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The Golden Ticket, a reel written by fiddler Eric Merrill, appears on... his own excellent solo album, The Western Star. Eric's obvious love of the eight instrumentals and four songs here fuels the album. His album notes and Dirk Powell's additional notes confirm Eric's passion for the material. Eric is a fiddler first, but he is also quite fine on banjo and guitar. His playing is delicious, his vocals warm and welcoming. As Powell notes, Eric never rushed the pieces, he lets them set their own, often leisurely, pace. His singing, fiddling, guitar and banjo will rip your heart out again and again. Superb work throughout. |
- Sing Out Magazine |
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From Earle Hitchner's Ceol Column: More so than any other musician I can think of, Eric Merrill has an optimal grounding in both Irish and Appalachian idioms, and the switch-hitting power of his playing can be heard throughout "The Western Star." This is not an album paying tepid service to two styles. Instead, it captures the robust energy and virtuosic delicacy of each without a trace of dilution. "Hughie Travers'/Brown's Dream," two reels that open "The Western Star," is one of the best tracks I've heard in all of 2004. The playing is dynamic and propulsive, but without velocity overwhelming the mix. With breathtaking dexterity and derring-do, Eric Merrill's fiddling alternates between Irish and old-timey styles while ex-Solas guitarist John Doyle and five-string banjoist John Herrmann maintain a strong, fluid rhythm. Think of the best instrumental work by Solas expertly grafted onto the best instrumental work by the Freight Hoppers: that would describe the impact of this cut. It's exhilarating. Fiddle and five-string banjo are the bulwarks of American old-timey music, and Merrill's skill on both can be heard to beautiful effect on "Hell and Grace," the cheekily titled, sweetly played reel he wrote for his grandmother. Merrill's fiddle-banjo blend also comes across well in "If I Lose," a song written by Ralph Stanley, who's always preferred "old-time mountain music" to "bluegrass" as the label for his style of playing. The grit singing by Merrill, with vocal harmony from Howie Tarnower, is punctuated with snatches of a Sliabh Luachra-style polka rhythm, and the track ends with button accordionist John Whelan joining Merrill on fiddle for the latter's all-out "Western Star" polka. The polka "O'Sullivan's" comes from recordings made of Glauntane's Padraig O'Keeffe in 1948-1949, and the polka Merrill pairs it with, "The Top of Maol," was picked up from a 1977 album, "Kerry Fiddles: Music From Sliabh Luachra, Vol. 1," by O'Keeffe, Murphy, and Clifford. Merrill plays these two polkas on fiddle with a canny integration of Irish traditional and American old-timey (sawing strokes especially) styles, as he does on a reel he wrote, "The Golden Ticket," girded once more by Doyle on guitar and Herrmann on five-string banjo. "Every Time You Leave," a song composed by the country harmony duo of Ira and Charlie Louvin, features a supple vocal harmony from Merrill and former Footworks member Kristin Andreassen. The song also features some fine dovetailing by Merrill on fiddle and Patrick Murray on uilleann pipes... ...The once-estranged kin of Irish traditional and American old-timey music has found common purpose and uncommon linkage through the multiple talents and respectful, confident approach of Eric Merrill. I can understand why the welcome mat is out for him in each musical camp in Boston. Merrill's solo CD is an unexpected, end-of-the-year gift I'd recommend to anyone who cares about Irish, American, or Irish-American traditional/roots music. |
- Earle Hitchner (Irish Echo) |
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With two traditions, he makes a modern sound Eric Merrill has spent years trying to figure out if he is an Irish musician who was born in America or an American musician who plays Irish music. It may seem like a distinction without a difference, but in the world of traditional music, where authenticity is prized, finding the right answer became a defining quest for the 29-year-old Boston fiddler, banjo player, and singer. The results of that search are heard on his vibrant, eloquent, and entirely lovely debut CD, ''The Western Star: Irish Music From America" (Yodel-Ay-Hee). In his fluid mix of Celtic and Appalachian folk music, a new kind of authenticity can be felt, true to the ancient aesthetics of tradition but unmistakably modern in its groove and sensibility. Over pulsing acoustic soundscapes, he will begin playing a wild Irish reel. Then his bow strokes fatten, single notes becoming thick, dark chords, before bursting into an eerie, windswept Appalachian tune. But what he is doing is not fusion; he never tries to Americanize the Celtic music, nor to make the American music more Celtic. He is simply playing both as he feels them, set to arrangements that allow each to retain its essence. Merrill performs at Jimmy Tingle's in Davis Square, Somerville, tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. as