Today, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Tift Merritt has shared her new single “Someone To Watch The Band With Me,” which is a preview her first album in a decade, Sugar, due out on June 26, through One Riot. The track examines lingering loneliness in a modern, increasingly online world and epitomizes the profound honesty that radiates throughout Sugar.
“There’s something really lonely about the digital world when you can get anything you want delivered but finding real human connection seems fraught,” says Merritt about the new single. “I’m fifty, I have three jobs, a kid, no time; how am I going to find someone? I just wanted to say really directly, something that might cut through the noise, a signal flare. We make everything else so easy to find, why does love remain elusive?”
Merritt’s upcoming album marks a defining new chapter for the North Carolina-bred artist long regarded as one of Americana’s most influential voices. She stepped largely out of the spotlight following her 2017 album, Stitch of the World, turning her focus toward raising her daughter, who is 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 become Sugar.
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