Mon March 17 Philadelphia Johnny Brenda's
Tue March 18 Northampton, MA Iron Horse
Wed March 19 New York City Mercury Lounge
Fri March 21 Alexandria, VA Birchmere
Sat March 22 Durham, NC Carolina Theater
Fri March 28 New Orleans Parish/HOB
Sat March 29 Pittsburgh Club Cafe
Sun March 30 Ashland, KY Mountain Stage / Paramount Theater
Tue April 1 Toronto El Mocambo
Wed April 2 Ann Arbor, MI Ark
Fri April 4 Chicago Schubas
Sat April 5 Madison, WI High Noon Saloon
Sun April 6 Minneapolis Cedar Cultural Center
Tue April 8 Denver Bluebird Theater
Fri April 11 Vancouver Plaza
Sat April 12 Portland Doug Fir Lounge
Sun April 13 Seattle Tractor Tavern
Tue April 15 San Francisco Great American Music Hall
Thu April 17 Los Angeles Troubador
Fri April 18 San Diego Anthology
Sat April 19 Tucson Plush
Mon April 21 Austin Parish
Tue April 22 Dallas Cambridge Room
Thu April 24 Atlanta Five Spot
Fri April 26 Wilkesoro, NC Merlefest

woohoo! we'll be at mpls for sure on 4/6.
and what fun could a night in mad town be on a saturday night.

Enjoy, Kent! We saw Tift Merritt with Brad Rice playing lead at the Birmingham Museum of Art, the summer before last. What a great show (and what a sweet girl)! I told her she should have won the Grammy for Tambourine and the lady standing with her at the merchandise table hollered, "There ya go!"

An email from Tift's fan site:

JUST ANNOUNCED!
THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO
Tift will be appearing on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Monday, February 25, the night before Another Country hits record store shelves in North America, February 26.


(unfortunately I will be in Texas when Tift plays the Mercury Lounge here with her band next month )

from my weekly ear x-tacy e-mail...

Enjoying Another Country more & more. Sweet....real sweet

i gotta go get that. thanks for the reminder.

reminder about tonight.

pits.

i fell asleep!

TM with Buddy Miller & a few other videos on this page

Wow, Tift really done good! If you have a broadband connection, you can download an NTSC format .mpg file of her Leno appearance from my website at:

http://kbergend.tripod.com/tift2008-02-25leno_ntsc.mpg

The file is about 235Mb.

Very cool to see Doug Pettibone playing pedal steel -- anyone know if he will be touring with her?

same here. it's very, very nice. can't wait to see her on tour up here in early april.
amazon has a video she made just for them on their web site of the song 'broken'
right here
on the same page is a nice review of the album, plus a rather interesting customer review

I've already completely forgiven George Drakoulias for Tambourine!

for anybody in this general area...

Finally picked up Another Country, this afternoon. Most excellent!

the bad news...about 4"-5" wintery mix of snow, sleet & ice is on the ground, it has consistantly been falling since about 8:00 am this morning. and still is...

the good news... an e-mail from ear x-tacy about noon, simply said "come rain, sleet or snow tift is still playing"

well, about 30 or 40 of us braved it and she was very impressed and happy. so happy that she expanded her planned 30 minute set to about an hour and 15 minutes. it was tift solo, on her acoustic and keys. she played most of the new record w/a few from "bramble & tamborine" thrown in for good measure. about 1/2 way into the show, as keith noted in an earlier post, she stepped out in front of the monitors, as she excused herself to the people sitting on the floor and said "can you hear me ok? let's try this" and launched to a beautiful, almost acapella version of "supposed to make you happy." it was stunning. beautiful. even in the middle of a busy record story on a snowy friday night. it was dead still and quiet.

afterwards she said "if you've got anything you want me to sign, if you wanna say hi, whatever, i'll be here" and she hung around and chatted, signed and asked everybody how they liked the new record, joked about the snow. she was wearing, as she explained a "carolina blue," not "kentucky blue" ear x-tacy sweatshirt/hoodie that she explained that she made john (ear x's owner) give it to her because she was "horribly unprepared" for the weather, it was snowing and she didn't even bring a coat and was wearing about 6" open toed heels (which john commented "i like your snow boots"). she said, "wasn't it 60 degrees here yesterday?"

during the show and meet and greet, the snow turned to ice and the drive home was a little slippery. but it was well worth the trip. i'll post a few pics in a while, sorting them now.

tift's gibson


tift w/john timmon's, owner of ear x-tacy in the background






"supposed to make you happy"













click on the concert pic link in my sig to see more if you are interested....

