“I’m not a political writer at all,” she stresses. “It’s just not how I can communicate with people….I didn’t know what to write about; I didn’t know what to say to John about his father. And I just started singing about America, and about patriotism, and — I think that song is about people who are marginalized….Everybody has felt that place where you are marginalized, where you can’t get in from the cold, or it doesn’t matter which side you’re on. Although, this is my intelligent assessment of it, after the fact. I don’t know what I was aware of at the time [I was writing it].
“But anyway, we were going to record it, and we were in the studio September 11th. And, so, ‘Bird Of Freedom’ ended up being the last song that we recorded. We saved it for last because we we probably wouldn’t have any emotional energy left after we did it. But we all decided that it was important to keep playing that song, even though ‘marginalized’ changes really fast.”
“Bird Of Freedom” is the sole song on the album that features Merritt on piano instead of guitar. Elsewhere, most of the keyboards are handled by Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, the one player who supplemented the Carbines’ contributions in the studio. This cut somewhat into Readling’s role on the record, limiting him largely to pedal steel, but he’s quick to credit what Tench brought to the table.
“I knew that he was gonna be playing on the record, and I really felt nothing more than excitement. I mean, Benmont’s stuff is — I’m already trying to copy a lot of it,” he confesses with a laugh. “I feel like I’ve benefited some from that. I definitely learned some things. It’s not that he played a lot of things that I couldn’t play, but he has amazing taste; he’s a great player.”
Johns, in addition to producing, also added quite a few guitar solos to the album — enough to where Merritt and the band realized they might want to add a lead guitarist to their lineup before they began touring behind the record. Not surprisingly, the guy who ended up getting the job was Dave Wilson, leader of the erstwhile Stillhouse — the band Merritt had gradually pilfered a couple years earlier to form the Carbines. Sometimes, what goes around comes around.
“Yeah, I totally schooled Greg and Jay, and Tift stole ’em from me…and now I’m just gonna pay her back and wait until we get a really big gig, and not show up,” Wilson cracks, an apt demonstration of the live-wire humor and attitude he brings to an otherwise famously polite lineup.
More seriously, he explains that he’d always naysayed the idea of adding him as a guitarist when it had inevitably surfaced previously. “I never really thought they needed a guitar player, personally,” he says. “But with the way that her new tunes started coming out, the ones she was writing for the record, it did need it. It sounds a lot better when it’s fuller. Greg’s playing Hammond when he’d never really played much of anything besides a little Wurlitzer here and there. Which is cool; it fills out the sound, and gives it different textures.”
There’s one song Merritt wrote last year during her winter-spring spree that didn’t make it onto Bramble Rose, even though it was probably the perfect closing track for the album. The band did attempt to cut it in the studio, but they weren’t quite satisfied with the result — perhaps because it’s best rendered completely solo, as Merritt played it in a midnight gig at Merlefest 2001, the first time she’d shared it with an audience.
“Not Quite Ready To Go” was inspired by her memories of that little house in Bynum, where Zeke Hutchins first set up his drums in the kitchen to accompany her more than four years ago. Sometimes, even as your dreams are carrying you everywhere you’ve ever longed to go, you can’t help but pine for the times you’re leaving behind:
The sweat, and the sound of cicadas
The night, pressed up against
The light, coming out of the kitchen
Everything made sense
On a balmy February day, Tift departs the Bynum General Store and presently pulls into the driveway of that empty house. Walking through the grass and the dirt and the weeds, she peeks through the windows at the spirits that linger within those walls.
Outside, her trusted companion Lucy dashes and dances with boundless excitement, clearly overjoyed to romp around her old stomping grounds once again. The sun is setting over the ramshackle barn in the yard as Tift peers up into the hayloft and leans lazily on a rickety gate.
Before long, it’s time to return to Raleigh, where band practice awaits. Lucy wanders up to the van, but pauses, uncharacteristically reluctant to climb aboard. As she breathes in the sights, the sounds, the smells of the old homestead for a few more moments, her sentiment becomes clear: She’s not quite ready to go.
Tift Merritt will carry that with her, wherever she goes.
ND co-editor Peter Blackstock is partial to the Rose brand of pork brains at the Bynum General Store.
