What I Got Wrong

Friends encouraged me to put the hardest year of my career into words.

Chris Stamey lent me an ADAT machine which I set up in the kitchen to record new demos when the Bramble Rose tour ended in 2002.

I wrote this piece for an off-shoot series of Creative Mornings called REVIVAL or Fuck Up Nights, which I delivered appropriately jet-lagged. I’ve been trying, for sometime, to figure out how to write about my early music business experiences. Aren’t they comedy? “The day my first record came out, my manager’s phone was disconnected because the bill hadn’t been paid! Ha!” “That’s not funny,” people reply. I know, I nod. Women musicians ask me things like, “What happened when you had a baby? Because all my people fired me.” Or “Pop music has NO women with long careers, so I’m really excited to meet you!” I take full responsibility for my life and my career, but I think women need to be talking to each other about their stories. And as I think about returning to the music industry, I’ve been trying to trying to find a way to tell these stories because I am absolutely terrified the music business will make me feel the same ways all over again.

A big thank you to everyone in the audience on Friday, and everyone at the Creative Wave / One Riot / Eleuthera retreat in France — all of whom have been so encouraging that it game given me the guts to say this out loud. (More on France soon...)

In the back of a Ford Econoline van somewhere in Iowa, I got a phone call. It was the fall of 2002. I was 27. Bramble Rose was over. The tour was over. The record was over. I was to go home and write a hit. I looked out the window at the passing midwest with tears running down my cheeks. We were just getting started, some handful of months into touring, loading in, loading out, getting tight. But my first record cycle was officially already over.

The good news was that people in the music business had ambition for me. The bad news was people in the music business had ambition for me. I’ve learned in the years since to when someone says the word HIT something really bad is probably about happen. Cover your head.

But I did, even then, what I do when I am the best of myself. I set my mind to it. I wrote everything down and threw it out for everybody to see. I got right to work in the little farmhouse where I lived (Ok here’s where I first really screwed up) with the drummer and my dog Lucy. The drummer went to on a trip; I stayed home to work. Legendary NC music mentor Chris Stamey lent me an ADAT machine that I set up in the kitchen for recording. I wrote a lot of songs, quickly. Write My Ticket Home, Stray Paper, Still Pretending, Plainest Thing —- and sent them off before the year was even over. I heard nothing back. Nothing at all.

I got my nerve up to inquire about the silence. A& R said, “No hits” My manager said these songs aren’t hits. It was humiliating to share my innermost heart to such deafening silence. But then it wasn’t all silence. I should have showed my body on the last record cover, I would have sold more records. My band wasn’t not good enough. I was a good writer not a great writer. Something about that song, it’s not a hit I needed a hit. These songs weren’t hits.

Journal with ADAT Kitchen Record Log

This continued on, for a year. Good Hearted Man, Ain’t Looking Closely. Late Night Pilgrim. Not hits. I eventually got angry. I wanted to talk to a musician who could hear my humble kitchen demos for what they were. If I need a hit, if my band wasn’t good enough, if I was gonna juggle all the label wanted, I wanted to talk to George Drakoulias in exchange. He was my dream, had produced my favorite records, the Jayhawks Tomorrow the Green Grass and Hollywood Town Hall as well as Maria McKee’s You Gotta Sin To Get Saved. Guess what they told me. George Drakoulias wasn’t going to want to talk to me. I was going to have one chance with George.

But George did like my songs. He liked them a lot. A bunch of amazing session in LA later beside legendary engineer Jim Scott, Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and my hero Maria McKee who came in to sing, we made a record called Tambourine.

While I was in the studio, in classic major label music business fashion, my A & R guy was fired for some kind of financial impropriety that was never disclosed and the mission of the label completely changed into fiscal responsibility. Nobody explained that to me. Maybe they didn’t have the heart to. There were no more ambitious conversations about hits, but the never-ending audition continued on.

