Getting married, having a child and going seven years between albums evidently fired Natalie Merchant’s imagination — and her musical ambitions.

Indeed, her latest album, the 2-CD set “Leave Your Sleep,” is the most elaborate undertaking of her career. For the project, she took poems, nursery rhymes and lullabies written by the likes of Ogden Nash, e.e. cummings, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Graves, Christina Rosetti, Edward Lear and many others — and set them to music.

Then, to create the music, she invited a range of groups / artists like the Wynton Marsalis Quartet, Medeski Martin & Wood, The Fairfield Four, The Chinese Music Ensemble of New York, the Ditty Bops, members of the New York Philharmonic, The Klezmatics, Lúnasa and Hazmat Modine to collaborate with her.

The result is a sort of globalized chamber-folk that is alternately ruminative, soothing, complex and amusing.

When she comes to the Michigan Theater on Tuesday, Merchant and her eight-piece band will perform material from “Leave Your Sleep,” as well as favorites from throughout her career, according to tour publicity. She is also slated to appear at the downtown Borders store earlier in the day.

Merchant has described the album as a thematic piece about motherhood and childhood — and the relationship between mothers and their children.

When deciding what pieces to adapt for the album, it was her goal to cast a wide net, finding writers from various countries, ethnic groups and time periods. She took a similarly global approach when choosing musical styles — the albums draws on various genres from all over the world — like chamber music, bluegrass, reggae, jazz and Celtic, Chinese and Balkan musics.

One motivator for the record’s theme — motherhood and childhood — was Merchant’s daughter, who was born in 2003. And Merchant was also interested in exposing her daughter to a diverse spectrum of music.

Merchant explained the genesis of the project in a recent interview with the New York Times. It started out as a lullaby album, she said, for which she wrote and recorded many of her own songs. But that eventually gave way to what became “Leave Your Sleep.”:

“I was breast-feeding six hours a day, and I felt this burst of creative energy,” she said. “In my mind I had all these visions of projects I wanted to do and things I wanted to make, but I couldn’t leave my chair, and I had my hands full. So I just put a tape recorder next to the chair where I was nursing, and I would start singing into it, and that’s where the first songs came from. I didn’t really have time to focus on writing lyrics," she told The Times. Later, she “narrowed the field to poetry that related to motherhood or childhood, because that’s the world I was living in.”

One of the most striking songs is "King of China's Daughter," featuring the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York. The song is based on a poem about a girl who uses a jump rope constructed from from the notes sung by birds to go skipping across the surface of the sea.

Another is “The Janitor’s Boy,” written by Natalya Crane, an early-20th-century prodigy who had her first collection of poems published in 1922, when she was just 9 years old. In order to capture the energy and vibe of that era, Merchant asked Marsalis to help her write a Dixieland jazz arrangement, and Marsalis brought in his world-beating quartet to record the track.

Many of the poems Merchant chose to adapt are from the realm of fantasy or myth, and some feature young girls who overcome tall odds — like in “Griselda,” a song that jumps to a jubilant Memphis soul groove, or Nash’s “Adventures of Isabel,” in which the title character defeats both a witch and a giant — in a song that gets a sprightly Cajun-ized treatment.

There are some darker themes on the album, as well. One song, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” is a wistful piece that draws on a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest from the Victorian England period. The poem is about an adult trying to explain the concept of death to a child. Merchant’s choice of the work was inspired in part by the fact that some of her own friends had died recently, and she found herself trying to explain death to her own daughter.

“Leave Your Sleep” is also ambitious on other levels — like the presentation and packaging. The CDs come in an 80-page hardbound book — roughly the size of a double-CD case — that has been painstakingly researched and annotated, complete with the words of the poems and lullabies, and photos of the poets / writers.

Merchant started her own label, Myth Records, in ’03, but later decided she didn’t want to run a label — she was burned out by the grueling touring schedule she had maintained up until she got married and gave birth.

So she ended up financing the entire project herself and then took it to Nonesuch Records, which signed her to a record deal and released the disc.

“There really is not a record label in the world that would have listened to me, listened to those demos and said, ‘All right, we’ll give you $700,000, Natalie,’ ” Merchant told the Times. “There was a budget, and then we just exceeded it, and there was another budget, and we exceeded it. It ended up just being astronomical.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.

Watch a recent "PBS Newshour" segment about Natalie Merchant's "Leave Your Sleep":