See You On The Moon

Tift Merritt | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 1, 2010)
• Original Release Date: 2010
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Fantasy
• ASIN: B003FBNJ5O
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,353 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

See You On The Moon is Tift Merritt's most visceral work to date. A deeply centered departure, these focused and creative musical short stories find Tift at the height of her powers. "I wanted to make a really direct record. I wanted to take everything to a place that was less labored, of more depth. Open space, real strength. There was a certain feeling of inevitability about it. Like I found these songs whole."

To bring her musical short stories to life, Merritt recruited Tucker Martine, best known for his work with Bill Frisell, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Laura Veirs, Spoon, and as one of Paste magazine's top ten producers of the decade. Martine produced, recorded and mixed the record while receiving a detailed tour of Tift's native turf. "It made a lot of sense to take this record back to North Carolina," she added. "Build a fort in our own backyard." With longtime band mates Zeke Hutchins on drums, Jay Brown on bass and vocals, and guitar player Scott McCall, the Martine-Merritt partnership sounds firmly anchored in the deep water of home while deliberately and wholeheartedly venturing from the docks. "Tucker has such a gentle way of bringing the best out of people, of taking the time to see what you are really made of and getting at, and coaxing you further from there. We wanted to come at things from different directions, not go straight for a band combo, really build around the songs rather than some idea of how things were supposed happen. I played more instruments on this record than any other I've made." At heart, See You On The Moon is a profoundly focused Tift doing what she does best better than she ever has - poignant writing and performing welded to the steady pursuit of new places. Joining the `Moon' sessions were, among others, celebrated pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz and My Morning Jacket's Jim James.

In her nascent career, Tift Merritt has already produced an impressive body of work and earned a passionate, dedicated audience. Her live performances, both with her band and on her own, are similarly riveting. Tift's preceding albums are 2002's debut Bramble Rose, 2005's Grammy nominated Tambourine, and 2008's widely acclaimed Another Country. 2010's stellar See You On The Moon is a most important step forward in a remarkable artistic journey that continues to search, penetrate, and surprise.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Isn't She A First-Magnitude Star Yet?!, June 5, 2010

By 

Erik North (San Gabriel, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: See You On The Moon (Audio CD)

How is it that, after four brilliant studio albums and one live one recorded in England in late 2008 (BUCKINGHAM SOLO), Tift Merritt is still not a star of the first magnitude?

While pop radio is still obsessed with overproduced divas, and country radio is over-infatuated with the bland, inoffensive hits of Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift, Tift has quietly made a name for herself during the last eight years as a singer/songwriter of intelligence and heart that was a mandatory thing back in the 1970s. That trend continues with SEE YOU ON THE MOON, a gorgeous bit of rootsy, often folk-influenced, country and rock recorded with producer Tucker Martine in Tift's home state of North Carolina with longtime backing musician friends Zeke Hutchins and Jay Brown, along with pedal steel master Greg Leisz (now one of the most wanted session guys of the last twenty years). Save for "Live Till You Die" (written by Emmit Rhodes of the 1960s pop group Merry-Go-Round) and "Danny's Song" (an acoustic folk/country take on the Kenny Loggins composition that was a Top 10 country/pop hit for Anne Murray in the spring of 1973), the songs on this album are all from Tift's pen, all of them rendered in her own quiet, breezy, but highly incisive fashion. And as usual, Tift's musical eclecticism covers social commentary ("After Today"), R&B ("Mixtape"; "Papercut"), modern folk ("The Things That Everybody Does"; the title cut) and Linda Ronstadt/Emmylou Harris-influenced country-rock ("Six More Days Of Rain"; "All The Reasons We Don't Have To Fight").

With all this, on top of this album's predecessors, Tift should be up there on that exalted plain occupied by her spiritual mentors Linda and Emmylou, or at least alongside Sheryl Crow (to whom she has also been compared in the past). And in a perfect world, or if this were still the 1970s, that is exactly where Tift would be. It's a pity that the powers-that-be that determine who gets radio airplay don't see her music as a legitimate asset, or that a lot more people don't know about her; because over these first ten years-plus of the 21st century, Tift has, for me, been the best female singer to come down the road. SEE YOU ON THE MOON validates this for me for the fifth time in a row--an intelligent combination of modern songwriting and old school, rootsy musical values. If you are tired of the same overblown divas and bland Music Row assembly line mentality that so dominate corporate radio, please don't hesitate to check out SEE YOU ON THE MOON--or for that matter, everything else that Tift has done. You definitely will not be sorry.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adding the wisdom of age to the beauty of youth, June 3, 2010

By 

Mitchell Kokai (Raleigh, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: See You On The Moon (Audio CD)

You wouldn't know it by looking at her, but Tift Merritt has been doing this music thing for some time now. She already had been honing her skills for several years by the time her first recordings with the Two-Dollar Pistols surfaced in 1999.

It was the first album under her own name, 2002's Bramble Rose, that generated "The Buzz," and she's had some version of that acclaim ever since. This background is necessary only to underscore the fact that Tift never has settled for a formulaic approach to her music. She could have chosen to stick to an "alt-country" groove, or made her name as a soulful rocker, or channeled the '70s singer-songwriter vibe into a series of well-received albums.

Instead she has decided to follow her muse wherever it leads. And on See You On The Moon, her fourth album of original material, that muse leads in different directions, with pleasing results. Others will focus on the inspiration for particular tracks -- and the stories behind the songs are good, to be sure -- but most people exposed to these songs won't bother to read about the lost friends and relatives, roller-skating hijinks, and '70s rock-and-roll recluses who helped spark the flame in the recording studio.

You don't need to know the stories to feel the power of the music. Whether hard groovin' ("Mixtape"), rockin' out ("Engine To Turn"), turning introspective ("Never Talk About It"), or getting snthemic ("Feel Of The World"), Tift shows that the woman who inhabits that pint-sized frame knows more about what she's doing than the girl who started on the musical journey more than a decade ago.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My introduction to the artist, June 1, 2010

By 

Geonn W. Cannon "geonn" (Oklahoma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: See You On The Moon (Audio CD)

I had only vaguely heard of Tift Merritt in the past, and I picked this album up on a whim. I knew that it was a good choice from the first song. I skipped ahead to the title track, because I like songs about the moon (it's weird, I know, but it got me to pick up the album in the first place). "See You on the Moon" is so haunting, and lyrically beautiful, that I had to listen to it a few times before I could move on. When I had gone through the entire album, I had to go to Tift Merritt's website and read the little stories about how she wrote each song. The stories, while not necessary, give an amazing additional depth to each track.

I'm not going to do a song-by-song review. But songs like Engine to Turn, Six More Days of Rain, and After Today are staggering in their depth. Hopefully this album will increase Tift Merritt's presence so that people won't have to discover her the way I did. Talent like this deserves to be recognized.

This was my first experience with Tift Merritt, but it's definitely not going to be my last. I look forward to going back and exploring her past releases while waiting for her next album.