The Tift Merritt Interview: Everyday Singing, Vulnerability in Songwriting, and Her New Album “Sugar”

Today on Americana Music.com Podcast we are excited to welcome Grammy nominee Tift Merritt. A brilliant songwriter and gifted vocalist Tift blends country, folk, rock, and soul influences in her music. Her song “Traveling Alone” has over 18 million streams on Spotify. She’s an advocate for musicians’ rights with the Artists Rights Alliance. With nearly a decade of life’s vicissitudes to draw from she’s releasing her brand new album, Sugar. Tift Merritt’s  Sugar is full of luscious melodies and sweet signature vibrato that takes you on a journey of authentic vulnerability. The highly anticipated album is one of her finest pieces of work to date and is releasing on June 26th. We are so happy to welcome Tift Merritt to our show. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:08

Welcome to the Americana Music.com Podcast with your host, Sarah Popejoy.

Tift Merritt Introduction

SPEAKER_04 0:16

Today on American Music.com Podcast, we are excited to welcome Grammy nominee Tift Merritt. A brilliant songwriter and gifted vocalist, Tift blends country folk, rock, and soul influences in her music. Her song Traveling Alone has over 18 million streams on Spotify. She's an advocate for musicians' rights with the Artist Rights Alliance. With nearly a decade of life's vicissitudes to draw from, she's releasing her brand new album, Sugar. Tift Merritt's Sugar is full of luscious melodies and sweet signature vibrato that takes you on a journey of authentic vulnerability. The highly anticipated album is one of her finest pieces of work to date and is releasing on June 26th. We are so happy to welcome Tift Merritt to our show. Welcome, Tiffed. Hi, thank you so much for having me and thank you for that nice

Growing Up in Raleigh, North Carolina

SPEAKER_04 1:05

introduction. Tiff, your hometown is Raleigh, North Carolina. Can you talk a little bit about your hometown and what it was like growing up there?

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Oh, well, it was, you know, a long time ago. You know, I was a child in the 80s. There wasn't any internet, had Ataris, and it was like Stranger Things without the demogorgon. I think that was a time when regionalism really was a very powerful part of geography, right? Like we weren't exposed to everything everywhere all the time. And I there was an accent that was from eastern North Carolina, and there was an accent that was in the Piedmont where I'm from. And I just really love my upbringing in North Carolina because there was a real sense of place. And I think my adult life here is an expression of gratitude for that. And you know, I am really rooted here. My daughter is really rooted here. I am very, very grateful for the community that I have that grounds me here and the life offstage that I have here. And then when I go off and do something, I think that sort of the flower is there because the roots are here. I feel very strongly about that. And you know, it's such a gift that my parents are still here, that we just bump into friends and neighbors wherever we go. It's really important to me.

Eudora Welty

SPEAKER_00 2:33

One of my heroes is Euta Welty. I remember visiting her house in Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived her whole life. Very unique person. And I always admired that she could look out that window in her office and write about the whole big world from there and the depth of humanity from there. And this idea that you can be your own weirdo self in a small town where everybody sees you do it and holds you accountable. It's always been a favorite idea of mine. She's a writer? Yes. Yes, she's a she wrote amazing short stories and novels, and she was a WPA photographer and just a real a legend in Southern fiction, but also she said all great daring starts within. Oh, I love that. She wrote a book called One Writer's Beginnings that is particularly, you know, on the writing life. She writes beautifully on being an artist and being a writer.

SPEAKER_04 3:26

Oh, that's cool.

Character Songs "Laid a Highway" and "After Today"

SPEAKER_04 3:27

I did a deep dive and went through you said, uh oh. No, it's not bad. It's not bad. And went through your whole collection of music, at least what's available to me as a listener.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

What is that when you did that?

SPEAKER_04 3:43

I like doing that with artists sometimes just to see how they grow and stuff. You have such a distinctive voice with a range of styles you can adapt to depending on the song. Before we get into your new album, there are two songs that I just have to mention because they freaking blew me away. I had never heard them before. I was like, how the hell have I never heard these songs? And they were Leda Highway was one and After Today.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Oh, that's so kind that you mentioned that one. My dad really loves After Today, actually.