Lots of fun at the Tift show in Pittsburgh on Saturday. She did two shows -- one solo early show, and a second show with the full band. I went to the latter.

The second show opened up with a local band -- Cellofourte -- which consists of four musicians playing cellos to a hard, driving rock beat. Yes, they're a talented bunch, but after a couple of songs, I think you've pretty much covered the range of rock cello music. Seven or eight songs was a bit much, in my opinion.

It seemed like a longer-than-normal delay in Tift finally coming out, and she admitted she was in the back caught up in the NCAA tourney as North Carolina was in the final minutes of its game. After she eventually started, she got updates from a member of her crew between songs.

She naturally played a lot from her new CD. All in the all, the show rocked and she seemed to be in a jovial mood, especially after the NC win. Band sounded great.

Personally, I thought the highlight was "Ain't Looking Closely." Great song.

On the other end, I would have preferred to hear "Virginia" in its normal uptempo style, as opposed to the ballad she turned it in to last night. Also, sad to see "Good Hearted Man" missing from the playlist.

After the show, Tift stayed by the merchandise table and talked with fans, signing CDs and such. Very personable. Made you wish you could stay there all night and chat.

Last Sunday night 4/4 we saw an incredible show at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis with Tift and a very impressive opener, the
Everybodyfields. Tift is an absolute showperson, a dynamo on stage, and you could tell she was having a blast playing that night.
Most of her material was from Another Country. Smiling at the end, and shaking hands with all of us in the front row, she seemed almost
embarrassed at the standing ovation we gave her. This was our first time seeing Tift, and it will not be the last.
Afterwards she came out to visit with fans and sign cd's.


Sam and Jill of the Everybodyfields



A few of Tift Merritt, we were sitting in the front row right in front of her keyboards.


Setlist. She also played Virginia near the end, and I'm not familiar enough with her songs
to tell you if those in the half circle to the right are songs of not. And she also played Good Hearted Man and also Tambourine solo.

They are, my bet would be:

Good Hearted Man
Tambourine
The Plainest Thing
Mille Tendresses
(When I Cross Over)

Glad you guys had the opportunity to see her, Kent! Thanks for the pics and review. And Tift is always a dynamo onstage and incredibly friendly and gracious offstage, in my experience.

More U.S. dates announced!

Fri Jun 6 Boston, MA Paradise (with James Hunter)
Tue Jun 10 Philadelphia, PA World Cafe Live (with James Hunter)
Wed Jun 11 New York, NY Blender Theater (with James Hunter)
(May-June 11 Tift solo, June 15-on Tift & band)
Sat Jun 21 Telluride, Colorado Telluride Bluegrass Festival
Wed June 25 TV: Late Show With David Letterman, CBS TV
Thu June 26 Annapolis, MD Rams Head
Fri July 11 Indianapolis, IN Radio Radio
Sat July 12 Berwyn, IL Fitzgerald's Night Club
Fri July 18 Knoxville, TN The Pilot Light
Sat July 19 Nashville, TN Grand Ole Opry + free plaza show
Sun July 20 Nashville, TN 3rd & Lindsley, simulcast on WRLT
Thu July 24 Burlington, VT City Artist Festival at Battery Park (free!)
Wed Aug 6 Boston, MA Museum of Fine Arts
Thu Aug 7 New York, NY Bowery Ballroom
Fri Aug 8 Burke Mountain, Vermont The Tamarack
Sat Aug 9 Pawling, NY Towne Crier
Fri Aug 22 Isle of Palms, SC Windjammer
Sat Aug 23 Raleigh, NC North Carolina Museum of Art
Sun Aug 24 Wilmington, NC Greenfield Amphitheater, WUIN The Penguin 106.7fm 5th Anniversary celebration

I wish that Tift would come and do a full show around these parts!!! She was great when she did her thing at Tall Stacks back in October 2006!!

