DURHAM -- Tift Merritt mentioned Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, but her lecture on songwriting began with Southern fiction writer Eudora Welty.
Merritt, who grew up in Raleigh and earned a degree in creative writing from UNC-Chapel Hill, said her music begins with the words. Plucking sentences from her favorite book, "The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty," Merritt built a song for more than 100 fans in Duke's Nelson Music Room Thursday afternoon.
"'Harris went across the yard and up the one step into the hotel,'" she read. "That's your chorus."
In Durham this week for a Duke residency with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, Merritt belted out an a cappella rendition of Carole King's "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," offering it as a model song.
"It's very plain-spoken language," she said. "It's not overly sophisticated. It's not trying too hard. It's words somebody might speak to you in the street."
"A really good song is three sentences, maybe four," she continued. "I mean, there are exceptions. There's always Dylan."
Merritt said some ideas just require a longer form, like a short story, rather than a song.
"If I have a feeling that's really complicated, it's not going into three sentences," she said.
Merritt, whose 2004 "Tambourine," was nominated for the country album and album of the year Grammys, said music follows patterns, much like the structures of good writing: setting, plot, characters, etc.
"There's this idea that you just have a drink and it comes out of you," she said. "It's like putting a sentence together. I think melody is a lot like a plotline."
Music theory - the set of "tools" that help her as a songwriter - has come to Merritt in the midst of her decadelong music career. She learned to play by ear and feeling but eventually came to appreciate tried-and-true musical devices. Collaborating with Dinnerstein, a renowned classical pianist accustomed to playing what the masters composed, only enhanced that appreciation.
"I believe very much in traditional song structures," Merritt said.
Structure, though, is sometimes at war with her words. Guitar in hand, Merritt played a song she's working on. She said it's lopsided because of a long first verse but she doesn't want to trim it.
"I'm really stubborn about words," she said. "If I were to take it into the studio, I would probably have a big fight with the producer."
Merritt said she writes music to express the feelings of her lyrics, something she said Joni Mitchell does very well.
"She's making sure that the chords that she's choosing are as unresolved and as puzzling as the words that she's singing," Merritt said. "I don't play with any kind of virtuosity. I play really purely to support writing and singing.
"I thought there was a lot of vanity in wanting to be a singer, in wanting to be a performer, and I thought there was a lot of virtue in wanting to be a writer."