part of the Boston Celtic Music Festival. The weekend event features more than 160 local Celtic musicians performing in concerts, intimate song swaps, instrumental seisiuns, and dances at several locations in Davis Square; Harvard Square, Cambridge; and Watertown. Dirk Powell is among the most influential stars in the burgeoning neotraditional revival and wrote the liner notes to Merrill's CD. From his Louisiana home, he said he was intrigued by Merrill before he met him, because he heard him praised with equal fervor by both Irish and Appalachian musicians. ''When I finally got to hear Eric," he says, ''I thought his playing was eloquent and profound, but not trying to prove anything. When people come to a tradition from outside, they often focus too much on technique. They get caught up in the vocabulary but don't really have anything meaningful to say. Eric seems to have all the technique only because he has so much he wants to say." Merrill grew up in Seattle and was exposed to traditional music through his uncle, whose band played old-time Appalachian music. At 9, Merrill was studying classical violin but resisting its rigid focus on technique and individual virtuosity. His uncle's band just seemed to be having more fun. ''I'd sit in with them, and they'd show me tunes," Merrill recalls. ''They really emphasized the social aspect of the music, and I loved that. Then I was drawn to the history and culture of the music. It's so grounded in people's real lives, which felt very good to me." He fell in love with Irish music while attending Indiana University. He went there because it had a good instrument-making school, and he wanted to not just play fiddles but build them. Today, in addition to performing in Celtic-rock accordionist John Whelan's group and several local folk dance bands, he is a violin maker at Reuning & Son Violins in Boston. After studying music for a year in Ireland, he moved to Boston in 1999 because he heard there were bustling scenes for both Celtic and Appalachian music. He stopped trying to reconcile his two musical passions and sought arrangement ideas that allowed him to play each distinctively. To that end, he found the tradition itself a wonderful teacher. He stuffs his iPod full of archival Appalachian and Celtic recordings, sets it on random, and finds much food for modern musical thought. ''There's so much weird, crazy stuff in those old recordings," he says. ''When later musicians learned the tunes from them, they'd smooth out the weird bits and then write new tunes if they wanted something a little funky. But when you really listen to the old versions of the tunes, there's some wild stuff, weird rhythms, odd modes. A lot of the stuff I do that people think is the strangest comes right out of the tradition." Powell thinks Merrill's desire to cull modern ideas from tradition puts him in the vanguard of a new generation that is redefining what it means to be authentic. ''There's the old standard of authenticity, that this guy was born straight up a holler and never had a radio," he says. ''With all this mass culture, that definition is over. Now you have people like Eric, who have the whole world at their fingertips but are looking for something real, and they immerse themselves in it. That's an authenticity of the soul." Merrill says, ''The balance you have to find is between the preservation and the personal, but that tension has always existed within the music. And the great guardian of tradition is the music itself. Why would you want to change it? I don't think there's anything particularly character-building in putting yourself through listening to all those scratchy old records if all you want to do is turn it into something else. The fact is, there's no reason to play traditional music if you don't love it the way it is." |
-Scott Alarik |
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Shamrock-Stitched Cowboy Boots A reel, a hoedown, a fiddle. Despite surface similarities, Celtic and country music rarely share the same stage. Respecting each other's traditions, serious traditional musicians often feel daunted by the challenge of blending different styles without bastardizing both. But with "The Western Star," multi-instrumentalist Eric Merrill has discovered a sweet spot where Ireland and Appalachia meet. This project sounds gimmicky. But "The Western Star" is a shockingly accomplished debut. Merrill has refined the music to a point where you don't try to figure out what pieces come from where: A Ralph Stanley number segues seamlessly into accordion; melancholy pipes provide a perfect counterpoint to the Louvin Brothers's country song "Every Time You Leave." Tradition is often a fraught concept in "traditional" music. Merrill was exposed to Irish, old-time, and country through his family. He occasionally played with his uncle's country band and now uses his grandmother's bow and chin rest. But family provided inspiration rather than material; he hasn't recorded any pieces he learned from them. Instead, Merrill picked up influences along the way. In Bloomington, Indiana, he studied folklore, music, and