There are plenty of great venues here in the Dayton/Cincy/Columbus areas she could play--I may have to run over to Indy to see her in July though since that is about as close to here that she seems to be playing.

13 Jul: Madison, WI @ Art Fair on the Square, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
This date just showed up on her web site.
It may be worth the 4 hour drive to Mad-town to see Tift.
Plus the Art Fair on the Square is incredible to go to, artists from all over the country
all around the Wisconsin State Capitol grounds, plus 4 music stages.

I drove up to the Towne Crier Café in Pawling NY from Long Island (about 90 miles) last night to see Tift, having missed her appearance at the Mercury Lounge in NYC some months back because I had to be out of town. I picked up my friend Arlene (who lives in Manhattan) at the Pawling train station at 7:01 and we headed over to the venue to have dinner before the 9:00 show. There was already a pretty good crowd seated near the stage when we arrived at 7:10, but we got a table with a good view about 20 feet from the stage a little left of center.

I had never heard opener Jess Klein, and I gotta say she was absolutely phenomenal! With a plaintive sultry voice and formidable technique on a guitar that's nearly as big as she is, she had the audience absolutely transfixed (myself included). I actually had to loosen loosen my collar during her spine-tingling performance of Willie Dixon's The Same Thing, during which you could have heard a pin drop.

Tift and the boys came on a little after 10:00 and opened with Morning Is My Destination with Tift at the piano. It was a very spirited show, as I've come to expect from Tift by now (I think this was show #8 for me). This was the first time I've seen the band with Scott McCall and I thought he did a really fabulous job on lead. They performed Supposed to Make You Happy unmiked with Jay and Scott turning in beautiful harmonies, and also went off mike for brief but lovely interludes during Keep Me Happy, Broken, Something To Me and When I Cross Over. Tift performed Good Hearted Man solo on the piano (after encouraging the staff to silence the register noisily pumping out the dinner receipts) and they closed with a rousing performance of When I Cross Over. Mille Tendresses was the encore.

By the time the show was over it was about 10 minutes before Arlene's last train back to NYC. I had brought my copy of Another Country for Tift to sign, but a long line had already formed to talk to her when I came out of the men's room and I really couldn't wait. So I just stopped alongside the line across from her and Zeke on our way to the front door and called out "Tift! I have to catch a train, but -- I LOVE YOU!" She flashed me that big smile of hers and reached out her arm through the people standing in front of her, and I squeezed her hand and waved. "Don't miss your train!" she laughed. It was a good moment.

I could say a lot more about the show but a recording is worth a thousand words (and then some), so you can download hi-fi mp3s from this link:

http://kbergend.tripod.com/tm2008-08-09.zip

The house mix wasn't quite as good as other times I've seen Tift perform and there's a bit of clipping during the very loudest parts of the show, but for the most part it sounds pretty nice. I boosted the gain a little on Supposed To Make You Happy to make it more audible. Enjoy!

01 Morning Is My Destination
02 Hopes Too High
03 Stray Paper
04 I Know What I'm Looking For Now
05 Another Country
06 Supposed To Make You Happy (unmiked)
07 Tell Me Something True
08 Keep You Happy
09 My Heart Is Free
10 Ain't Looking Closely
11 Broken
12 Tender Branch
13 Something To Me
14 Good Hearted Man
15 When I Cross Over
[encore]
16 Mille Tendresses

AT943c > Marantz PMD620 @24/44.1
cardreader > USB > Audition 3.0/Ozone 3 > CD Wave > Apple mp3 encoder @192kbps
Editing: gain adjustments, EQ, compression < 120 Hz, MBIT+ dither to 16 bits

your wish has been granted mike...



it is at the southgate house, but as jeff bird (cowboy junkies) said, "this place sounds pretty good...for such a shithole."

and she's also doing a free show about two miles from my house!

Coincidentally, I streamed a bunch of archival shows on wfuv yesterday when I was at work, including Tift's Studio A recording.

There was another show from the Cutting Room with Escovedo. She was wonderful; he - not so much. His voice just didn't "Cut" it for me.

as always keith, thanks for the words and the music.

whoa!

http://www.myspace.com/jessklein

http://www.jessklein.com/

dammit keith, your killin' me here.

She played that Soda Water song Saturday night ... wow!

yeah, that was the first one i listened to, nailed me.