and meet me in the studio on this particular day’—that was sort of the easy part. (laughs) The magic would happen in the studio once we had everything set up. But there was a lot of sweat and blood and tears leading up to the magic.”

When did you first conceive of this album?

“The day after my daughter was born. I think [new mothers] are pretty evenly divided: The women who go into a postpartum depression and the ones who go into a crazy euphoria. And I went into a crazy euphoric state.

“I knew that I was going to be responsible for introducing her to the world, and language, and music, and spirituality, and nature—everything. The doors of the world were going to open to her through me. And I didn’t realize it so much until I was holding her in my arms. I had all this energy, and yet I had to nurse my baby five, six hours a day. I was trapped in a chair with all this energy, but I noticed there was a book of poems that I had bought for her—an anthology of poetry was sitting on the shelf near the chair where I was nursing her. So I just started looking through the book and marking pages that I found interesting. I thought I would begin with lullabies, and that’s the album I would make for her. I also realized I wanted to sing lullabies to her but I just didn’t know any. So I thought, ‘I’ll just write my own.’ But I felt kind of hobbled, because I couldn’t really use my hands. (laughs) So I started singing these poems into these melodies, into a recording device. That’s how I started the record, and it kind of grew from that. That was almost seven years ago.”

And eventually it grew beyond lullabies, right?

“Pretty quickly. Because as soon as she was old enough to comprehend basic language, I started teaching her Mother Goose rhymes and teaching her how to use language as a toy—that it could be this delightful plaything of hers. I loved the rhythms, and the rhymes were really great for her memory, and introducing her to new vocabularies. And so I was kind of immersed in that world, which I found very enjoyable. It was kind of dark times in our country, and I was feeling powerless and frustrated, and I also realized that I’d spent my whole life waiting to have a child—I’d waited 40 years to have this child, and I knew that time would be very fleeting, because I’d lived long enough to know what five or six years would feel like, so I just wanted to really be there. But it felt creative, too—I wanted to be totally present in her life but creative at the same time, and that resulted in me making art out of the experience of motherhood and her childhood.”

The common thread in these poems is that they’re by or for or about children. Yet the album, to my ears, doesn’t sound like many children’s albums and doesn’t seem to be playing down to the audience. Do you consider it a children’s album?

“Like I said, I think it was inspired by my experience of having a child, and children certainly enjoy it. And actually, the president of Nonesuch said the greatest thing—he said the Beatles made the best children’s records of all time, but they never made a children’s record. My daughter loves the Kinks; ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is her favorite song. I haven’t really segregated music in my collection and said, well, this is music that she will enjoy and it’s appropriate for her because it was written for children. She just responds to music. She loves African highlife guitar, she loves salsa music, she loves Celtic folk music. And that’s something that most of the parents that I know do for their children—they just play music they enjoy, and the kids are exposed to everything. There are plenty of other forms of media that are specific to certain age groups, and you don’t expose kids to R-rated film, obviously, and there’s literature that’s too complex, you can’t introduce them to it. But I play symphonic music for my child and she doesn’t find that too complicated, and she doesn’t find it dull or boring. I was just trying to speak to her in the musical language that she already seems to understand.

“It is a systematic concept record, I guess, but that doesn’t mean it’s so highbrow that children can’t enjoy it. I mean, there’s a lot of nonsense poetry involved in it, but there are a lot of great big-band and bluegrass and Cajun songs that have silly lyrics—but they were never written for children. The Edward Lear poem or the William Brighty Rands—the nonsense material, especially the British Victorian nonsense—was actually for the most part not created for children. It was created for the amusement of other adults, as a lot of the nursery rhymes were actually political satire, or they were amusements of the gentry. They eventually became part of what we consider the Mother Goose canon, but they weren’t always specifically written for children.

“That’s why I named the album Leave Your Sleep—it’s taken from a Mother Goose rhyme. Because it points to the genesis of the record, but there’s something deeper in our culture, a deeper place that those rhymes inhabit historically and in their origins, and also historically in where they live in our culture. I think Leave Your Sleep is a really simple phrase, but it can be interpreted in so many ways. It seems to point to an awakening of some sort, whether that was my awakening to this poetry or my invitation to other people to become awake to it. Or to just take these poems that are more obscure and wake them back up—you know, give them a second chance at different lives, bring them to light in a way.”

There’s been endless debate over whether song lyrics are poetry—whether Bob Dylan is a poet, for instance. By setting poems to songs you’re sort of inverting the equation, making these poets into pop lyricists. Are the two skills at least somewhat complementary if not interchangeable?