violinmaking. But he hit the rainbow-ending pot of gold in Cork City. Here he learned the Sliabh Luachra style, which comes from the Cork/Kerry border. However, along with its own local tradition, "of all the places in Ireland, [in] Cork there was the most interest in American music," Merrill explains. The musician played Carter Family songs with guitarist/banjoist Mick Daly and the "connection between the music of Cork and Appalachian music was pretty apparent." At first, Merrill focused on playing his different genres separately. But he eventually wanted to "find ways of putting them together that created something that was more me." As an American living in Ireland, he wanted "to bring something of my own country to the music." This goal is complicated by regional variation within old-time music. The old-time community goes through fads: for years many people were influenced by North Carolingian Tommy Jarrell; new favorites come from Mississippi, Texas, and Kentucky. Interestingly, Merrill's interest in old-time is more general than his interest in Irish: "I haven't picked a favorite region." Merrill can discuss these nuances by the hour. Given his encyclopedic knowledge, it's all the more impressive that he could come up with his own style. To do this, the musician stepped carefully. "My answer is to just be very specific and deliberate about it. I didn't want to make a pan-Celtic fiddle record," he says. "What I hope is that I've spent enough time with these styles that I can create something growing out of them instead of just appropriating bits." That's not to say it came easy. "The Western Star" took two years and more than a dozen collaborators. For the album, Merrill chose "people who were grounded in Irish music but who had a breadth of musicianship that would let them go outside of that [tradition]," like guitarist Matt Heaton and bassist Corey DiMario. For "Every Time You Leave," he asked uillean piper Patrick Murray to echo pedal steel; Heaton tried for the same effect on electric guitar. "No matter how much I planned it out," he says, "I totally relied on all the musicians." When choosing songs, Merrill had a particularly subtle criterion in mind. "I was looking for songs that kind of illustrated this connection I see between sean nos music, which is the Irish-language song, and some old-time songs and kind of mid-century country music." Unlike story-song ballads, sean nos places "a big emphasis on emotion over plot." Merrill sums up their guiding emotion as "something bad happens and it doesn't get better." This sense drew him to "Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still," a gorgeous Civil War-era song full of longing. Driven to produce an album that hit the perfect balance between his different influences, Merrill found himself having to master another balance: studio wizardry. As he puts it, "There were some things that were very live and some things that were very much not live." Merrill tweaked many tracks after the fact, especially since he often played more than one instrument himself. Fitting others' contributions into his compositions could prove challenging. For instance, "I love working with Patrick Murray -- he's the piper. I think he's got an incredible stage energy combined with really great musicianship. &But the big problem we ran into is that I like to sing in F, and it's a really bad key on the pipes. So in the recording we vari-sped everything up to G for him to record and then tuned it back down to F." Some in the folk world resist this kind of studio manipulation, but Merrill defends his choice, especially for the country material. "I love country music from the 70s and the whole countrypolitan sound," he says. "One of my big inspirations for the arrangement on 'Every Time You Leave' is this great George Jones song called 'A Good Year for the Roses.' And there's nothing reasonable about it, it's so over-the-top it's completely ridiculous, but I just think it's beautiful." Indeed, the track's lushness heightens the poignancy of the lyrics. That said, Merrill admits his tinkering could reach extremes. "'Every Time You Leave' -- Corey did that bass part three times, and for pretty minor changes." He rerecorded parts at 4 a.m. during mixing sessions. "I have a hard time letting go. I ended up doing a lot of the recording myself, doing all of the graphic design, making the violins, and doing all the production and playing a lot of the parts." (The extensive, attractive liner notes are a big plus.) Merrill's tweaking was at the service of getting at "a pretty specific vision of what I wanted." He has a less certain vision of the album's future. He hopes a label will pick it up, and notes that transferring the material from the recording to the stage continues to be a challenge. At the moment Merrill is busy making a living, via violin repair, contradances, and sideman engagements with Irish button accordionist John Whelan and alt-bluegrasser Adrienne Young. Listeners can only hope he makes the time to explore the new terrain he's mapping out. |
-Danielle Dreilinger |
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