Tift Merritt

After all, cranking out tune after tune has never been Merritt’s style. She doesn’t want to grow up as an artist in front of a listening audience, nor does she feel the urge to release every song in her catalog. She’s not interested in sharing a series of rough drafts — only polished gems.

“I’m a reviser, a perfectionist,” she says, describing her songwriting approach. “If it’s not right, it’s worth waiting for. I think a lot of times as a writer, you feel like what you’re working on has to be the most important thing to you at the time. But some songs fall away quickly, and others not so quickly. The special ones tend to hang around.”

This grounded mindset has served as Merritt’s compass since high school. Determined to navigate life on her own terms, she didn’t head straight to college. Instead, she spent a few years waiting tables and moving around the country with her dog, Lucy, eventually landing in New York, where she cut a demo and logged some time a studio backup singer.

Merritt returned to the South in the fall of 1997, enrolling in a creative-writing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She had a class with fellow musician Zeke Hutchins, who, a day after hearing a tape of her earlier songs, showed up at her apartment with a drum kit and a stack of old records. He told her she’d better get used to playing live, because they were starting a band.

The Carbines assembled gradually over the next year, adding a layer of frayed country with each new member. Readling brought dobro, steel guitar and keys to the ensemble, and bassist Jay Brown later introduced rich harmony vocals to the fold just before the band’s first appearance at SXSW. Momentum built — and label offers began to trickle in — though it would be a while before the group entered the studio.

Despite the early buzz, Merritt and Co. insisted on preserving a deliberate pace. The longer they waited, they thought, the better they’d sound on record. Playing shows would make them tighter, and tighter gigs would lead to bigger crowds in Carolina’s twang-friendly Triangle area, which had already spawned Whiskeytown and The Backsliders. A deal with Sugar Hill fell through at the last minute, but Merritt didn’t fret; she decided to hang onto her cards.

In 1999, a small newspaper hired Merritt to photograph Lucinda Williams and Jim Lauderdale at MerleFest, Doc Watson’s annual bluegrass/Americana festival in Wilkesboro, N.C. Her press pass gave her access to the backstage area, where she mingled with future contemporaries like Gillian Welch and then returned home inspired to write.

The following year Merritt gigged hard, both with the band and solo, anxious for exposure outside the Raleigh area. She returned to MerleFest that spring as a performer, entering the festival’s Chris Austin Songwriting Contest — the same showcase Welch won in 1993.