Places blur one into the other when you’re a musician on tour spending just 12 or 15 waking hours in each venue’s locale.
If you go
Tift Merritt with Jason Collett
Where: The Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Info: $25; ticketmaster.com
Perhaps it’s that feeling of transience that leads many back to the places they consider “home” when important work beckons. That was true for Tift Merritt, who recorded her recent release “See You on the Moon” in North Carolina. “It’s just funny that our lives become this weird geography lesson when we’re on tour,” Merritt said. “After a while, it doesn’t matter where you are — but in another way it really does. North Carolina is our home and there’s no feeling like being home. No feeling at all.”
So when hassles of recording — as planned — in the west became greater than the perceived benefit, Merritt and her band decided to head back to North Carolina. Not only was it the place she and her band called home, but she knew and loved the studio – and what musician could resist a studio with a tried-and-true “good luck” piano in it.
The result is an album packed with comfortable, soul-inflected Americana songs that will sometimes put one in mind of Bill Withers, a musician whose music Merritt and her band often listed to while recording and otherwise crafting on the album. Add to that vocals by Jim James of My Morning Jacket on “Feel of the World” and some inviting but deceptively intricate ballads and grooves, and you see how far Merritt’s music has advanced.
Merritt makes it clear that although the album’s recording took her back to home, musically it is a true step forward for her sound.
“You are always surrounded by certain things we love. We say ‘I love that movie or I love that book or I love this record,'” she said. “We definitely thought a lot about Bill Withers on this record because his arrangements are so spare and yet so powerful.”
A more laid-back, less intense focus on — for lack of a better term — the expected mechanics of certain songs is obvious in the songs.
“I wanted to come at these with a sincere point of view,” she said. “I think that people freak out a little bit too much about things … We really approached some things different. We weren’t saying ‘ok, let’s get the drums in here,’ or ‘we need bass here.’ We let the songs grow naturally.”