SPEAKER_04 4:16

They are both character songs where you've embodied a different character. What I love about the story songs is that you're telling them from the perspective of a 55-year-old woman in Leda Highway and of an 18-year-old boy in After Today with such empathy. At the time you were in your late 20s and early 30s, do you remember what inspired those songs? And was there something that you did to prepare for writing them?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

I have a friend who inspired Leda Highway, and it's really about a real town in North Carolina called Bynum. Uh-huh. I lived around the corner from Bynum when I was, you know, in college and first starting a band. I was going down to their general store and sending out cassette tapes to radio stations and clubs. And he's like, Girl, what are you? My friend Jerry Parton. Girl, what are you doing? I said, Well, I'm trying to get a gig. And he goes, Girl, you sending more mail than all of Bynum. Why don't you just come on down here and play at the store? And we did. And you know, this little town, it had a movie theater and it had the general store and built around this mill where everybody worked at the mill and everybody cared for each other as a community. And and then they just plonked a big old highway down, right down the street. And nobody had to go down the little road anymore. You know, and the mill burned, and that was kind of the end of that little town. I loved that town. I still do, it's still there. I need to call up my friend Jerry Parton. I have less of a memory after today. I know I was living in New York City then, and I don't know if it was a real case. I'm trying to remember. I I should go back to my notebooks and see. You know, I recently watched To Kill a Mockingbird with my 10-year-old daughter. I haven't revisited that song in a long time, so I'm not gonna be super eloquent about it, but I do think that it is important, number one, for songs and songwriters to have a creative response to the world they live in. That includes the flaws in our justice system. The feeling of being in the moment which must accompany that kind of situation where you are a participant in a broken system and effectively without a future or a past within it.

SPEAKER_04 6:25

What I loved about it is it just felt so personal. When I say personal, I mean like you could feel like you could be in his shoes.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah, that's right. That's what I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

You did it.

SPEAKER_04 6:42

But yeah, yeah, it was really moving that song. Thank you

The New Album "Sugar" & Dependency on the Music Industry

SPEAKER_04 6:46

so much. Sugar is your first album in almost 10 years. You stopped touring when your daughter turned two. You said that you had lost any desire to fight against an industry that didn't really see what you had to give. You were wondering if that world was gonna hurt you again. Can you talk about what you meant by that regarding the music industry world and then kind of talk about your response? Because I feel like it's a response to that, the title track song.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

I've had the good fortune of having a long career, but I have also been somebody who has been told that I didn't live up to my potential a lot of times too, or that I wasn't, you know, didn't sell enough or wasn't good enough or can't write or whatever, and not who I'm supposed to be. I just think it's a gatekeepy industry, and I think women have to do 17 things more to get notice. At this point, I don't really care. Yeah. But when I stopped touring with my daughter, I damn well did, you know. And when this was my life, I damn well did. When I got off the road with my daughter, that was a very clear decision. There was no way that that wasn't the right thing to do. My career was not gonna sustain us. It is nearly impossible to be a mom on the road, a good mom on the road, the kind of mom I was gonna be. But I had definitely had the feeling of if I had turned a corner and gotten a bus and been able to afford a nanny, I could still have my dream. But that didn't happen. So there was a lot of feelings of failure. You know, feelings of failure of like, you know, my my work never caught the word old on fire. It didn't. I had been told a lot of the things that women are told in this business, which is, you know, you've had a lot of looks. If it hasn't happened yet, it's not gonna happen, that kind of stuff. Somewhere inside of me, you know, I'm a nice enough person that when people say stuff to me, I believe it. There was a part of me that thought, okay, this is it, this is done. I I took it as far as it went, and this is as far as it goes. And on one hand, I'm totally okay with that. I really love my life off stage. I have my creative activity is much bigger than was allowed, the tiny piece that was allowed of me in the music industry. But I just kind of at a certain point after being off the road with my kids, was like, God, all those guys that told me all that stuff, none of them can sing like me.

SPEAKER_04 8:57

Yeah. Don't you think though, too, getting home to your roots that you can kind of see a little more clearly whether it be their motives or how it's totally full of shit or being grounded in uh yes, being grounded.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

I tell you what has helped me. This is a big surprise, is that I am no longer financially 100% dependent on the music industry. That is a very terrifying, scary thing for a head of the household to be doing, unless you are a certain level. And it has always been that way. It has become even more so in the past 15 years. But I do not envy my young self having to navigate all it. And I have always, always, always wanted to only be an artist, and I'm not a hobbyist, and 100% all in. But there is a real power in not being reliant on gatekeepers in order to make your art. Wow. Wow. So you know, I'm an academic, I'm working on a motel, I do a lot of things. And I think there's some real power in having your money where your mouth is in terms of your givea fucks. You know, it's yeah, because if you're financially dependent on it, it matters.

