Another city for Merritt

The singer-songwriter, long a Raleigh resident, has a new address, a new album and a new outlook

NEW YORK -- Tift Merritt strolls toward the Hudson River in her quiet West Village neighborhood. Having moved here just a few months earlier, the North Carolina singer-songwriter is a newcomer to this tree-lined street with a century-old bohemian heritage.

With the blasé sophistication of a seasoned New Yorker, she notes the red brick compound where celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz lives and works, and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Schnabel's raspberry-colored high-rise. But her face lights up with a newcomer's awe-struck glee when she rhapsodizes about the city's cold-weather palette or points out the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street at West 11th.

"Yeah, that's where the Village Voice was conceived, and where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death," Merritt says. Then she adds with a laugh, "We hope to avoid a similar fate."

Generations of artists and performers have gravitated to New York, some to live in a cultural mecca amid the Leibovitzes and Schnabels and legends. Others come with larger-than-life dreams, the 8 million-to-1 chance of being discovered, for reinvention or escape.

Merritt's reasons were more pragmatic than dreamy. With her third album on the way ("Another Country," on Fantasy Records, arriving Tuesday), a national tour about to start and a new monthly public-radio show, New York simply made more sense than North Carolina, her home base since childhood.

In New York, the apartment she shares with drummer Zeke Hutchins is a few minutes away from her manager's office. She can get just about anywhere she needs to be faster from New York than RDU.

But there's also the irresistible confluence of only-in-New York energy. Merritt had barely arrived when she found herself on the "I'm Not There" Bob Dylan tribute concert at the Beacon Theatre in November with Joe Henry, My Morning Jacket, Yo La Tengo and other alternative-rock stars.

"We were literally moving stuff into the apartment when we heard that a female singer had to cancel," says Merritt, 33. "My manager called to ask, I got on the show and there was no pressure. It was great."

The New York Times agreed, saying she had "the night's purest voice." Variety called her performance "the program's most gripping."

Of course, Merritt got plenty of love from her old hometown, especially after she earned a Grammy nomination for "Tambourine," her 2004 album. She advanced from selling out local clubs to such prestigious engagements as opening the N.C. Museum of Art's summer concert season and performing with the N.C. Symphony.

Behind the scenes, however, were struggles with her label, her manager and the industry itself. She abandoned music, went to Paris and finally found herself in the place she needed to be.

"In France, I discovered that I love writing in the city," Merritt says. "There's such an intensity to being in the city that matches the intensity of what you're experiencing in your head. So you go out on the street in this haze and you're met with an equivalent amount of energy. As opposed to going through the aisles of the grocery store down there, feeling like a freak in dreamland."

Going wrong, going right

At a small cafe near her studio apartment, Merritt settles in over coffee and croissants and talks about the decline that began, as all declines do, at the top. Her Grammy nomination, for country album of the year, felt like validation and fuel for a commercial breakthrough. But the breakthrough never came.

"The label thought the Grammy nomination was a fluke," Merritt sighs into her coffee. "That made me feel good the first time I heard it."