“Well, I’ve talked to some literary critics who feel that part of the reason poetry has fallen so far out of fashion is that it was originally meant to be recited and sung, and it’s because of this separation from its musicality that it inhabits this ivory tower, and that it’s inaccessible to so many people. But as a writer of verse, which is what I am—whether you want to call me a lyricist or a poet, that’s up to your bias—my words are meant to be heard. And I feel that way about all these poems. These poems didn’t come to life for me until I read them aloud. And then they came further to life when I gave them pitch, and lengthened or shortened the syllables and gave them notes. And the notes helped me illustrate them—illustrate the emotional content or the subject matter, whatever it was it just made it a more full experience for me.

“So I don’t know. Actually, I just received an invitation from Poetry magazine to contribute. It’s the most prestigious poetry journal in America, so I was thrilled. But then the second paragraph said ‘as a contributor to our special column that we call “The View from Here,”’ which is basically an outsider’s view of poetry. And I’m actually sitting here today composing a letter to the editor saying, ‘But I’m a published writer of verse for 30 years, and why is it that I’m not considered a poet? Because somewhere in the world there’s music that accompanies what I do?’”

How big a pool of poems did you start with?

“Well, I had to narrow the field to just the criteria that you described—poems about, by, or for children—because there were just thousands and thousands of poems. I read hundreds, and I ended up writing music to probably 50. We recorded 35, and 26 ended up on the record.”

In assembling the material, did you uncover poets and poems you didn’t previously know about?

“I’d say 80 percent of the stuff that ended up on the record I’d never heard of before.”

What were some of the most notable surprises?

“Well, the Nathalia Crane poem ‘The Janitor’s Boy’ is my favorite—that and ‘If No One Ever Marries Me,’ because they’re extremely obscure poets, that they were young women—Nathalia Crane was 10 when she wrote ‘The Janitor’s Boy’ and Laurence Alma-Tadema was 18 [when she wrote ‘If No One Ever Marries Me’]. Both those poems were from their very first publications. The search for photographs of them, and information about them, was very interesting. I actually located Natalia Crane’s widower, living in California, and he put me in touch with a woman who’s writing a biography about her. That’s how I got all the information about her. She was from Brooklyn, so we went to the Brooklyn Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution and got an incredible treasure trove of photographs because she was a national celebrity from the time she was 10 to about 16, for just being a precocious young poet.

“I made a joke onstage in London recently, that for a 10-year-old girl to get that kind of notoriety she’d have to murder her whole family and eat them. (laughs) Just to write a book about your obsessive crush on the son of the superintendent of your building—that was enough to make you an international star in 1927.”

There’s a lot of Victorian-era poetry on the album. Why were you drawn to the Victorians?

“British Victorians experienced a sort of golden era of children’s literature, and that’s a reason I was really drawn to it. It is more sophisticated—even the nonsense is more sophisticated. It seems to be more about the structure of the language and the playfulness of the sound of the language, and even the meaning of the words, especially in Edward Lear’s case. The stories about the poets were really fascinating, and the meter and the rhyme schemes just really appealed to me when I sat down to write music. They adapted really well to music. Edward Lear actually did compose music—it’s one of the things he did with his talent. He was a painter; he actually taught Queen Victoria to watercolor as a painting instructor.

“He was one of 21 children and the family was broken up when his father, who was a stockbroker, experienced a reversal of fortunes and was sent to debtor’s prison. So he ended up being educated by his sister and rising in British society to the point where he was held in high esteem by the queen. And he lived with the 13th Earl of Derby because he was this very talented painter. He was hired to paint the Earl of Derby’s private menagerie of over a thousand animals that he had on his estate.

“I wanted to go visit the estate where he lived, because the Earl of Derby was also the first to publish Edward’s poetry. So I thought it would be really interesting to go there and see the house. He started as a servant in the home, and then he ended up being a favorite in the drawing room of the mansion. And it is a mansion—it’s the biggest house I’ve ever seen in my life, and they have a safari park there, hundreds of acres of safari park with baboons and rhinoceros and elephants and cheetahs. (laughs) The stories are just fascinating. The descendant of the Earl of Derby still runs the property, and they have a convention center there and a spa.”

Are there some poets whose work you wanted to include that just didn’t lend itself to the musical form?

“Yes. I thought Lewis Carroll should be part of it, and we did record ‘How doth the little crocodile/Improve his shining tail/And pour the waters of the Nile/On every golden scale!/How cheerfully he seems to grin/How neatly spreads his claws/And welcomes little fishes in/With gently smiling jaws!’ or something like that. But we didn’t end up doing that. And another, Walter de la Mare, turned out to be one of my favorite discoveries. I wrote three or four of his, but they ended up not going on. And William Roscoe, who was an abolitionist and a member of Parliament in the early 18th century, and he only really published one poem, called ‘The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast.’ He wrote it for his son, and it was serialized in a journal of some sort. In spite of being a member of Parliament and a famous abolitionist, it basically was the thing he’s remembered for. I’m really sorry that piece didn’t end up on the record.

