Tift Merritt and a Grit that Shines on Sugar
Are you strong enough to do the gritty work of love?
This is the question. It’s the question that holds up the bridge of Sugar’s opening track, “Finest Feelings.” And it’s the question all of Tift Merritt’s latest studio album, and her first since 2017’s Stitch of the World.
I’ve known one thing about Tift Merritt since I first encountered her in the Oxford American celebrating Eudora Welty as a beacon. She is a fierce artist, one who holds creativity as sacred above ambition, who writes with the open-hearted ethic that makes county-soul true through the deep swirling motions of strings and horns.
Though all these instruments are here too.
When Merritt asks, “Are you strong enough to do the gritty work of love?” it’s a question as political as it is intimate, as abstract as it is domestic. These celebrations of the many creases that stitch love together are what Merritt calls her “best attempt at a creative response to now”—whether it is the sweeping currents of our common lives or more often the laundry and bills and messes that stack up.
Sugar is, as routinely noted, the first Merritt made after the birth of her daughter, and the first made in the total peace that she may never make another.
Thank goodness these fruits of Merritt’s integral artistic practice to daily make sense of life have found their form. For the postures she takes are those of surviving.
In “Mad Mad World” Merritt reckons with our histories of marginalization in the light that remains of the asylum on the edge of the town. Considering how diagnoses of madness are built upon social class and gender, Merritt gestures toward solidarity. She decides that madness may be sane in this cruel world filled as it is with guns and shouting TVs.
This meditation finds its reflection on “Last Ditch Ultimatum,” a humorously apocalyptic imagining where heaven is closed until it gets made on Earth in universalist fashion–in Paris–”with the drag queens and orphans and sweet Mary Magdalene.”
The anthem for this cause is, of course, “Everyday Singing,” which Merritt wrote after a series of letters between Rosetta Rietz and Dachine Rainer. In their correspondence is uncovered a kind of assurance–not about the ultimate resolution but about the continued revolutions. “Whatever comes next,” Merritt sings, “there always will be poets and revolutionaries, people who risk their own for another, and the everyday singing of mothers and daughters.” The choir assembled for coda brings it home–that all the gritty work of love is what transcends us anyway.
On Sugar, Merritt has rekindled singing as the way to break the locks on the gates, doors, and hearts that keep us from each other and from ourselves. It’s out now, so grab your copy here. And if you get the feeling, sing along!
– – –
On Sugar, Merritt is accompanied by a wonderful cast of musicians from the choir of mothers and daughters and sisters and friends on “Everyday Singing” to a backing band–including Robert Ellis on electric & acoustic guitar, Todd Bolden on bass, and Peter Levin on piano and keys, Audley Reed on electric guitar, and Juan Solorzano on pedal steel & electric guitar. Eric Slick, Fred Eltringham, and McKenzie Smith all play drums across Sugar. The strings are arranged by Jordan Lehning and performed by Kristin Weber (violin), Patrick Monnius (viola), and Emily Rodgers (cello). And the horns are arranged by Marc Franklin and performed by Marc Franklin (trumpet), Art Edmaiston (saxophone), and Roy Agee (trombone).
Lawrence Rothman co-produced Sugar with Tift Merritt. It was engineered by Louis Remenapp, except the choir on “Everyday Singing,” was recorded and engineered by Chris Boerner at The Gables. Sugar was recorded and mixed by Lawrence Rothman and Louis Remenapp at Gold Pacific Studio and mastered by Pete Lyman at Infrasonic Sound.