SPEAKER_04 9:59

Right, right. Can

Vulnerability in the Song "Generous"

SPEAKER_04 10:00

you hear my dogs? I'm so glad I can. I love the song Generous. The line, changing girls like changing clothes is killer, as is man enough to be my lover, but not my friend. You say it's a hard song to listen to for you that you'd rather sing it. Can you talk just a little bit about that song? It was very vulnerable.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Yes, for sure. And that, you know, that's the point, right? That's why we try to write something true. Um I think rock and roll is that it's the most powerful when it's vulnerable, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think feeling disposable is a horrible feeling. Even when love is gone or broken or feeling it's disposable rather than something that you honor is a hard place to be.

SPEAKER_04 10:43

It's such an interesting word that you use because I have never heard it put that way, but I feel like it explains a

"Everyday Singing" inspired by a NYC Record Label Owner & a London Based Anarchist Poet

SPEAKER_04 10:50

lot. The song Everyday Singing was inspired by letters between a New York City record label owner and a London-based anarchist poet. I would love to know more about this as well. But people discovered it.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

You know, with the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke, I do a wonderful archival project. It's a collective of folks looking at the papers of Rosetta Wrights who I had not heard of. And actually, Alison Russell played me a record called Sweet Petunias. And I was like, why have I not heard that? Rosetta Wrights was a second wave feminist, downtown New Yorker. She was talking about menopause in the 70s. Um she wrote a book about menopause because she couldn't find one by a woman. I mean, she's just this very unique alive person running in these amazing downtown circles. And in the late 70s, she gets angry that jazz is a male domain. She's like, Where are the women? And she goes looking for them. And she ended up putting out 19 records of erased four mothers of jazz and blues. And a lot of that is because you can see in her letters that she joins this circle of record collectors, and it's all white guys who are all in love with sort of integrity solo guy blues. That's what they call integrity blues, like Robert Johnson. Find the women, something like 86 or 7%, and I know that because Rosetta counted, of the records that came out from 1920 to 1927, it was overwhelmingly female. But all of these jazz critics categorize it as vaudeville because they're like laughing and they look great and they're telling jokes and they're singing. But Robert Johnson, who doesn't come out till 18 years later, is really the blues. And so it's you see the formation of this narrative that is facilitated by a change in technology because they don't make the leap from 33 and a third to 78. And this is because the gatekeepers get to decide in that moment whose music is important, what price they're gonna put on it, and what music is. How is it that we don't know her story? So, you know, I just I think there are a lot of lessons about technology gatekeeping moments, women to having to tell their own stories in order to survive in the music business. You know, it's just a lot of cycles that are really pertinent right now as all of these four mothers of Jazz and Blues train AI models to replace them. I just accidentally bumped into this and thought, you know, how do I not know Rosetta as a veteran in the music business? Because um, in her personal letters, there were letters between she and Desheen Rayner, the anarchist poet, and they're talking about being single moms and how important their daughters are and how stretched thin they are. And their ex-husbands both worked in the anti-nuke movement, and they're talking about Reagan and fascism getting exported all over the world, and you're beautiful, and you're gonna rise from the ashes, and this is hard right now, but you're wonderful, you know. I was like, oh my god, this is like me and my friends. And it gave me so much hope, right? And it gave me so much hope, and it reminds me that like these everyday lives they're way so important. That everyday singing is so much more important than like some slick duck lost up behind the mic presented moment. It's the everyday singing that matters.

SPEAKER_04 14:26

That's

Dorothea Dix Hospital and "Mad Mad World"

SPEAKER_04 14:27

cool. That is cool. Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was the state's first mentality. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

And it was on the edge of town, and now it's right in the middle of town, and they're turning a public park, which is a phenomenal park and a phenomenal thing for our town. But we can't pave that story over and forget. That would be turning our backs on some big lessons and some big questions.