“There were many. So there could be another volume someday.”

How did you decide on a musical sound and create an arrangement for each poem?

“I just listened to the internal rhythms and rhymes of the poems, and depending on the characters—it seems like I was drawn to poems that had strong central characters. It wasn’t a conscious decision but it seems to be something that unifies all the poems, whether it’s ‘The Peppery Man’ or ‘The Janitor’s Boy’ or ‘The Sleepy Giant’ ‘The King of China’s Daughter,’ ‘maggie and milly and molly and may,’ ‘The Dancing Bear’—they’re really archetypes of childhood literature, too, whether it’s the circus equestrienne or the dancing bear, and witches and giants and that sort of thing. So I would just decide how I wanted to represent this character musically, and then rhythmically I would just find the rhythm within the structure of the language of the poem. It was really fun. And some of the songs—like ‘The Peppery Man’ I actually wrote that in three different styles of music, and just decided that the blues seemed more appropriate. That was the place I wanted to put ‘The Peppery Man’—I wanted to put him down South.

“And ‘[Adventures of] Isabel,’ the Ogden Nash poem, that was written in a couple different styles, and then I just decided that I was going to make Isabel a girl from the bayou. I imagine her in a torn cotton dress singing, just swinging from a vine in the swamp barefoot. That’s my version of Isabel. Ogden Nash actually wrote it about his daughter, and I found a great photo essay of him and his family at home … and that’s not his daughter at all. She was very proper, lived in a house with servants and wore white gloves and patent leather shoes and bows in her hair. But there must have been something about her—her character must have been strong. My version of Isabel wasn’t anywhere near his version.”

It sounds like it’s been quite a large project. Now that it’s complete, is the album like you initially envisioned it, or has it gone through massive transformations as it has evolved?

“Well, when I gave up the idea of it being an album of lullabies, ten lullabies, I started to embrace it as a larger project. And I knew from about year two of working on it that it was going to be the most ambitious thing I’d ever made. And definitely when were the planning the recording sessions it really became apparent it was monstrously big. (laughs) I made a wall chart of all the songs, and I remember Steven Barber, one of the string arrangers I worked with, walked in. He’s from Texas, and he just looked at it and he said, ‘The Germans don’t even have a word for this! The or-gan-i-zation of it!’ It was true. We had people from so many different places. And every one of those 120 musicians that worked on the record had to be contracted, transported, fed, given demos, given charts, supplied with directions to the studio. There was this whole list of tasks that had to be achieved to make sure they made it into the room at the right moment, in the right frame of mind. It was massive.”

It’s clear that your becoming a mother was a very direct influence on this album. Does having a child change the way you think about your art in general?

“I think having a child changes just about everything about the way that you see yourself and the world. Since most artists are just projecting some internal vision or reflecting their impressions of what they see, yeah, I’m sure it’s affected everything. I think there’s more playfulness in what I’m doing now, and more depth at the same time, because of the experience. And I think I’ve become more certain of who I am, so that gives me more confidence.

“I think the long-term effect of making this record on my work is going to be that anything is possible. I’m not going to discount anything, any idea. I wrote an arrangement for traditional Chinese instruments for this record—I mean, everything that we did. I sang a duet with an 87-year-old man, recorded with Wynton Marsalis, and I wrote string arrangements with Sean O’Loughlin that were performed by members of the New York Philharmonic. I just feel there were so many things we set out to do that at first I thought, well, what do I know about the range of a pipa, or an erhu? And who do I think I am to write a string part for some of the best cellists in the world? And we just did it. Or what business do I have adapting Gerard Manley Hopkins to music? I just felt like this poetry is speaking to me, and because of the way it’s affecting me, it’s given me license to do what I’m doing.

“I felt at points like I needed to ask permission from someone, and I didn’t know who that person was, because so many of the poets have been gone for so long. But the interesting thing was meeting some of the poets and their heirs and their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, and how delighted they are by the project.”

After this project, what’s next for you?

“Well, I did sign a two-year deal with Nonesuch, and I have many songs written that just haven’t been recorded because I’ve been focused on the poetry project, so I’m excited about that. I’ve found a convent in the South of Spain that is a cloistered convent—and only Nonesuch would be probably interested in this project—but I’ve obtained permission to live there for a period of time, and I thought that would be really fascinating. Some of those women have been cloistered for 60 years. I thought that being inside, even just for a month, and observing that lifestyle would be really interesting to see what kind of music I would write in that environment. So that’s a project I’m interested in. I could go a lot of different directions. So who knows?”

Here’s a video performance of a song from Leave Your Sleep, based on the poem “The Man in the Wilderness” by an anonymous poet:

Image by Mark Seliger, courtesy of Nonesuch Records.