Tift Merritt

Her laugh a warming howl and her bright-eyed smile made to melt, singer-songwriter Tift Merritt is, in many ways, an overpowering firecracker of a artist. Overpowering, that is, in the most pleasant of ways. Ask her a question, for example, and she immediately has an articulate, amusing retort that will only warrant further interest. Put her on a stage and she’ll break your heart with her words, voice and freckle-tinged expressions - again, in always rewarding ways. If some folks really are, as they say, “born to do it,” count Tift in as one of the few. 

“It’s always funny to me that I spend so much time in rock clubs in front of people when I’m really just an introverted homebody who’d rather be writing stories at the desk and typewriter up in the attic,” Merritt recently told NUVO when asked about the noticeable literary prowess displayed in a self-written press release accompanying her latest album, Another Country - the bulk of which she wrote after “accidentally” moving to Paris for a short time. “In the beginning, [writing] was what I really wanted to do,” she explained with a youthful snigger. “Maybe when I grow up I’ll still be a writer.

“Sometimes you have to go very far from home and get very lost to realize that life is all around you, shouting at you to take its many good things with you,” Merritt wrote in said press kit about the time she spent drifting through Paris streets, eyes stretched wide. “I cannot explain what happened in Paris except to say there were never enough hours in the day to write and there was always kindness at hand. It was the happiest I have ever been.

“I had been on the road so long that I didn’t really know which way was up,” Merritt said when explaining the circumstances surrounding her brief move to Paris. “I wasn’t ready to go home [after touring] so I thought I’d take a vacation. I Googled ‘Paris, apartment, piano’ and actually found a place. Once I got there I thought, you know, ‘this isn’t just a vacation.’”

From there things got interesting, Merritt said, going on to explain how she spent much of her time at her rented Paris piano, suddenly writing new songs.

In time returning to her longtime home of North Carolina, Merritt - who has since relocated to Manhattan, longing for the creative energy she found in Paris - tweaked her Paris blueprints before going into the studio with noted producer George Drakoulias (Jayhawks, The Black Crowes) to record Another Country, her follow up to 2005’s Tamborine - also produced by Drakoulias.

“I handcuffed him to the door,” Merritt said - backed by a warm laugh - when explaining how she came to work with the legendary producer. “Really, I picked up a Maria McKee cassette when I was 19 and saw his name on it. I thought ‘I want to work with that guy.’ I sometimes forget what a big dream that was for me because now I just call him up. He’s my pal, we kid around. He’s so great at keeping a singer/songwriter like me from collapsing into over emotionalism or relying too much on the words.”

In addition to Drakoulias, guitar legends Charlie Sexton and Doug Pettibone joined Merritt and her band - Zeke Hutchins, Jay Brown, Danny Eisenberg - on the album, making for a sharply played lazy day songwriter album that could easily be filed next to Lucinda Williams’ 2001 classic, Essence.

In the six years since the release of Merritt’s 2002 debut LP, Bramble Rose, she has amassed quite a resume of her own, earning widespread acclaim (including “album of the year” nods from Time Magazine and the New Yorker, amongst others), playing the late night talk show circuit, raking in numerous Americana Music Award nominations and so on. She’s shared stages with her hero, Emmylou Harris (“She’s the queen!”), as well as Willie Nelson, Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch and the man who is often credited as playing a big part in her initial record deal, fellow North Carolina-bred songwriter Ryan Adams. Of her many award nominations, Merritt’s second album, the aforementioned Tambourine, most notably received a Grammy nomination for Best Country Album - an accolade that threw many of Merritt’s followers.

“I think sometimes people who are doing things that aren’t easily classified are up to be wrongly classified,” Merritt said when asked about being classified as a country artist. “I don’t really believe in musical genre. I tend to think of myself as a singer/songwriter. That gives me leeway to move in a lot of different directions”

Major commercial success, however, has thus far alluded Merritt. “What I like about my career,” she explains, “is that I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do and I’m gonna write what I mean and say what I say. That’s important to me. I can’t predict if that’s ever going to cross paths with commercial success. To a certain extent, the fact that I’m a working artist is alone a great deal of commercial success in my book.”

In the meantime, Merritt, along with her band, plans to keep working hard, growing and learning new ways to let her uncontrollable glow spread through her work, leaving touches of her sweet firecracker grace everywhere she rambles.

Written by G. William Locke