Project: Cabinet of Wonder (Natalie Merchant, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Children’s Theatre)
Released: August 2026 (digital album) and ongoing
Role: I joined Cabinet of Wonder in spring 2026 to write the project's summary/bio and lead the campaign across brand and artist channels, supporting the album release on Nonesuch Records and the program launch in Head Start classrooms nationwide.

American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant and Nonesuch Records present Cabinet of Wonder, an album featuring music and videos from her multimedia collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chicago Children’s Theatre. Cabinet of Wonder represents three years of behind-the-scenes work among the project’s collaborators; it is also the culmination of Natalie’s four decades of involvement in children’s arts and education. Designed as a free enrichment program that introduces music, poetry, and the dramatic arts, Cabinet of Wonder reimagines Mother Goose and her rhymes for a new generation of young children through modern interpretations of the classic child-centered canon. Recorded with more than twenty-five instruments played by just as many musicians, the arrangements span classical, folk, jazz, funk, blues, and beyond, opening up a universe of imagination both in the classroom and at home. 

“I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m considering what I’ll leave behind. I believe Cabinet of Wonder will be my legacy; every skill that I've acquired over the last forty-five years has gone into this project,” says Merchant. She not only composed, sang, and acted (a dual role as Mother Goose and a librarian-teacher figure named Miss Natalie) but also designed and stitched the costumes, wrote the teaching guides, and oversaw the creation of the project’s content-rich website. 

The accompanying album now welcomes Nonesuch into the fold. In 2010, after eighteen years as an Elektra artist, she released her Nonesuch debut, Leave Your Sleep, a two-album anthology of classic children’s poetry adapted to song with an accompanying picture book. Now, Cabinet of Wonder expands on her use of music as an illustrative device to bridge generations. 

Even before she had an international platform, Merchant was drawn to working with children. In high school, she volunteered at an arts education summer camp for kids with disabilities. “It was during the Carter administration, when there was money available for therapeutic arts programs,” she remembers. “It was a grand experiment for the time, giving kids with severe developmental challenges clay and paint, and exposing them to music and dance. I worked with kids my own age who had two-word vocabularies, but I would see them responding to color on a piece of paper, or rocking and swaying to music. It was an extraordinary experience.” 

Through college, Merchant led after-school arts and crafts at her hometown Girls Club. As 10,000 Maniacs’ star began to rise, she collaborated with Scholastic Magazine, which sponsored a nationwide poetry contest based on her lyrics, leading her to visit various classrooms. She later spent a full year working in the nursery school of a shelter for homeless families in New York City, organizing concerts to benefit the center. “We did a show for Rosie and Harry’s Place at Radio City Music Hall, and all the women I worked with were there.” She laughs, “They were so surprised, they thought I was just a student at Columbia.” In recent years, she has worked internationally with Fondazione Prada’s arts education incubator, Accademia dei Bambini, adapting Italian poetry to music and performing it in Milan. 

But the most direct seed for Cabinet of Wonder began germinating nearly a decade ago, during Merchant’s time as artist-in-residence at an upstate New York Head Start preschool program. During her three years there, she worked with more than 400 children. Head Start, the federally funded program that serves America’s most economically vulnerable young children (ages six months to five years), prepares them to succeed in school and in life. 

Merchant’s introduction to the organization had come several years earlier, when she raised money to build a new playground for a Head Start preschool in Kingston, NY. When she moved to Troy, NY, so her daughter could attend a girls' high school, she felt isolated in a new town, remembered Head Start, and reached out. “I imagined I would volunteer a day a week for a few hours. It quickly turned into three full days a week because I fell in love with the kids,” she explains. “I love this age group: between three and five is the magic zone. The brain is developing at such an accelerated rate that anything that is put in front of a kid at that time in their lives goes directly into making who they are.” 

Merchant began writing songs based on the classic nursery rhymes she had learned from her mother and passed on to her daughter. Realizing the centuries-old verses could become powerful teaching tools, she built lessons around their delightful language and absurd imagery. She hired a guitarist and a fiddler to accompany her during weekly classroom visits. “Kids knew Tuesday morning, Miss Natalie was coming, and fun was gonna happen. We played all sorts of games and danced in a big circle. We’d have long and amusing conversations about words and imagination. But most of all, we’d sing at the top of our lungs and laugh. There was so much joy,” she recalls. 

