Natalie Merchant's US summer tour is still a month away from its launch at the Wellmont Theater in Montclair, New Jersey, on July 12, but a select few will enjoy an intimate performance of songs from her recent Nonesuch debut album, Leave Your Sleep, this weekend. Merchant will perform for attendees of the 2010 Poetry Conference at West Chester University of Pennsylvania in the culminating event of the conference this Saturday night.

In a preview of this weekend's event and her later summer tour, Merchant spoke with the Philadelphia Inquirer about Leave Your Sleep and the poets whose words she chose to set to music for the project. Inquirer staff writer John Timpane calls it "an ambitious work that embraces fun, story, and sadness."

For the article, Timpane spoke with poet Dana Gioa, the co-founder of the West Chester Poetry Conference and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, who describes Leave Your Sleep as "unprecedented" and tells the Inquirer: "There have been pop musicians in the past—Joni Mitchell and Loreena McKennitt, for example—who have set poems to music, but no one has ever done anything of this scale or range. What Natalie has done is to create art songs, in the old sense of taking preexisting poems and setting them to music. She's the Franz Schubert of folk-rock."

You'll find the complete article at inquirer.com. For Merchant's summer tour schedule, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour. To pick up a copy of Leave Your Sleep, head to the Nonesuch Store.