SPEAKER_04 14:55

Yes, yes, for sure, for sure. We had our own version of that here in Tulso's Vanita. It's still a little hike away, but the same idea.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

We were all threatened with that as children, right?

SPEAKER_04 15:07

If you don't behave. Well, and I actually had a grandmother, great great-grandmother, I didn't find out until like 2019, was in that hospital. The husband took her to the psych hospital and left, and who knows why.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Well, I mean, you could trip in the wrong direction and get committed at that point. There's so much shame about it. Yeah. Honestly, it's like if you were poor, or if you were black, or if you were a woman, or if you had Pelagra, which was the diet of the poor, and your hair fell out. It's such a metaphor for and I and I think those places say so much more about who we are on the outside than they do about anybody on the inside. And we've been living in a time which is pretty upside down. Yeah. And so I just had this strange attraction to those stories. Like, why do we treat our vulnerables so awful all the time again and again? Or like, how will we think about what is real in such a strange reality?

SPEAKER_04 16:04

And your song Mad Mad World is about that hospital.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:08

And the forgotten people that society didn't want to deal with.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:12

I love the bridge on that song, by the way. I'm gonna read it if that's okay. And what's so great about living straight in a mess of a place like this, guns and TV, people shouting at me, who to hate and how to live. Call me crazy, commit me, baby, if that's what sane is. Can you talk a little bit about that song?

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Um, I'm proud I wrote it, and I, you know, I just I mean, and are we not all living in an asylum right now?

SPEAKER_04 16:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:41

A little bit.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

I don't know. I you just look for the medicine in the world these days, right? Like, what is the answer to this question? How can we heal ourselves?

SPEAKER_04 16:50

And yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

I can't imagine that committing people and not looking back is any kind of solution for anything. And then here we are doing it again with ice.

SPEAKER_04 17:01

I feel like I'm just gonna say this real quick. Yeah. I feel like maybe we had this false sense of, even though in a lot of ways we were headed in the right direction with a lot of things, that we had overcome those things, our past as a nation. And I feel like maybe we got a little too confident in that. I I do a lot of research too on the side. One of the things I was studying was a trail of tears. I think we just can't be complacent anymore with not treating people right.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Well, I couldn't agree more. And I think it's really hard to think about the systems as a whole and what we can do to change them and where we actually have power to have impact. But living into what you just said every day in our lives, I have no doubt. Like living our principles, putting them into action, putting love into the world, putting kindness into the world, making the most of our lives to make meaning. I think that is where our power lies. Where our power lives right now, and not shying away from the big questions and not taking the easy way. That's all I know to do right

"The Fate of Man is Sarah's Eyes"

SPEAKER_00 18:06

now.

SPEAKER_04 18:06

Yes. The a cappella song, Beta Man, is Sarah's eyes. Taken from the hospital's 1919 sewing room.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Can you tell us a little bit about that? The report from the sewing room. You know, every year that they put out annual reports because they're government agencies, and it was like the report of the garden and the report of the sewing room, and here are the patients making the stuff. This shopping list of coffin pillows and blankets and 700 dresses and curtains and bed seats and I don't know, it was just such powerful imagery. I couldn't help but try to sing it, right? And that's what I did. I just started singing and I recorded myself singing it, and then I tried to live up to that list with the rest of the song.

Hard Questions When Writing Songs

SPEAKER_04 18:49

I read that you hope people feel the joy and laughter and asking of hard questions that went into your writing. Can you talk a little bit about some of those hard questions? What kind of hard questions do you ask yourself when you're creating writing a song? That's a good question.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

The granular hard question is did I say what I mean? And did I say something that hasn't been said? And did I write it all the way? After the act of writing, the process of editing and revising and making it into a something is filled with hard questions. Yeah. You know, having a creative response to now is always a really important thing. What is the question that you're gonna pull on that makes now particular? It's also like, shit. I gotta fall in love again before I die. Just making sure you're asking the honest question, whether it's how do we get here, what does this mean, how does this feel?

SPEAKER_04 19:47

Yeah, I think you're also speaking about openness and vulnerability and doubling down on being real. I imagine that in addition to as a songwriter, that there's also self-work in that, trying to know that you're being honest with yourself. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

I mean, I think that how I make meaning of the mess inside is by writing, right? Right, right. It is what I do when I feel something. So that aspect of my self-care.

unknown 20:16

Definitely.