As a year-end celebration, the children performed a play, Happy Birthday Mother Goose, for their families. Merchant designed and constructed its elaborate costumes with a local sewing circle. “It was such a beautiful community event. When I came to Troy, I didn't know a single person. After three years, I probably knew 500 people, most of them under the age of five.” 

Visiting Chicago after the pandemic, she shared the materials with her longtime friend Jacqueline Russell, cofounder and artistic director of Chicago Children’s Theatre (CCT). She, in turn, tapped Jonathan McCormick, managing director of the Negaunee Music Institute, the community engagement arm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO). Together, they began a fundraising campaign to bring her Mother Goose project to Chicago. The CSO commissioned composer Megan Gould to arrange seventeen of Merchant’s songs for chamber ensembles. CCT cast and prepared child actors, designed and built sets, commissioned puppetry from Manual Cinema, tapped Chicago portrait and theater photographer Joe Mazza to document the project, and hired two video production companies, Big Foot Media and Little Cabin. A master furnituremaker was hired to build a big, beautiful blue cabinet containing a small secret theater that would become the focal point of the series. CCT and CSO also assembled a team of early childhood experts and teaching artists to help Merchant adapt her curriculum to meet National Head Start Association standards.  

“During the years I was working in the Head Start preschool, I wanted to find a way to share all that joyful learning I was witnessing,” she says. “In Chicago, I found willing partners in the CSO and CCT. They assembled a remarkable team of creative collaborators, and together, we devised a way to do just that.” 

All of the music was recorded in Chicago with Merchant, musicians from the CSO, and special guests, with Grammy-winning chief audio engineer Ryan Freeland, assisted by Mathieu Lejeune. All the videos were filmed in Chicago, and Merchant edited them in New York with the post-production company Abstrakt. Chicago web developer Katherine Pendlay and associates worked closely with Merchant to bring all the rhymes, music, photographs, videos, sheet music, teaching guides, and other resources into a rich website that’s now open to all. 

Over the seventeen-track collection, myriad musical styles and instruments are introduced to young ears, from the elegant chamber arrangement of “Little Nut Tree” to the brassy Dixieland jazz of "Little Miss Muffet," the Calypso swing of “Humpty Dumpty” to the Celtic rollick of “Hickory Dickory Dock” and the irresistibly danceable “The Queen of Hearts.” Merchant penned three originals for the project: the opening theme song, “Cabinet of Wonder,” the tender folk ballad, “Rhyming Town,” and the anthemic pop closing theme, “The Goodbye Song,” which teachers and parents will undoubtedly use to help little ones accept that the fun eventually has to end…until next time.  

The music in Cabinet of Wonder deftly illustrates the collection of rhymes. Merchant explains, “I deliberately picked rhymes with very strong characters, and then chose instruments to represent them. For example, Peter Pumpkin Eater is the bassoon, Humpty Dumpty is the marimba. I could have gone all different directions with Jack Sprat, but I decided on horns to make him funky.” 

In late summer 2026, this unprecedented public arts project reaches a wider audience with the digital release of the Cabinet of Wonder album. In support, Merchant will spend the 2026-27 school year in partnership with the National Head Start Association, leading teacher training sessions, conducting site visits, attending educational conferences, and collaborating with early childhood education divisions of public and private schools, as the program launches nationwide. 

After a year of successful pilot programs in Chicago Public Schools (which culminated in concerts with Merchant for 3,000 children at Symphony Center in Chicago), the model is now ready for other school systems and orchestras to replicate. 

“Cabinet of Wonder has been a big labor of love since the beginning, eight years ago. As more people discover it, the community continues to grow. It’s a beautiful thing we’re making together,” Merchant says. When asked about her enduring impact as an artist, she reflects, “The most important thing I've ever done in my life is have a child. And through the act of mothering, I learned so much. I enjoy being able to share what I know about children with others. All the magic that began in my own home or in small Head Start classrooms, it’s inside Cabinet of Wonder now.”