Tift Merritt - Tambourine

Genre country Publisher Lost Highway External Links Tiff Merritt Lost Highway

Tambourine does studio-rock up proud. It's a bit canned-sounding--kind of trebly, somehow--and the lyrics are nothing special. Tift's looking for redemption in the underground and lets us know that "Sometimes I am a fool/Who's dealing cards/To a ghost that's running late." Which is all right, but from the evidence of the record Tift had lived in a few places with rainy climates and needed to get back south to her roots--the South where they make calibrated, mildly involving records like this one, complete with Exile on Main St. piano, Tom Petty organ, Stax/Muscle Shoals horns. This record even ends in an Exile-ish vein, with the gospel-lite "Shadow in the Way." Somehow or another Tift sounds too together for underground redemptions, rigged card games with ghosts, ungainly shadows and that kind of foolishness.

This record has been nominated for the Best Country Album Grammy, and far be it from any writer to say what's country and what's not. But this is L.A.-meets-Nashville studio rock--Robert Altman might well cast Tift if he were to revisit Nashville for one last look around--and she sounds too comfortable for country, a bit too vague. She sings like Sandy Denny a couple of places, maybe. This is one of those records for which so much time and energy was spent in effacing personality that the thing takes on some sort of unintended personality all its own. As with so much studio-rock from the early '70s, this is rock that doesn't quite rock and after a while one can become seriously fascinated trying to figure out why anyone would go to the trouble.

Studio pros and semi-pros like Jack Nitzsche, Thomas Jefferson Kaye, Michael Nesmith and, of course, old Gram Parsons--who are, along with Bonnie Raitt, the spiritual forefathers of Tift Merritt--had a real subject thirty years ago: California didn't turn out like they thought. Whereas Tift, skillful as she is, and as enjoyable as a song like "Ain't Looking Closely" is, just doesn't seem to have anything to write about. It's the inevitable difference between California as a hugely conflicted pop wonderland and Nashville and the South as a very un-pop straight-ahead fantasy world. Point of view and meaningful eccentricity aren't present as far as I can hear; I don't get any sense of why Tift's chosen these particular cliches and received musical structures. The whole thing is competent-plus and Tift sings well, but it's basically a singer-songwriter move and judged as such Tambourine is certainly no competition for, say, Freedy Johnston, who had a somewhat similar fascination with readymade forms but who used them in a far cannier way. So--somewhat sexy, not uninvolving, alt-country lite; Nashville seems to have turned out just like Tift thought.