Listen to the first single to be taken from it below.
Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Tift Merritt has announced Sugar, her first album in nearly a decade, due out June 26th via One Riot which is described as “defining new chapter for the North Carolina-bred artist, long regarded as one of Americana’s most influential voices.”
Merritt stepped largely out of the spotlight following her 2017 albumStitch of the World, turning her focus toward raising her daughter, serving as a Practitioner-in-Residence at Duke University, helping shape the hotel reinvention of The Gables in Raleigh, NC, and advocating for musician rights through the Artist Rights Alliance. That time away – lived fully and on her own terms – quietly expanded her sense of purpose, laying the foundation for the songs that would becomeSugar.
An unguarded collection rooted in Merritt’s radiant blend of country-soul, Sugar was written across eight years of lived experience and “reveals an artist returning with renewed clarity and emotional depth. Moving fluidly between the intimate and the expansive, the album finds Merritt celebrating fleeting moments of grace while grounding her songs in the realities of everyday life.”
With the album announcement, Merritt has shared the album’s lead single Finest Feelings which you can watch below. “There’s nothing so fine as the urgency of love—someone who shakes you up and reminds you how much you have inside,” she says. “This song just spilled out, full of hope and fear and possibility and also the longing to be fully known.”
“Before I made this record, I was looking at the world and thinking, ‘I don’t know what to do except try to put some love out there.’ And for me, singing is the most honest, immediate way to offer love,”
“Before I made this record, I was looking at the world and thinking, ‘I don’t know what to do except try to put some love out there.’ And for me, singing is the most honest, immediate way to offer love,”says Merritt.“My work has always been about trying to understand what it means to be human at that point in time; I believe it’s my responsibility as an artist to have a creative response to the current moment. But that response has to make room for the personal and the joyful too—we can’t face everything with doom and gloom alone.”
Recorded at Nashville’s Gold Pacific Studios and tracked live, Sugar is produced by Lawrence Rothman, she’s joined by a wide-ranging group of collaborators, including guitarist Audley Freed (Alison Krauss, Sheryl Crow), multi-instrumentalist Robert Ellis (PJ Harvey, Faye Webster), Dr. Dog’s Eric Slick, Midlake’s McKenzie Smith, and Memphis-based arranger Art Edmaiston.
“Producing Sugar felt like stepping into a rare, hard-earned moment of creative focus,”says Rothman.“There was patience in the room, but also a quiet urgency—like everyone knew this music had been living with her for years. Many of the takes were first takes, Tift on the floor cutting with the band. It felt less like making an album and more like documenting an artist re-entering her own story.”
“Sugar is about the surprising sweetness of being unequipped for showing up every day but trying anyway,”Merritt says.“It relishes pleasure, finds love and loses it, and laughs about how your ideas about your life get shaken out of your hands for the better. It’s a love song to calling it like you see it—it seeks kindness.”
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