If you should ever find yourself chatting with Tift Merritt you can't go wrong bringing up her musical heroes, including Joni Mitchell, Dusty Springfield and Emmylou Harris, but the longtime Raleigh, North Carolina, resident would just as soon discuss the University of North Carolina basketball team. So deep is her lifelong love of Tar Heel hoopsters that the night they won the 2005 NCAA men's title, Merritt — who graduated from UNC with a degree in creative writing — called her dad from the stage in the middle of a concert and put him on speaker phone so he could narrate the end of the game for her and her understanding audience.
Her 2002 debut, Bramble Rose garnered the singer/songwriter/guitarist favorable comparisons to Lucinda Williams and Harris, and earned a mention on year-end Top-10 lists in both Time and The New Yorker magazines. Merritt had spent several years building a following in North Carolina's college-heavy region known as the Triangle, first as a side singer/guitarist with Two Dollar Pistols and later fronting her own band, The Carbines. One night The Carbines opened for Ryan Adams, and the former Whiskeytown frontman was so impressed that he helped Merritt get her first record deal. Her Stax-meets-No Depression second offering, Tambourine, got her nominated in the Best Country Album category at the 2005 Grammys.
Following a four-year recording absence, Merritt issued her third album, Another Country, which she mostly wrote on a piano in a rented apartment in Paris, France.
Provenance: Houston, Texas
Latest release: Another Country (2008)
© 2008 Nigel Music Media LLC. Used by permission.
Tift Merritt
