TIFT MERRITT – SUGAR: REVIEW
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
TIFT MERRITT
Sugar (One Riot)
LOOK AROUND AND IT IS EASY to find some well-meaning or well-remunerated type telling us how what we need to build – in ourselves, in society, in our sporting team – is resilience, that somewhat forced addendum to the self-help catalogue that too often boils down to the claim that not being crushed is a win, still walking is some kind of reward. I get it, and it is not to be sniffed at to come out of a relationship or a job or a life-changing moment intact and able to continue. But is that all there is? What about the day after?
For any of us who cringe-wince whenever that lecture begins, it is a strange and beautiful thing to find a collection of songs that place resilience as something more than surviving or deflecting the worst. Songs that look at why and then how without losing track of what matters. Sugar is just that.
“I’ll show you all the sugar and the spaces in between/All the sugar that only I can sing”.
Tift Merritt, who has not released an album for nearly 10 years, isn’t satisfied with just surviving or even rebuilding, arguing instead that the real win, the real reward, is retaining what mattered and sharing that, or finding a new way to be that says I can do better, be someone more, and I don’t have to drown the past – my past, my self – to do so. That’s why on an album where plenty that can go wrong in someone’s life does go wrong and an empty space in your life can yawn hungrily, joy is in the bones of it all, from the personal to the professional.
Not unfettered joy but solidly built, worked-for joy that entitles her to say, ostensibly to a lover but really to all of us, “You just forget my heart was generous”, and it’s not a slap down but a seam of hope buried in regret.
In Generous, Merritt lays out the terrain in the aftermath of abandonment (by someone for whom “changing girls is like changing clothes”): pictures that can’t be looked at anymore, letters that won’t be read, the knowledge that the one who walked out for “something better” is all but saying she’s not worth it. With little more than guitar and bass and a voice that hides nothing of its vulnerability she doesn’t say some variation of whatever doesn’t kill me blah blah – for goddamn this hurts and there’s nothing good about that – but pitches her firmness as a source of satisfaction.
Within the more clearly theatrical Locks, Merritt enters with a steady gaze and gait that offers a mood that inexorably becomes the kind of just-barely-controlled drama of a Barbara or Charles Aznavour (or a Wainwright sibling). The drums are steady but feel like they push, the piano rolls through but around it things firm up in her repetition of “I’m trying to sing all the locks off my heart” that doesn’t promise it will happen but suggests you shouldn’t bet against it. And Library Of Dust (“Everything is written of us in the library of dust”), springs from those same French dramatic roots but brings to it a layer of Patti Smith, rhythmically and in phrasing, that once again says more isn’t out of the question just because less has been offered, that there’s “More than you can conceive/In the lines of six oak leaves”, so why not move to it?
If there is space to question in those songs, there is no hiding the positivity, and the call to share it, in the rising warmth of Everyday Singing. Community in voice (the choir of women and girls who come in in its latter stages to embody its verses), community in rhythm (the ticking momentum that pulls all the instruments like a hand on your sleeve encouraging you on) and community in spirit (“Whatever comes next, there always will be poets and revolutionaries/People who risk their own for another, and the everyday singing of mothers and daughters”) is the foundation. But there’s more than that: there’s the right to go on and be more. “Men hold back, but I’m so free/I cross oceans, I fly centuries,” she sings.
And I’ve not yet mentioned the gift of pleasure in the soul-punched Look What Love Just Did, where southern brass encourages dance, and the sensuality of Someone To Watch The Band With Me, which celebrates the shared pleasures of music and bodies and bodies as music, even as it pines for its fulfilment (“When are you coming home?/I’m tired of sleeping all alone/I need someone to watch the band with me.”). Or the folk layers of voices in the round of Fate Of Man Is Sarah’s Eyes that underpin Merritt’s proselytising vocals.
By the time of the closing track, the gospel gathering Philosopher’s Song, where she gives thanks and offers succour, the sense that we may have been gathered in a church of the unpoisoned mind is sealed. Among imagery of nature’s circularity and a piano that brings the choir stalls to the pews, Merritt explains that she’s not the finished product, still “swimming in the water for an answer going by”, but along the way in that search she’ll savour “any kindness I can find” and return it. Because that’s the way of genuine resilience, the way to “start anew and undo all the marks of man”.
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