Continuing my song-by-song presentation of Tift Merritt’s latest album, Stitch of the World, we arrive at track six, ‘Icarus.’
When I listened to Stitch of the World the first time, I initially felt this song might have been one too many slow ballads in a row. It’s one of the most delicate songs on a very delicate album.
Here’s a sweet, sexy little track from Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball, made even more sexy by its accompanying video, which features a lingerie-clad model working a stripper pole.
I don’t know if this is the official video or some expertly crafted fan video. It does feature Springsteen himself toward the end. Quality entertainment.
‘Off to the Races,’ the second track on Lana Del Rey’s 2012 album Born to Die, is equal parts sultry and street, a blend of Nabokov’s Lolita and a thug life Bonnie & Clyde.
The Lolita references, appearing throughout, were an early indicator that Del Rey had more serious, literary concerns than anybody gave her credit for. It was easy to dismiss her as a lightweight based on her looks and the damsel in distress image she projected, but a closer look at her songs shows real depth and craft.
The title track of Tift Merritt’s Stitch of the World zooms out from the more personal focus of the earlier songs and takes a more metaphysical look at the world.
I’ll let Merritt explain the song’s origin in her own words:
The inspiration came when I was in California and had rented a cabin for my 40th birthday. I was looking out the window at one of those surreal California sea cliff views where the stars and the trees were just so startlingly beautiful that it didn’t look real. It looked like some of those old felt cut-outs where you could create your own landscapes. I just started to think about how it looked stitched together and how lucky I was that I was stitched into the picture as well. I asked myself what all of these invisible stitches that hold us together and to each other might look like. Where are all of those invisible seams? Which ones are in our control and which ones are not?
Thought the title song of Tift Merritt’s Stich of the World follows today’s SOTD, ‘Love Soldiers On,’ this one more fully embodies the theme of the album.
This is an album about perseverance and healing, a battle cry for those knocked down but not knocked out. It was born from Merritt’s personal issues but seems to have arrived just in time for about half of the country.
Meet Me In Montauk 