bramble

Tonight, cooking dinner, I put on a record I recently picked up—an album I’ve known for years. It hit me that I first bought it about 13 years ago at Tower Records on Broad Street in Philadelphia. The store is gone now.

Bramble Rose marks a turning point for me—the move from the city I grew up in, Philadelphia, to the one I’ve come to call home: Durham, North Carolina. In 2002, staying at a friend’s house in Cary, I came across a review of the album in a local magazine. After dinner with friends, I stopped by Tower and bought it. Another friend had sent me a portable CD player, and at night I’d fall asleep on a mattress in the dining room, listening to Tift Merritt.

There was a gap between when my wife moved south and when I followed. In those last weeks, I’d cleaned out our two-bedroom apartment and closed off the bedrooms, sleeping instead in a small dining nook with a CD player, a couple of books, and a bottle of brandy. It was a lonely stretch. Those songs carried me through.

Moving is difficult—especially when the place you’re leaving feels embedded in your DNA. I’d been a Philly guy my whole life. It felt like my defining trait.

Revisiting Bramble Rose now brings back the force it once held over me. I’ve seen Merritt perform several times, including a memorable 2007 concert with the North Carolina Symphony and later in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein. Her music evokes a longing for home—but not nostalgia, exactly. Something quieter. A place where you fit, where you can breathe.

On her third album, Another Country, that feeling deepens. Writing from abroad, Merritt captures the dislocation of being away while widening her sense of the world. It’s that tension—the pull between distance and belonging—that I keep returning to.

There’s a scene in High Fidelity where the main character explains he organizes his records autobiographically. Bramble Rose sits at the start of a new chapter for me—a bittersweet beginning that, in hindsight, led somewhere good. North Carolina became home. Still, there are days I miss the streets of Philadelphia. And it’s this album that quietly bridges the two.