At an unassuming on-off in Birmingham, I walked into the club to find a film crew set up unannounced. The surprise taping was to see if I was good enough. If my band was good enough. No one warned me, even my manager, let alone asked my consent or opinion. At the time, I was surfing, everyday. I was tan, fit, 27. I had decided to wear a mini-skirt for the one-off and had probably done my hair in the Miller Light branded mirror in the bar. The record company watched footage in a corner office (they didn’t come to the show). Rather than discussion about my voice, my musicianship, and my hard work, the discussion that ensued was about my underwear. Could they see it when I was sitting at the keyboard? I was trying “too hard” too hard to be sexy. What was I trying to do? Whatever it was, it was very bad. It was suggested to me not to do that again. I did not yet understand that a woman ought only be sexy when someone else tells you it’s time.

When the record came out, I toured some 30,000 miles in America alone — with Elvis Costello, in vans, all over the US and also in Europe. My band and I worked very hard. Unexpectedly, I was nominated for a Grammy For Country Album of the Year. The room went quiet like I had again done something wrong— I had outperformed expectations. That wasn’t what I was supposed to do either.

Here’s the thing. Every woman in this room in a creative career — or any kind of career — knows that women aren’t allowed to screw up. Men musicians can be late, stoned, not tie their shoe laces, have no guitar strings and broken gear, forget the words and have a terrible show. The industry men around them think it’s charming, real rock and roll. Brilliant. Women must look a certain way, land the dismount, juggle the moving target expectations, pretend we didn’t do anything at all, and laugh and shake our curls when someone says why are you juggling like that? I was already writing in my notebooks at the time that maybe the music business wasn’t for me. I was trying anything I could to find footing, agency, some sense of where I was a stakeholder of value in my own art.

And, after the Grammy ceremony, I was a commercial failure for a second time. No one was ambitious for me. I was disposable. A record executive actually turned to me in a club, looked me in the eye and said, “Who gives a FUCK about Tift Merritt.” My manager did nothing, because the business relationships these men had to each other were all important than any obligations they had to me. The head of my record label inevitably added to that chorus when he called to drop me. My new songs couldn’t pay my old debts. (I had written Another Country). The whole Grammy thing, he said, was a fluke. Why, he said, had I tried to write a hit?

In Los Angeles at 27, photographed by Rorberto D’Este.

I was exasperated, empty — and relieved to leave the room. But here is where I really, really screwed up. I believed him. I believed all of them. About everything. Somewhere down inside myself I believed every time I was told I was not enough, not dressed right, shy of the mark, good but not great, a fluke who didn’t deserve to make it, that there was a grain of truth to it. Something real inside it.

I spent the next ten years trying to prove to myself that I was not a fluke. Trying to prove to everyone else that I was not a fluke. I heard more about not having hits, wearing the wrong thing, getting it wrong. I pushed on, on the road, making records, no matter how many times I was told my work didn’t matter or that I’d had a lot of looks. I was trying to make people who really didn’t know the difference from me and a tree understand. I will never get back the time I allowed those hurtful words to take from me, fill me with anguish and doubt. I will never get back the energy shame sucked from me when told I was getting my own womanhood wrong. I gave my power over to flip comments from flip people.

Here’s where I finally got it right. When my daughter was two, I knew, deep down, that the music world was not good enough for her. I stepped away altogether. It took a lot of courage, but that decision was the best thing I ever did.

And what I learned is that I don’t need a hit. I have value already, implicitly, without any justification at all. I don’t need anyone else’s idea of who I am supposed to be. I like it just the way I am right here, offstage. The executives who told me I didn’t matter cannot sing like me. In fact, my voice is better than it has ever has been. And it’s an important voice —— just like yours.

And the only thing I can do now is love my tiny good life harder. I can only make sure I put love and compassion in the world more loudly and encourage other people to do the same. I can only make sure I use my voice for kindness more deeply. That is, of course, real singing. And if I had to be a disappointing fluke to find out just how important real singing is, to show my daughter how important that kind of real singing is, to remind you tonight of what real singing is about, I’d do every one of those weary miles all over again.