Bowery Ballroom

showview

Tift Merritt

Jason Collett

Thu 8/7

Tickets

21+

Doors 7:30pm

$16 adv / $18 day of

Tift Merritt

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=16996310
http://www.tiftmerritt.com/
After a Grammy nomination, and top 10 albums in The New Yorker and Time Magazine, Tift Merritt took hiatus with a piano in Paris and came home with her best and most personal songs to date. Her new album Another Country has gotten incredible reviews:

Time Out New York: "Merritt is one of the best singer-songers you haven't heard of yet."

Associated Press: "...a smart, sardonic quality reminiscent of Jackson Browne ...the soulful tenderness of Norah Jones...the bubbly folk melodicism of Feist... a new and compelling direction for Merritt."

Spin: "Sweet Southern depression from a French flat. Deceptively sharp tales of hearts in distress, implying fierce emotions just under the surface."

Mojo: 4 stars **** "Merritt's first solo album won her critical acclaim; her second got a Grammy nomination. Neither were as good, nor as fully representative as her third... Here her wonderful voice, smooth and warm with throaty twang and unforced power, has free rein to do what it does best on 11 fine new songs."

Jason Collett

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=30217237
arts-crafts.ca/jasoncollett
Most singer/songwriters are lonely souls with only a stool, an acoustic guitar and a heart-worn sleeve. Not Jason Collett. Oh sure, the Broken Social Scene guitarist has his instrument and a stack of intimate tales to tell-but his new solo album, Idols of Exile, sounds more like a house party.
Since 2001, Collett has been considered the indispensable lynchpin of Toronto's booming indie scene, thanks largely to his casual (and still occasional) star-studded songwriting night known as Radio Mondays. Of course, most of these tunesmiths-such as Hayden, Kathleen Edwards, Weakerthans and most of the Arts-Crafts family-weren't stars yet. But Collett's beloved community-building series solidified the Toronto indie movement that would soon take off worldwide and connected Collett with his future social scene.
Collett was asked to join Broken Social Scene after their breakthrough album You Forgot It In People, but he was a solo artist first and never stopped writing his own tunes. When pressed for influences for his more roots-based style, he cites Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and Nick Lowe. "My stuff is based around songs and the Social Scene thing is based around busting songs wide open," he says. "My thing is more schooled."
But after putting his own music on the backburner-aside from 2003's internationally-acclaimed Motor Motel Love Songs (which was actually a compilation of earlier efforts)-Collett is ready to fulfill his promise with Idols of Exile, his proper Arts-Crafts debut.