What Makes a Great Song?

SPEAKER_04 20:18

What do you think makes a great song?

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Oh gosh. Well, I think all the rules are made to be broken. So you make a rule and then you think of something. But I tend to really think that if a song is powerful enough, it has structure enough to hold a lot of music, but also exist in its fullness when it's stripped down. I think that's a good litmus test. I think they're technical things, you know, like the melody has shape, right? And this chord structure has interest, you know, music in it. It's not flat, and then and the language is not lazy, you know. I think that's that's all really important stuff. But at the end of the day, do you feel it? You know, it's like how much heart can you put in it? That's just something you just practice again and again and again, and you hopefully get better at

Tift Merritt Outro

SPEAKER_00 21:05

it.

SPEAKER_04 21:05

Well, Tiff, thank you so much for joining us today. It's really been a privilege having you. You're so nice.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

I really enjoyed it, and I really wish you all the best, especially with your research. Thank you for all your kind

Next Week's Interview with Nanseera

SPEAKER_00 21:20

questions.

SPEAKER_04 21:20

Oh, thank you, Tif. Here's a short clip from next week's interview with Nan Sarah.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Well, first of all, I'm also just very glad that it really moved you. That's what I hope for for this song, always. I am mixed race. My mom is black, she's Ugandan. My dad is white, he's from Maryland. On my dad's side of the family, we have ancestors who were enslavers in Alabama. A few years ago, my dad took my brothers and I down to Mobile, Alabama. We have extended family that who live there still, and genealogy and and keeping track of our ancestors is something that's really, really important. On my this is like my paternal grandmother's side of the family. And so we got to go and learn about our ancestors who were enslavers down there, and not even just about that, but also just about like who they were and how they operated, and to go actually see for ourselves like the places that they would have been going to and the plantation house that they had and the house that they lived on and the street that it was on. And it's funny because posting it online, there's been some sort of anger of like, why did your dad take you there? And like that would be so like horrible. And I don't think he took us there to like necessarily have fun, you know. But I think it was more like this is your history, and you have the privilege of being able to see it for yourself. You know, I'm gonna give you that if I can. You yourself interacting with that history and what remains of it today. So that's a much more long-winded introduction than I usually do. Yeah, so this song is sort of about that experience of being mixed in someone who's considered black, you know, most of the places that I go in the United States. But then also within my American ancestry, my ancestors were never enslaved and were rather the enslavers. And so it's a very interesting experience to be walking through the world, being seen as black, being impacted by a very violent history that my ancestors were part of, upholding and continuing, then you know, sort of having to be on the a lot of times on the on the negatively receiving end of that legacy.

SPEAKER_03 23:19

Welcome to church. It's all marble and windows, and big money stained into glass, and Jesus the Savior is dying across from highly hung Confederate flags. I saw a black woman, and then a policeman. Her body was pulled to the ground, and it seems like nothing is changed in Mobile Except me and my brothers are in town. Rode in my diary, I'll get my matches and gasoline. Oh, I wrote in my diary, I'll burn it out till it's green.

SPEAKER_02 24:13

People ask me why did you burn down my pill? Can't you see the something about you?

SPEAKER_01 24:27

I always say I wrote I it's like a few years ago. It's actually like a decade ago now that we went down to Mobile with my brothers, and so I was actually still in high school at that point. I went to a very, very cool high school and we had shorter semesters in January and May. And in May, one of our teachers was also a singer-songwriter, Anita Isola, very cool, and she ran a songwriting class. So we had three weeks to write a song, and then we would do like a showcase at the end. And I had been going through since my move to boarding school, was just like really rough. I had been going through like a writer's block, and so I really hadn't been writing songs for a couple of years at that point, and so I felt very rusty, very rusty. And I think this experience though, it it haunted me in a way, and in a way, writing the song almost felt like an exorcism. It sounds so dramatic, but like it really, this spirit that was just it couldn't settle, like it was just very disturbing internally. Yeah, and I knew it needed to get out of me. But I also I think this the struggle of writing the song when I talk about like the technicality of that, is like I really I wanted it to be as complex as it felt.

SPEAKER_04 25:34

Thank you so much for listening to Americana Music.com podcast. Be sure to go to Americana Music.com and find playlists of the Americana artists we've interviewed here. Also, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform.