When Tift Merritt emerged out of North Carolina’s college-town club scene in 2002 with her debut label album Bramble Rose, she looked to us newly minted fans of her lovely, neo-country voice to be on top of the world. She’d won the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at Merlefest. And the new Universal Music prestige label Lost Highway had picked her up as its lone new artist, amid its hip roster of Whiskeytown, Johnny Cash, Drive-By Truckers, and (pre-scandal) Ryan Adams.
But in Episode 336 of The String, she looks back with two decades of hindsight, evoking new revelations and more than a little bewilderment. “That was a particularly tricky time for me, in Nashville, to be on a major label. And you know, needing to jump through all of those kinds of hoops,” she says. “I think at the time, I was young enough that I assumed that everybody in the room knew better than me, and were talking to each other.”
Meanwhile, those of us following the Americana music business assumed that Lost Highway was operating with a different ethos from Music Row’s chart and image-driven machine. Behind the scenes though, even as Merritt received praise from critics and DJs, support from her label apparatus was lacking. According to our conversation and a remarkable essay she posted recently at her Nightcap With Tift Merritt Substack, they told her that she should have showed more of her body on her album cover, that her band wasn’t good enough for the big time, and that the demo recordings she was making back in NC for her follow-up album weren’t “hits.”
But Americana music doesn’t even operate on hit songs, I note in our conversation. She replies, “I was told I couldn’t be Americana - that there wasn’t any money in it.”
Of course, Tift Merritt has long been a leading light of Americana music, whatever the suits say, and the story of those demo tapes is central to why this Fall, Tift returned to play Americanafest for the first time in many years.
Her new label, the Virgin Imprint One Riot, has released highlights from the long-shelved early 2000s recordings as Time and Patience, The Tambourine Kitchen Recordings. Tambourine refers to the album that would emerge in 2004 as her breakthrough classic, one that was nominated for Best Country Album at the Grammy Awards. On the same day, the label also re-issued Tambourine as a (belated) 20th anniversary, first-time vinyl release. It invites us to hear songs like “Good Hearted Man,” “Stray Paper” and “Write My Ticket” in a before-after mode - the rough-and-ready snapshots made on a recorder loaned to her by NC music icon Chris Stamey, and the punchy, full-bodied tracks she made with her dream producer George Drakoulias.
Merritt’s story of meeting and clicking with Drakoulias is another key story in this conversation and in her ability to move past the limits placed on her by her Nashville recording contract. “I had so much fun with George. He's such a generous one of a kind character, and you know, he understood what I was after,” she says. Besides a supportive ear, the producer stocked the sessions with artists that Tift loved, including Neal Casal, Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers, and a heroine, Maria McKee of Lone Justice, who sang harmony on a couple of tracks.
“I have been lucky to have a collection of moments where I can go like, Oh my God, my dream just came true. And that was certainly one of them. I mean, looking across the studio at Maria McKee singing on my record, that is something that I will never, ever forget and never ever take for granted.”
Tift was dropped by Universal after Tambourine, but she thrived with acclaimed releases on Fantasy Records and Yep Roc Records over the next decade. When her daughter, now 13, was about two years old, she moved from New York back to North Carolina and slowed her touring schedule down. She’s never set music aside, but she has added new layers to her life, writing long form and working in history and the humanities as a practitioner-in-residence with Duke University for example.
I ask if her sets at Americanafest 2025 could be framed fairly as a “comeback” or at least a return to the music community, and she says there’s some truth to that, but the years to come will likely demonstrate it’s more layered and diversified. “There's something really lovely about being coaxed back from my little life and being reminded that, you know, I have some things left to say, and that playing music is such a special fun thing,” she says near the end of our time together. “So, you know, I have to say a big thank you to everybody who's been involved in this (recent pair of releases) for kind of flushing me out of my house. I'm really grateful.”
